I have a nas with 2x10tb drives. I mostly just have music, movies and tv shows on it.
People talk about raid not being a backup, but is that relevant for non-original data? I mean I can always get the media again if need be. It would just be an inconvenience.
What would you do?
i have ~24tb (6x4) unraided x3 on separate nas, one of which is only plugged in and turned on every few months. if i lose a drive, i can clone the whole thing quickly from one of the other 2 backups… i dont have to worry about failed raid arrays and i get a bit more useful storage…
in the ~5 years i’ve had this setup going i think ive only lost one drive, and it started throwin smart errors long before it died
i guess im using a ‘redundant array of inexpensive nas’ = RAIN! is that a thing? can i make it a thing?
Curious what was the model of your drive failure? I have 6 years now on a bunch of 8TB WD Elements/EasyStore drives as well as some 10TB-14TB WD MyBook, Elements, and refurbished WD drives from serverpartdeals in the preceding years. Still no failures yet but I’m expecting one eventually.
all my drives are WD Red
I have all my spare drives pooled together into a frankenNAS system in a spare Fractal R5 case. Whatever media fits gets a backup on there (in order of personal importance). Otherwise I will reacquire all my ISO’s should disaster strike.
R7 gang here. Let us keep the dream alive!
I have it replicated to a backup server then to one in the dc
You have a data center?
I have a full rack colocation, been doing colocation for other people aswell
That’s cool. I’d probably do that if I could justify the costs
Well if you ever do want to discuss it feel free to give me a shout ;)
Very specific media like rare or modified Rips gave an extra copy on an archive folder. All my cloud storage and personal backups also go to the archive folder. That folder then gets backed up to local raid 6 NAS, and then the qnap software syncs that up to backblaze once a week.
I have 3x 14 TB in a raidz1 setup on TrueNAS. Would take awhile to redownload but isn’t critical in any way, so I feel like that’s a good compromise.
The key concept here is how valuable your time is to rebuild your collection. I have a ~92TB (8x16 radiz2) array with about 33TB of downloaded data that has never been backed up as it migrated from my original cluster of 250GB drives through to today. I think part of the key is to have a spare drive on hand and ready to go when you do lose a drive, to be swapped in as soon as a problem shows up, plus having email alerts when a drive goes down so you’re aware right away.
To add a little more perspective to my setup (and nightmare fuel for some people), I have always made my clusters from used drives, generally off ebay but the current batch comes from Amazon’s refurbished shop. Plus these drives all sit externally with cables from SAS cards. The good news is this year I finally built a 3D-printed rack to organize the drives, matched to some cheap backplane cards, so I have less chance of power issues. And power is key here, my own experience has shown that if you use a cheap desktop power supply for external drives, you WILL lose data. I now run a redundant PS from a server that puts out a lot more power than I need, and I haven’t lost anything since those original 250GB drives, nor have I had any concerns while rebuilding a failed drive or two. At one point during my last upgrade I had 27 HDDs spun up at once so I have a lot of confidence in this setup with the now-reduced drive count.
My goodness, used drives are a nightmare indeed for me
It definitely comes down to the specific line. My last 6TB drives were my first jump into SAS drives but that series was terrible and I had a bunch of failures. I really should check google more often before jumping on what looks like a good deal.
I just need my config files. The media I’m ok with losing it. I’ve been losing it for years.
I only backup data that I either can’t replace or would have to spend significant effort to replace. Most of what’s on a media server doesn’t fall into that category.
I’m probably an outlier, but I have a full 3-2-1 backup. Over 100Tb myself, with it all backed up. I have a safe off-site I back everything up to weekly and then annually I do a full backup to LTO tapes.
I lost my media once. I don’t want to go through that again.
Wow!
Given your previous experience, your approach is understandable.
I have an old raid setup on which the card died, and Crashplan deleted my Backups when the array went offline (yea, I was pissed)l.
One of these days I’ll find a card on ebay, recover everything, and back it up again.
If I’d had a second backup…
Pretty sure something like 10 years ago crashplan deleted a bunch of customer data in a deduplication job gone wrong.
What’s the cost on the drives and tapes? (Roughly)
Tapes aren’t bad, I can get few dozen TB off eBay for a couple hundred. Drive was crazy though. Dropped 2 grand on it and it still isn’t that good of a drive.
So you have 3 100TB arrays?
2 arrays, then the tapes. Primary has double parity, backup has single
Thanks
I have a total of 48 TB across 4 HDD, plus the system SSD on my old desktop, now just server. It’s unfortunately running windows, because I haven’t had the time to reinstall everything from scratch yet even though I’ve intended to for years.
Anyway, I just run Backblaze for backup on it, except one drive which is important photos/files and that gets an extra backup to a RPi using Syncthing. The other drives are all downloaded media that could be replaced given enough time, but Backblaze backs up my whole PC and hasn’t complained about the size yet. I thought for sure they’d cut me off or something, but nope still just paying $99/year for a single PC backup.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters Git Popular version control system, primarily for code NAS Network-Attached Storage Plex Brand of media server package RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SBC Single-Board Computer SSD Solid State Drive mass storage VPN Virtual Private Network
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
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If you woke up and all of that data was gone tomorrow but you didn’t care, then there is no reason to back it up IMO.
Hell, I download things multiple times sometimes just to spite Comcast.
It might be worth keeping a text file log of what’s on there at least.
Music is almost by-far the easiest to “restore”. In the event you lose everything and don’t want to spend time restoring it all, you can fling money at Spotify/etc and use a service that automagically imports playlists.
The other stuff? That’s going to be insanely annoying to back up and insanely boring to rebuild if it’s a super-huge collection. Personally, if it’s something I think I’m going to watch in the future I’m buying the bluray/dvd and keeping it on the shelf (more-so for that it works as a conversation piece).
I only care to have a solid backup strategy of stuff where there is a 0.0% chance to rebuild like personal documents, photos, and videos.
Fortunately, since you “only” have 2 10TB drives (I’m assuming as a RAID1 array), consider this:
- Buy a 12/14/16TB external drive (just in case you upgrade disk space in the future, you’re using this drive so infrequently it’ll last you a few years easily)
- Take a full disk backup, put a physical label on it with the date, store the drive in a safe
- Wait 6 months, buy a second 12/14/16TB external drive – you’re almost guaranteed to get a drive in a different batch, and if you really want to amp up the paranoid factor, go for a different brand.
- Back up your data to the brand new drive, put a label on it with the date, toss it in a safe
- Wait 6 months, grab the oldest drive, replace it’s contents with a new backup, throw new label on it, toss back in safe.
Generally speaking, this will give you at least 1 backup that’s no older than 12 months, and 1 backup that’s no older than 6 months. The only risky time where you’d lose a backup is when you’re replacing the oldest backup.
IMO this 6mo strategy is a fine compromise on cost, effort, and duration of loss of data but tweak as you see fit.
To extend on this: Anybody ever did a test recovery to see if the backups are ok and to dry-test their backup/restore strategy? I have to admit that until now I was too cheap to keep a spare drive array just for testing.
I had a similar idea of 2×12TN drives, with one at home and backed up to monthly, whilst the other being in a remote location and backed up to physically every quarter
Yeah, and your way can give you a free off-site backup.
I guess if you really wanted to optimize to minimize the number of backups to take, you could just take one of the drives to the offsite location as part of the rotation.
Say if you have 3 drives, you’d always keep your second oldest copy off-site. You want your most recent backup on-site for convenience of restoration, and you want your oldest on-site to use to take a backup without driving to your buddy’s place first.
Let’s say your drives backup schedule is quarterly and with 3 drives, and the backup dates are: Drive A: Jan 2023, Drive B: April 2023, Drive C: July 2023
Now it’s October. Use Drive A for your backup since it is the oldest. Now Drive B becomes your oldest
Take Drive C, the now-second-oldest, to your buddy off site.
Bring back Drive B from your buddy’s place since it used to be the second-oldest and is now the current oldest
When it’s time to rotate the drives for backups, do a backup to the oldest drive first.
Take , do your backup to your oldest drive locally first, then drive offsite to drop off your now-formerly-newest drive, and bring back the off-site drive as the oldest.
That’s a decent idea. I was planning to keep one off-site backup on the same drive in perpetuity, but this might be better in the long-run. Do you think I should maintain a staggered back-up strategy or keep both backups in sync (by backing them up together at the same time)? What would be the demerit of this method?
Honestly I’m just super lazy and a bit ADHD. The more work a chore requires, the less likely I’m going to actually do it, so it’s just a personal hack.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with any approach as long as you can commit to doing it. It’s just a matter of finding something that you’re able to stick with. Maintaining cold backups is annoying lol
I am too, but on the other hand I’m also paranoid haha
I’m currently running mine on Windows and use SnapRAID and DrivePool as my defense against drive failures. I think I have 7 data drives and 2 parity at this point (totalling around 90TB). Beyond that I copy the Snapraid whatchamacallit to a separate backup drive along with my OS drive. This isn’t really a ‘backup’ but in the scenario where I have several failures and no way to restore, I still have radarr/sonarr keeping track of my library and a membership to several private trackers.
I wouldn’t worry too much about losing media files as most can just be downloaded again. I find it more beneficial to make use of all the storage space you can rather than trying to do a 1:1 backup, which gets pretty absurd once you start getting up there in movie/TV count.
Media Server? No content backup at all.
If you lose everything, just download new stuff you want to watch, or redownload a few TV series/movies.
Music? There are streaming services.
Only backup configurations and maybe application data, so that the reinstall will be easy. Those few kB/MB could sit anywhere. I’m using GitLab for this purpose.
Edit: Images! If you have your photos on there, back them up! They can’t be replaced!
The streaming services wont work if you have no access to interner lol.
At my last job I had to travel to my work dailly for over an hour in one way, for almost the whole travel I didn’t have any network or phone reception.
Will much rather just have music on a media server and a client that allows me to locally download some of my favouritr music for such situations like navidrome and synfonium than pay for spotify premium to allow me to do that.
We’re talking about replacing lost content here though. And as such you can use the streaming services as a “backup” by re-ripping your whole collection if you lose it.
I’m actually doing this now as part of a library cleanup. Zotify + beets are a great combo to pull down vast quantities of music and properly sort and tag it.
Then I stream it to my phone in my truck using ampache and ultrasonic, which does have a local buffering option.
However if you have some exotics that you ripped from rare discs, demos or prerelease, live recordings with sentimental value etc. I would suggest keeping those properly backed up. I don’t have many of these, but the ones I do have are backed up both cloud and offsite.
Do people really have so much music that it’s get’s hard to just keep it backed up?
I personally never went over 1gb in size of my music library,
Personally I live in a very rural location and I farm, so I can spend a lot of time on the road or in my tractor. 1gb wouldn’t get me through a day in the field, so I have a pretty big collection with a lot of variety. We don’t even have reliable FM radio here, so it’s bring your own music or listen to the diesel roar.
I grew up on a farm, still help out sometimes. And same our fm radio doesnt work on most ny routes.
My songs were almost always just highly compressed mp3’s I would get years ago si ce back then spotify wasnt in Croatia so my only way was yt.
Streaming services let you just mark playlists for offline use, I have my whole spotify library offline.
Most streaming services have that under a paywall, which in that case I will much rather just make my own if I have a system to do it.
What music streaming service is even usable without paying?
Spotify is the only one that I know of that has a free plan and it’s (supposed to be) terrible
What I’m saying is that if I already have hardware to make one my self, why pay for it?
Edit: also some people just can’t afford to payfor streaming services
Sure you can, but I very much prefer the experience of something like Spotify. It’s very easy to find songs and to just listen to them at any time.
And some obviously don’t like piracy (I don’t care much since I have around 8 TBs of films, shows and other shit with Plex.)
