Onomatopoeia

USB isn't good for RAID, it's unstable.

Do you currently have more than 8 or 12TB of data? Because you can buy drives that size today, no need for RAID under those capacities.

I recently purchased an 8TB drive for ~$100 on Amazon. Yes, it's used, but comes with a 3 year warranty. I'm fine with that warranty length, as drives don't last forever, and I'll be replacing drives due to growth anyway.

Don't overlook RAID 1 - mirroring. With large enough drives this is a viable first step to some redundancy (though it's really intended more for failover). Simply replicating your data locally to multiple drives, and backing it up offsite should give a lot of redundancy.

The big challenge with local redundancy is that it's not backup, so replicated bad changes can wreck all local copies. Backup, however, gives you multiple copies of data and incremental changes (if configured that way).

Never had this happen, and I've carried laptops since the mid 90's, and they've always been plugged in most of the time.

Get to office, plug on, get home, plug in and sit overnight in the charger with no use.

I've seen a few expanded batteries, but that's across the hundreds of laptops in my support circle. It's very rare.

Every laptop I've had in the last 5 years has battery protection built in anyway. I'm running 2 laptops from 2019 that have it.

Though you do make a good point, something to figure out if your laptop does this. And to keep an eye on the batteries anyway (like check battery health quarterly), and replace if it gets down significantly (I replace mine at 70% health).

RAID isn't backup, or even redundancy, it's for creating large storage pools. It's at the mercy of the controller and all the hardware. In fact, the more disks you have, the more likely you are to be impacted by a failure.

In a typical RAID 5, if one drive fails, the entire array is at risk until the drive can be replaced, and resilvered. During resilvering (rebuilding the drive with all the data it should have, parity, etc), the entire array is at even more risk because of the load on the other disks.

With dual parity and hot spare (less data storage total), you get a little more security since the parity is doubled and the hot spare will be automatically resilvered if a drive fails, but that's not without similar risks during that process.

You still need backup.

Here's a real-world example of RAID risks. I have a 5-drive NAS with 5 1TB drives, which gives me roughly 4TB of usable space (1TB parity). It runs software RAID using ZFS (a highly resilient file system, that can build arrays using varying disk sizes, and has some self-healing capability). I've had a drive go bad, replacing took 30 hours to rebuild. During that time, the entire array is "degraded", meaning no parity protecting the data because it's currently rebuilding the parity. If another drive were to have failed during this read/write intensive period, I would have lost ALL the data.

To protect against this, I have 2 other large drives which this data is replicated to. And then I use a cloud storage for backup (storj.io).

This is a modified version of the 3-2-1 method that works for my risk assessment.

Without offsite backup, you're always at risk of local issues - fire, flood, etc. Or even just a massive power spike (though that's not much of a risk, especially if you use a UPS).

I'm actually building a second NAS to have easier local redundancy, and because I have a bunch of drives sitting around. With TrueNAS or Unraid, it's pretty easy to repurpose old hardware. Though power is always a concern, so I'm looking for an inexpensive motherboard that has low power draw at idle.

Makes me think of Futurama

I think the big thing is engaging with people.

I'm average size, but historically have RBF, so to counter it I try to engage with people.

Eye contact is huge. We can tell you're friendly from that alone (when it's done in a friendly way, not the staring down kind, haha).

I have a couple big friends, and it's easy to tell which are friendly by how they carry themselves (they're both friendly, one just comes across more friendly). It's interesting to watch.

Dread?

I suspect you have a similar awareness day-to-day as you do driving, it just makes sense that you wouldn't just "turn it on".

Then we're all wired different. I notice every damn detail of everything around me, it can be a little much at times, while none of my friends are like this (they're always surprised by the things I point out), and I have one brother who's like me.

This is probably why you don't consciously look around, it's already happening for you.

Glad to hear your daughter has a strong sense of herself, and confidence. It's how we'd like to see all kids develop. Though a healthy fear is good too - learning to listen to the fear signals from the old lizard brain, and assessing whether it's valid or just an old survival instinct over reacting.

Above I mentioned a book called The Gift of Fear. It's a good read on working with this instinctive fear reaction. The old lizard brain obviously worked for each of our forbears for generations (or we wouldn't be here), so there's something there - we just have to assess it well.

Is this sarcasm? Lol

Look at it like driving - you should be looking as far down the road as you can for "threats", and maintaining awareness of other cars and their behaviour all around you, and behind you, so you can predict what they're going to do.

We teach "Defensive Driving", which includes avoiding risky situations - don't let yourself get boxed in, watch for that car driving... assertively, and create a space for them to go so they don't cause problems for the rest of them, etc.

Rest of life is not really different - situational awareness is the primary tool for our safety. Don't step into the street without looking, don't walk under that ladder or scaffolding (things fall from work sites all the time), walk through the yard with the barking dog, etc.

Threats from people just become part of your overall situational awareness.

I recommend the book "The Gift of Fear" By Gavin deBecker. He essentially espouses the usefulness of fear and situational awareness.

Maybe this will help you reframe what seems paranoid fear into something more reasonable and useful.

Edit: The big thing is to engage in the society around you. If you're engaged, you're part of it all, people are aware of you. We actually get the word "idiot" from the Greeks - it was the term they used to describe people who didn't engage in the "polis" (society) - it meant someone not involved, not skilled at this (or other skills). So don't be an idiōtēs, engage with people!

Situational awareness is the best weapon anyone can have.

Having a weapon but no situational awareness diminishes the usefulness of any weapon, significantly. While I carry a tool that could double as a weapon, I'd really, really, really, like to never have to use it in defense. I'd much rather maintain awareness and avoid potential conflicts.

I'd rather identify a threat well in advance, and avoid it, then rely on defending myself with a weapon because I wasn't paying attention.

This is a massive tool for everyone, it's just very hard to do, and to know what/how to journal so that it's useful later.

Also to do it in a privacy-first way.

In my best John Cleese accent: "Bloody hell". At 98?

I can see the rough cuts when I zoom in, but the man's ninety-freakin-eight. I couldn't have done that at any point in my life. That's some serious patience.

I'm sure when he was younger it would've been flawless, but it's incredible as is.