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?
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You think you can get the media again if need be.
Depending on how large your collection is, would you remember every item in it? How much effort did you put into organizing it?
IME it’s far more of an inconvenience and expense rebuilding data from scratch than properly backing it up. And the peace of mind from a robust, tried and true DR process is golden.
You think you can get the media again if need be.
Well that’s my usual approach however we now live in the world of censored tv shows by netflix meaning some of the new media you may get might not be the original thing. :(
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.
Oof.
Yeah, last time I looked the drives are stupid money (I feel like the should be much cheaper).
My brother also has his own NAS at his house. We sync our media between both of our servers to both share it and to serve as an off-site backup.
Everything else on my nas gets backed up to a cloud provider.
Like you said, it could be replaced it’d just be inconvenient, and media is kinda bulky so cloud storage for all of it would get a little pricy.
Living life on the edge currently, but thats because I dont have a means to backup my media at the moment
I can always get the media again if need be.
Doesn’t that mean you already have backup? It may not be the easiest to restore, but it is a backup nevertheless.
I wouldn’t really class that as a backup, that’s like saying you have a spare tyre because you can always buy one from a garage!
It’s different because when you need a tire, you need it now. When you need a movie it can wait 5 minutes.
I do n+2 of my media. It’s overkill but I have the space. You might want local n+1 for convenience of restoring, but it’s not necessary. You could absolutely consider the ability to torrent something as one of your backups.
So technically I have n+3. If my house burns down (n+1), and my off-site storage (+1) explodes, I can always still torrent (+1).
I only back up things that would make me sad if I lost it or cause me a lot of time-sensitive work. Personal data files and configuration files. Media? I wouldn’t sweat it if my media drive got corrupted by malware or a hack or a lightning strike. I’d just live with a smaller library until I get things re-download again. And I’d be ok if I can’t find a handful of the rarer things. Pictures of my family? Backed up locally and on a remote server with immutable backups. Configuration files? Synced with a remote git repository.
“RAID is not a backup” just means that the entire RAID disk counts as one copy of the files.
Non original media doesn’t matter unless you think you have old obscure things that aren’t even on Internet archive or private torrent groups, or it has some sentimental value like a VTR recording of something you watched as a kid. Most you can download again and likely in better definition.
Focus first on getting at least 2 separate backups of the most important stuff: your family photos and videos. Then records, then work stuff.
That saying also means something else (and imo more important): RAID doesn’t protect against accidental or malicious deletion/modification. It only protects against data loss due to hardware fault.
If you delete stuff or overwrite it then RAID will dutifully duplicate/mirror/parity-check that action, but doesn’t let you go back in time.
Thats the same reason why just syncing the data automatically to another target also isn’t the same as a full backup.
I use Linode object storage for backups using Restic. 500gb of storage for 5eur/month.
I don’t backup logs, backups made by an app, cache, thumbnails and other stuff. I backup actual container data, so I can reatore it, restart docker and it works like nothing happened.
If you live in Europe you have 1TB by € 3.81 / month with Hetzner. It works fantastic with Restic (I’m using it too for my backups).
Whoa! Will take a look. Thanks!
I mirror it 1:1
If you can’t afford to mirror it, backup the files that were and are currently the most difficult to get atm.deleted by creator
I only backup what I can’t redownload, ie personal media. Everything else would be annoying but probably also a “great filter” if it all got lost and I’d have to make choices about what I really wanted in the first place.
I just want to add, you may not need to backup what you think you can redownload easily.
There are cases of series or movies being really difficult to find or it takes you a long time to find a working torrent. For those it definitely should make sense to back them up, but its a bit subjective feeling which ones those might be.
Another thing in my case, I got movies and seriea for my child on the server. He expects that is accessible, always, and is too young to understand that data can get lost. So I am also backing that up, it could be easily replaced but it would take me time and this would result in my child being unhappy. Not worth it!
I backup my music, photos, docker settings and that’s about it. Daily backups to one external HDD, but recently setup a second backup that’s runs weekly juuuuust in case. The music is only because it’s taken me a long time to build upy library, and that would be painful to lose. TV, movies, meh.
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
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