Inspiration for archiving and storage of our digital lives

In our little family we have collected a wast amount of data - video, pictures, movies and music - which gradually eats incredible with disk space, and which should be archived - but available - and still be protected by backup.

Therefore, I would like to hear how you and other 'families' have handled the large amounts of data and how you save, backup, and, find files, etc. again. Are there programs to index the film archives ala Aperture function with 'Offline pictures', where you have a smaller version of the image lying for review, and a reference to the DVD / hard disk it resides on?

Our data include:
- 75 gb images (indexed by Aperture)
- 500 gb video in AVCHD and MOV format (all movies in MOV format is indexed with Aperture)
- 1.5 Tb films (mostly ripped DVDs)
- 120 Gb music
- 1 to 1.2 Tb diverse data

The data is stored as follows:
- Pictures and video (total 575 Gb data) is on our iMac
- Movies, music (total approx. 1.7 Tb) and data (1.2 TB) is located on a Synology Disk Station

What do you do for example with original films, when you have edited a movie in Final Cut Pro X or similar and want to archive for later?

And how do you back up a disk station? Should I buy a disk station more with 4 Tb and make a mirror of everything?

All my macs are backed up to two Time Capsule where the switch between the two now runs automatically with the new Mountain Lion

You are where I want to get to - mainly. I have been looking at either building a RAID box or buying something off the shelf - like Synology to do my backups. Right now I have my libraries of movies, music and photos on various external hard drives and a time capsule drive. It is redundant jbod that I sync using itunes home sharing (mainly) and rsync for any data outside of itunes.

I have been using the Photostream function and iPhoto - to collect my random iPhone/iPad shots onto my various computers as well. My main photos are outside iPhoto and I back those up to Flickr.

I still haven't found a really good offsite backup solution - for all my data.

Thx for your answer IvanLasston.

I can highly recommend a Synology. I have been testing quite a few NAS-boxes and I bought a Synology DS211j with 2 x 3 TB disks. The sharing functions is so easy to use and the support for TimeMachine is perfect. Actually you can build your own TimeCapsule for half the price with Synology.

I use CrashPlan for offsite storage - my most important files is backup to CrashPlan Online (80 gb) and a copy of all my files is automatically copied to a disk that I store away from my house. The disk is sync every 14. day.

To backup my 'archived items' on my NAS I think I will buy a large external disk and sync the disk once in a while. Then I can store all my projects and unused files here and get a copy to another location.