yup, nothing more seriously upsetting than a few TB lost!
I think if you spent 5 minutes and figured out how long it would take to reacquire the media. then you'd do something about it!
But the key words there are "reacquire the media". As in the media still exists and can be obtained again. Its for this reason that I also don't keep backups of TV or Movies as a collection can be re-built. Now my photography work...that's a different matter - that stuff gets backed up all over the place!
Don't get me wrong though, I do have some failsafes in place...all my media is stored on an unRaid box so there is redundancy against a single drive failure, so the chances of needing to rebuild the whole collection are at least minimised.
But the key words there are "reacquire the media". As in the media still exists and can be obtained again. Its for this reason that I also don't keep backups of TV or Movies as a collection can be re-built. Now my photography work...that's a different matter - that stuff gets backed up all over the place!
Don't get me wrong though, I do have some failsafes in place...all my media is stored on an unRaid box so there is redundancy against a single drive failure, so the chances of needing to rebuild the whole collection are at least minimised.
Storing your backups on a device such as a NAS, while single-drive failure resistant, still has the element of danger while a drive is in the failed state.
If a second drive fails, or even faults, when rebuilding the volume after a single drive failure, the entire contents of the volume can easily be lost unless the volume is Raid 6 or better (double parity).
My captured content exists on the NAS and on stand-alone 2 TB drives (1-2 yo drives previously used for media prior to the NAS), stored off site. Purchased media masters are off site as well
For those keeping score on library contents and resolutions:
All movies are HD (1080p @ 10-17 Mbps), BluRay is full data rate (20+ Mbps) with all extras, TV is captured via Silicon Dust and MythTV @ 1080p also; renamed by FileBot (and my automaton)
The totals below are generated from each category (each 'type' is in a different NAS share). The totals do not reflect other movies & documentaries of interest only to me (my private collection).
[chuck@Lizum ~.57]$ ./count-videos
Movies 712
BluRay 273
Seasonal 17
Spec Int 30
TV Series 110
TV Episodes 6160
Music Albums 907
Music tracks 26707
[chuck@Lizum ~.58]$
It has taken me nearly 2 years to get my 1800+ movies into Plex. I am not interested in repeating that exercise. When I lost one of my hard drives it took amost 3 days to restore. But that beats the many months and all the aggravation of re-ripping hundreds of movies.
Do yourself a favor... Get a backup solution.
FYI - If you are in the US you can get Crashplan for about $100 a year. It saved me (twice).
My only problem with online backup solutions is my upload speed. Even AFTER I upgrade to bonded DSL, I will still only have 1.5 Mbps. NOT pretty when you want to back up 15+ TB. Secondarily, if you don't pay, it's gone without recovery.
My only problem with online backup solutions is my upload speed. Even AFTER I upgrade to bonded DSL, I will still only have 1.5 Mbps. NOT pretty when you want to back up 15+ TB. Secondarily, if you don't pay, it's gone without recovery.
That is a big part of my problems with the idea of online backup as well.
I also feel that it is over priced. When you look at today's storage prices and look at the price of reasonably reliable storage you find that for the price of a years service you can get a multiple TB drive or two or more and the average life of a USB hard drive is more than 4 years it becomes clear that using online storage is just too costly and the only thing it protects against, that is not covered by having local backup, is a local disaster and if you have such a disaster that trashes your hard drives then your media is probably WAY down on the priority list.
BTW: I have local backup and I use double backup with one set of drives off site and rotate the backup drives about once every 4 months. So, even if I loose everything at home, I do not have to re-rip my entire library but only what I have added in the last 4 months. It is overkill but I calculated it and factoring everything in like extra electricity the cost of the storage and assuming I get a drive failure every 2 years (That is a VERY conservative number as I have not had a failure that was out of warranty in the last 3.5 years) I still come out ahead after 4 years.
Of course uploading my library would take a prohibitive amount of time and lockup my upload pipe for the entire time so I really have no online backup option.
I've seen prices at 400 USD / TB / Year. That's more expensive than buying the drives outright. A 6 TB drive is 260 USD (retail). When used for backup only, the SATA interface will have faded into history (no longer supported) before those things wear out.
20tb of total storage 98% HD stuff all stored on an Unraid system, I have lost drives over the years and just replace with the same or bigger drive and it duplicates all the files back on the New drive... Unraid is awesome.. I cant hardly wait till H265 hits mainsteam i have played with it in handbrake betas it makes your videos 1/2 the size with no mesurable difference in clarity... Plex plays these files just fine.
But the key words there are "reacquire the media". As in the media still exists and can be obtained again. Its for this reason that I also don't keep backups of TV or Movies as a collection can be re-built. Now my photography work...that's a different matter - that stuff gets backed up all over the place!
Don't get me wrong though, I do have some failsafes in place...all my media is stored on an unRaid box so there is redundancy against a single drive failure, so the chances of needing to rebuild the whole collection are at least minimised.
I'd like to back stuff up but 40tbs? The cost is roughly £1k for just the drives and with the quality I use most newer drives only have 200-300 movies. It's dangerous but a grand won't pass waf
I have about 800 movies at 1080p and about 60 different tv shows with about 1000 episodes. I use a Drobo that has about 5tb of used storage on it (8tb in total). I know a lot of people don't like Drobo because its proprietary software, but the reason I like them is I just don't have the time to spend when a drive does fail, and with Drobo I just pop out the bad drive and pop in the good drive and it does the rest. Drobos are more expensive but you can find descent deals of a couple year old used ones. Also I like them because as my library grows it takes about 45 seconds to increase storage by hoping out small drive and putting in bigger.
It has taken me nearly 2 years to get my 1800+ movies into Plex. I am not interested in repeating that exercise. When I lost one of my hard drives it took amost 3 days to restore. But that beats the many months and all the aggravation of re-ripping hundreds of movies.
Do yourself a favor... Get a backup solution.
FYI - If you are in the US you can get Crashplan for about $100 a year. It saved me (twice).
I use CrashPlan to to backup 9.5+TB of info....I'm still uploading...Its taking a good few months...
I use CrashPlan to to backup 9.5+TB of info....I'm still uploading...Its taking a good few months...
Doing a quick calculation.....
Upload 15 TB of content, transmitting non-stop at sustained 60 KB/sec (allowing for some other use of the internet), requires 250,000,000,000 seconds. This is better expressed as 475,321.3 years.
Post upgraded DSL, the upload rate will increase to 145 KB/sec and I will be done in 1/2 the time.
I think the cost of the drives (or whatever they're using 400,000 years from now) will be cheaper. :D
