External HDD Storage (and Recovery) Recommendations

[beagan]

I had most of my collection backed up on a spare external HDD, or so I thought. My primary external for movies (not music) decided to stop working today. I've opened up the Western Digital 2TB case and put it in an external dock that I have. I can hear that it still spins, but isn't recognized by my PC each time. I've done a reboot several times and it might come up in Windows Explorer, though it states I need to format the HDD in order to use it. Clearly that will erase all my content. I'm unable to view through cmd, as chkdsk is giving me the following "not available for RAW drives". So, I'm pretty sure this drive is unusable at this point without having to buy third party recovery software. Any ideas different than what I've already mentioned are welcome.

Time to go get my backup external HDD that I keep in another room (not connected to PC). Oops, it's been quite some time since I've updated it. There's approximately 100 movies missing. Now to decide if I really need to rip and Handbrake all those movies again.

Question to the community: What's your backup process that gives you peace of mind? Is it similar to mine, but you have a schedule to periodically update your backup? Do you keep your backup connected at all times to make it easier to update? Are you faithful to a certain brand of external HDD?

[Woodstock]

I store all of my video on a Synology 8-drive media server. And a lot of it on USB-connected drives as well. And a few things are kept off-premise.

But my "peace of mind" backup is the boxes of disks where everything goes after ripping. Even though optical media is extremely fragile (in my opinion) it's resilient enough to serve as backup. Unless it is something like Urusei Yatsura, which you can't get anymore...

[Grauhaar]

Synology 12-drive media server configured in RAID-6 mode gives me very high availibility because two drives can fail without any interrupt. Any single drive solution (Internal oder External drive) will fail and the data is lost if no backup exists.