It's not sexy, but boy is it important. After having suffered a hard drive loss about twenty years ago, and the painful waiting to see if the (expensive) data recovery service would work, "back up" has become my middle name. This is especially critical as a professional photographer.

Every part of my work flow is backed up at least twice with the second copy "off site", meaning not in my office. This is a version of "geo redundancy" and gives you the safety net of a second physical copy of your data should - God forbid - your primary location suffer a catastrophic loss. Ok, touch wood, just needed to say that after typing that last sentence. 

I currently have a physical copy of all client work on a twenty four terabyte raid array in my office that's also backed up to the cloud. This direct access server (DAS) is made up of eight individual drives that share the data among them. It's configured to be able to handle two drive failures without any data loss (again, touch wood that I'd never have the fluke of simultaneous drive failures, crikey this is stressful to write about!).

Part of the beauty of this system is that you can upgrade an individual drive at any time to increase capacity. You just pop out the old drive and insert a new one. The system goes into data protection mode until the data is redistributed across the new drive, then you're back in business. I'm currently running about 60% capacity so I decided to take advantage of Black Friday deals to upgrade three of the four terabyte drives to ten terabyte drives, thereby almost doubling my capacity. Not sexy, but it does make me feel warm inside.