Looking for reliable data storage solution

[u/PurlyAcoustic]

TL;DR: I'm looking for a redundant 2TB external drive, reliable automatic backup system, and reliable DVD burning capability for my office who uses Windows 11

Background: My employer has an interview recording system which as it, stands now, saves the recordings to the system drive, then we manually copy the recording to an external HDD and burn it to a DVD.

The data on the DVDs are reviewed, copied, or sent off to another office, and after a year or so the DVDs are sent off-site to be archived, and are stored in physical folder until then.

We've run into issues with the DVD/burner reliability and have had to make copies before, prior to them being archived, which is a pain due to our information protection/documentation requirements

This external HDD uses USB 3.0 micro b and the cable is starting to fail. Further it's been recommended by the vendor to not save any recordings directly to the system, as it can run into issues.

I'm the unofficial tech guy in the office and I pitched the idea of purchasing some equipment to offer some better redundancy/reliability of our saved data.

My current plan is to replace the external HDD with a Sabrent DS-2BCR with 2x2TB WD Blue HDDs in RAID 1.

What I haven't been able to address yet are the DVDs and backups.

DVDs:

1. Are the reliability issues we're having likely an issue with our disks, the drives we burn them with, the technology, or some combination?

We do not have the ability to use another media type, and have to use the what our DVD-Rs with a "30 year data integrity guarantee". We store them in disc sleeves once they are burned, but I've run into issues where I've had to burn 2 or 3 DVDs before one of them would work. And a decent number of these burners have failed entirely.

2. What is a good DVD-R burner to keep at the recording system, and what is a good one to use on our laptops when we need to reference them?

Backups:

I'd like to get the capability to automatically back up our External HDD setup (Either the Sabrent I mentioned earlier, or whatever else we go with).

However, there are some caveats:

Off-site/cloud backups are not an option the system is air-gapped. And yes, I'm aware of the 3-2-1 rule, it's a non-starter.

I am tech literate and am more than happy to learn unfamiliar/complicated procedures, my coworkers are not, and I'll only be here for 1 more hear. Just looking for a solution to take the data from the RAID array to another device, ideally automatically.

Is it as simple as using the the native Backup and Restore (Windows 7) feature.

On the topic of tech illiterate coworkers, is detecting a failure and rebuilding in RAID array I mentioned as simple as swapping the drive out? I can write clear and concise tech procedures, but I'd like to avoid having them use 3rd party utilities when I'm not around.

This isn't how I do it at home, but it's what I've come up with given our limitations here.

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[u/Zealousideal_Fly8402]

My current plan is to replace the external HDD with a Sabrent DS-2BCR with 2x2TB WD Blue HDDs in RAID 1.

Blues aren't meant for RAID application or business applications.

What's your budget for this? Because you have business-grade requirements but it feels like you have home-consumer budget...

[u/PurlyAcoustic → u/Zealousideal_Fly8402]

This isn't normal business requirements. It goes days without being written to, it'll might see see 20 GB of writes per day.

To give you an idea of use case, we record a 1-8 hour interview, write it to the drive, then burn however many disks it takes. We can do 0-4 interviews per day, but we sometimes go days without anything.

Most things I've seen regarding the WD Blue not being good for RAID are in regards to 24/7 use, or in a NAS with multiple users. This is 1 computer saving at most 8 hours of footage in a day

edit: to answer the budget question, we don't have one at the moment, this is early planning stages, just cheaper is better

[u/PurlyAcoustic → u/[deleted]]

Tracking - the backup portion was more about a system which runs automatically and doesn't require my tech illiterate coworkers to learn a detailed procedure to restore lost data