Backtober

I recently listened to a one of Brooks Jensen's "Here's a Thought" short daily podcasts called backtober  Its about how he uses October each year to thoroughly review his digital back up and archives. He might be a bit obsessive, replacing any spinning hard drive older than 3 years, never less it has made me realize I need to totally re-evaluate my situation.

I have not found a good solution to replacing my little NAS unit. So automatic daily backups are not being made anymore!

1. Most of my archiving is now on external (spinning disk) hard drives, and unfortunately, I have experienced 4 of these drives crashing in the past decade. There were duplicates of these so I didn't actually lose anything, Duplicates were on another hard drive (ie same format/technology)
2. I do have archives up to 2010 on CD & DVD, They take up lots of space and I haven't touched them in years.
3. I have a fairly complete "extra" archive on a larger old hard disk that I can connect into my "air gapped" linux archive. When recently accessed one of these older disks started reporting errors (and will have to be replaced, but I'm out of old computer drives!)
4. I haven't evaluated the FreeNAS software yet!

It's October so I need to get onto these now, I like the idea of a full review yearly rather than my irregular monthly attentions (which has been overlooked a few times this year anyway).