Cayars, was this you? 
Donāt know but I have over 75TB uploaded to Onedrive. 77.2TB to be exact. 
Iāve got this uploaded at three different places. Well at least I still have google and amazon backups besides Onedrive.
I know about a dozen guys with over 50TB uploaded to all three places.
This is now the 2nd āUnlimitedā cloud drive to change policy on Unlimited storage. First for me was Bitcasa.
Carlo
PS Iāve half thought of creating a ābackupā online service specifically for people like us who want to be able to backup movies/shows offsite for a āreasonableā cost.
You were the first person I thought of when I read that announcement this morning
I must admit I was a bit peaved another āunlimitedā storage provider bites the dust.
I thought it was really surprising coming from MS. You would think they did a bit a research on user habits before going live with unlimited. It would have been far better to give 5 or 10TB to start with and then increase the upper limit by 5TB every once in a while if the system wasnāt being abused.
Now Iām wondering if it will be Amazon or Google who next changes āunlimitedā. 
Yeah amazon is interesting due to AWS. If anything I bet rates would increase. I donāt back up anything and just hope my unRaid box doesnāt critically die
@cayars said:
PS Iāve half thought of creating a ābackupā online service specifically for people like us who want to be able to backup movies/shows offsite for a āreasonableā cost.
I was thinking the same thing.
In a previous life I was going to start a company called:
āRedundant Technologies Corporation, Inc.ā
for just this type of thingā¦ offsite backup.
I was going to make millions (billions hadnāt been invented yet).
You havenāt lived until you have forced an Umlimited Storage provided to rethink their business model > @cayars said:
I must admit I was a bit peaved another āunlimitedā storage provider bites the dust.
I thought it was really surprising coming from MS. You would think they did a bit a research on user habits before going live with unlimited. It would have been far better to give 5 or 10TB to start with and then increase the upper limit by 5TB every once in a while if the system wasnāt being abused.
Now Iām wondering if it will be Amazon or Google who next changes āunlimitedā.
Reminds me of what went down with Bitcasa and their Unlimited promises
My version of āRedundant Technologies Corporation, Inc.ā would probably get me in trouble since Iād do things a bit differently than normal. All stored videos would be considered āprocessedā and if you immediately downloaded the file right after uploading it, they would almost always be different.
- If the movie was already uploaded and stored in the āvaultā your version would not upload unless the quality was better than that which is stored (up to a point). Some meta-data would get uploaded (IE screen size and audio tracks). Iād only guarantee a few audio codecs get stored such as DTS, AAC, etc.
So realistically only one version of any show/movie would ever be stored and it would be the ābestā copy of all those using the storage service. The client would check each file and only upload a file if it were deemed better than what is in storage at present. Any movie/show you had that wasnāt better quality than that in the vault would not have to upload but would just save the meta-data about your version.
On a download from the backup service a transcode process would take place if needed to give you files back in the āroughā format you had. IE you had 720 AAC at 4mbit file and that which is stored had AAC, DTS and was 1080P at 12mb. So the server would ātranscodeā the file back to your upload/checked format.
Uploading your collection would be much, much faster than with any other service as much of you files would already be seeded.
Needless to say Iād probably have the biggest collection of stuff around.
Carlo
That would probably get you in trouble with copyright trolls somehow, and not because of your last sentence either
@cayars said:
My version of āRedundant Technologies Corporation, Inc.ā would probably get me in trouble since Iād do things a bit differently than normal. All stored videos would be considered āprocessedā and if you immediately downloaded the file right after uploading it, they would almost always be different.
- If the movie was already uploaded and stored in the āvaultā your version would not upload unless the quality was better than that which is stored (up to a point). Some meta-data would get uploaded (IE screen size and audio tracks). Iād only guarantee a few audio codecs get stored such as DTS, AAC, etc.
Love the ideaā¦ and as long as I had the latest and greatest Plex Client on a big screen in āyourā jail cell, it might be worth it.
How would it be any different than OneBox, Google Drive, AWS, Bitcase, Box, etc. They all allow you to easily pirate by posting a link to your files or directories.
Youtube, Hive, etc have full length movies posted all the time and these are public facing websites.
I think the above named sites would be more on the āradar screenā than if someone did something like this.
What Iād be talking about is a sane way to remotely backup your entire video collection āyouā legally own. It would be closer to āWal-Martās Vudu Disc-to-Digital Store Programā than the typical Cloud Drive. It would just have the advantage of storing each video long term in a more stream able format (eg MP4). It would verify you have a local copy to start with is all and could skip the upload on files already in the vault. Not much different than Vudu on the surface.
At worst case it would need to store SD, 720 and 1080 versions of the files (format only needed if someone has uploaded that format) in the vault. What would be more unique about this is that in the event of a system crash or loss of a drive the end-user could request a drive(s) be filled with the customers data and UPS/Fedex back to them. A person could send one drive back and forth until theyāve retrieved their data or order a half dozen drives filled with data to be sent back to them (ie purchase drives and pay a small ācopy and shipping feeā. They could even have a version of Emby or Plex stood up in the cloud for their immediate use while they retrieve there data.
Really, when you think about how this could work it would probably be far less of a worry than running a conventional cloud drive that allows āsharingā as they promote pirating far more than a backup vault of this nature would.
The big benefits would be the ability to use pre-seeded files (less to upload) and the ability to send or receive HDDs with files not already present in the vault or your local library for quicker exchange.
What do you think?
Plexhilarated, yea just need to make sure itās one of the cushy white collar prisons.
I guess that makes sense. It just feels like something specific to media is going to grab the attention of the MPAA really quick.
That said if you figured out a way to keep people from gaming the system it could probably work. The reason things like Vudu work is because of the DRM and whatnot, they can prove you own the file. In this theoretical system what would stop me from creating a 20GB text file, renaming it to Star Wars(2015).mkv and uploading it, only to get access to said movie?
Devils advocacy aside I love this idea and I think it has legs. It would definitely eliminate bandwidth concerns for the majority of people, including myself. Iām not anywhere I can get a nice fiber connection, so Iām limited to a paltry 10mbps upload speed. Iād use your service should the cost be reasonable.
Iām free this weekend, when do you want to start?
Great idea for personal media library storageā¦ but at what point would it make economic (business) sense to just go ahead and license the material and just become the another Subscription Service?
I mean eventually you would have enough media that you could offer it to those Plexians who donāt have the storage or content, for sayā¦ $X.XX per monthā¦ but I digress.
Next thing you know, all the User Interfaces in each Client will have some newā¦ wellā¦ āDiscoveryā type of thing. Waitā¦ uhhā¦ nevermind.
vanstinator
Iām not really sure how the MPAA would get involved since they usually/typically only go after people publicly posting files for pirating. This wouldnāt be a service where you can post links to share files like google docs, etc. It would only be a backup site built specifically for media. So basically only a way to backup media you already have in your possession. Not much different than CrashPlan or any of the online backup services or Amazon Cloud Drive for that matter.
It would be different than Vudo from the standpoint that Walmart makes you take in the DVDs to prove you have already purchased the media, then they allow you to pay $2 or $5 to get a digital license of said media that you can then stream to any client devices you have on your Vudo account. I know people who exploit this too. Anything can always be exploited.
You do bring up a point Iāve pondered for a while which is how do you know itās not a made up file with a file name that looks like a movie/show. For audio it could be done semi-easily as you can use a number of āaudio fingerprintā technologies to identify the media. This could probably be done for video as well but Iād probably just take the honor system and run it like a conventional ācloud backupā where you donāt really care where or how the person got the files, only that they have them. You are just providing an offline backup service with a twist and no sharing.
If said backup client, hooked into say Plex Media Server or Emby Server and read the meta-info directly from the database(s) then I would think it would be easy to identify the media regardless of file names and the characteristics of the media itself. It would also add a level of āgenuinenessā to the backup service as someone would have to go to the trouble of first creating lots of fake files to trick the media servers first into believing they had the files.
Also people will always have titles not already seeding in the backup vault. So there will always be titles that will have to be uploaded and processed and you could probably tell if someone was trying to cheat this way. You could always require 1 of 30 to 50 titles be uploaded for the same purpose of cheat testing until said person ārecords a high enough internal scoreā to show they arenāt typically trying to claim media they donāt really have. Wouldnāt be a hard algorithm to create.
Plexhilarated
Having the files available as a backup vs having said files available for easy streaming are two way separate things and Iām sure the license costs would be extremely expensive!
Itās one thing for a couple of private individuals to share files vs creating a commercial service that charges money to stream said files you provide.
The more I think about it streaming should probably not be any part of it and it should probably only serve as an offsite backup.
When you get right down to it, itās probably much safer than Plex/Emby itself from an MPAA standpoint as you would not ever be publicly distributing media. ā at least thatās one way to look at it.
Agreed. Most of that post was tongue-in-cheek.
Good points. Iām obviously not a lawyer or anything myself anyway so I donāt have any real knowledge of risks. Overall itās a good idea and Iād bet people would use it. Iād be in line to give it a shot. @Plexhilarated would too, Iām volunteering him.
Read up on the Cablevision Network DVR court case, it covers this scenario. Basically if you retain a copy for every user you can make claims regarding storage and donāt need rights to the content. If you keep a single copy basically you need streaming rights to the file.
Now Aereo based its entire business model on that and was shutdown, but in general copies for each individual are okay, single copies are not.
*** Poof ***
[Those were my dreams - and I donāt have many]
@agelsomini said:
Read up on the Cablevision Network DVR court case, it covers this scenario. Basically if you retain a copy for every user you can make claims regarding storage and donāt need rights to the content. If you keep a single copy basically you need streaming rights to the file.Now Aereo based its entire business model on that and was shutdown, but in general copies for each individual are okay, single copies are not.
Cablevision won that battle because it was user controlled. Cablevision also set the president that cloud based DVR is legal. Comcast X1 DVR is also cloud based. Itās about the āsource/originā of the data.
Aereo while similar to a cloud based DVR was on the other hand acting as a content broadcaster and was redistributing broadcasts. Aereo essentially set up an array of antennas to capture all the TV feeds that were broadcasts in that areas and then allowed people to pick and choose what channel they wanted to record or to broadcast to them. One of the major hurdles for them was that people subscribing to the service might be in a location that couldnāt receive these OTA broadcasts AND THAT was the main problem that started the downfall for them. Redistributing a broadcast without permission is pretty much a copyright violation any way you cut it and not the same thing as a personal backup.
If done correctly like Cablevision or Comcast you can legally do it. In case some of this doesnāt make sense itās about the āoriginā of the material. With Cablevision and Comcast you have direct access to the broadcasts and itās just a matter of storing it in a different location. With Aereo you didnāt have direct access to this data to start with so you canāt legally store something you donāt have.
āCloudyā to say the least. 
Carlo (pun intended)
Just curious, but but what would you guys think a service like this would be worth per month if doable?
