OK. I am setting up my Plexing here and I just purchased a nice 12TB Nas drive.
For my personal important files, I have a second drive that mirrors the first, and another drive off site, so two identical backups.
Do you personally buy hard drives in pairs for your Plexing to do the same, or do you just backup the filenames rather than the files themselves so that you can re-acquire the files in case of drive failure?
I would assume mirroring a 4K Library would be quite the expense 
Thanks !
Never do that. It is important to use different hard drives. If you don’t want a different brand or model, use at least drives from different production batches together.
That way the likelihood of both drives suffering catastrophic failure shortly one after another (or even simultaneously) is lower.
I can’t imagine anything being more frustrating than the backup copy suffering hard drive failure during restoring the backup or during rebuilding the storage array.
This is all the more important if you run them in Pools or RAID configurations (starting with mirroring, a.k.a. RAID 1).
There is some merit in using hard drive pairs when doing RAID 0 (a.k.a. striping) but you should not use that for long term storage. The bandwidths of regular video files (yes, even 4K UHD raw rips) don’t justify using RAID 0 anyway.
That’s a good tip!! I didn’t think of that.
Do you actually back up the video files or just the metadata, for home use?
I have a backup on an external device to which I mirror my media files. This process is manually triggered.
My Plex data folder is on a dedicated SSD, which gets mirrored to an external hard drive every 6 months or so.
(If your Plex server is running on Windows, you should backup the Registry branch as well. It makes disaster recovery much quicker. https://support.plex.tv/articles/201539237-backing-up-plex-media-server-data/ )
RAID is not a backup.
My NAS media storage is ZFS based in a 7+2 config. I have a cold backup locally, also a 7+2. For the stuff that’s actually important it’s backed up to Backblaze.
I run increment backups onto tape here. Have about 150TB of tapes in temperature and humidity controlled storage to allow me to restore my libraries in case of data loss.
This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
