So new to the whole thing, though I’ve dabbled here and there with Plex, but getting ready to go all-in. Question I have is: How do you do backups of your digital media? I have a bud who’s giving me whatever titles from his library that I want (in exchange for some work I’m doing for him). I haven’t seen everything in his library, but he says he’s at about 17TBs. Now I don’t think I’ll bother with even half of what he has, but I have about 500+ titles of my own I need to rip (I’m hoping he has the same stuff as I do so that I won’t have to do it). My server has 8 drive days and I have 4 WD Red 3TB HDDs (but only two are in use), available (though thinking about bumping everything up to the 8-10TB range if the bonus money is there. The drives are connected to a $600 RAID controller and the drives are using SAS (4-1 cable to the card). The two drives in use now are in a RAID 0 configuration, but I know that will be unacceptable once I start populating all of those drives.
So how do y’all setup your drives to meet your needs? RAID? JBoD? Voodoo majik? I know that I’ll need to have a backup of the server somewhere else and plan on putting a NAS device in our storm shelter.
There are numerous other, similar, threads to this. And all of them has as much different ideas on how to best solve this as there are users who has replied (exaggerated a tad bit). What it boils down to, imho, is how important is the data for you specifically? How much time, money and effort do you feel is “OK” to spend on this? In a few threads I’ve seen people use USB-enclosures (and a lot of disks), other use hardware RAID (even 5, without BBU, one spare drive should never be used with the size of modern drives - especially not without battery), some don’t bother at all (just pure JBOD) since they don’t have the need to rapidly get up and running in case of a disk failure- a separate backup is enough for them (and the time it takes to copy everything back is OK for them).
For me, above mentioned doesn’t cut it for me, I store more than just movies on my server. Besides the actual backup (offsite, on external disks and in the cloud too for the most important stuff (photos etc)) I use a RAID-setup that also gives me the latest in terms of protection against bitrot etc (I don’t want my files to get corrupted) thus I opted for ZFS. But it too has its disadvantages and isn’t perfect either. You need to spend a lot of time configuring it and have to have server-grade hardware (to a certain point), and expanding it later on can be troublesome.
So, chose something that you feel meets your level of expertise (using something you aren’t comfortable with if a disaster happens can just lead to more headache), and doesn’t blow out your bank account either. Most important, remember to always have an offline, offsite backup.
@Heisenberg45 said:
So new to the whole thing, though I’ve dabbled here and there with Plex, but getting ready to go all-in. Question I have is: How do you do backups of your digital media? I have a bud who’s giving me whatever titles from his library that I want (in exchange for some work I’m doing for him). I haven’t seen everything in his library, but he says he’s at about 17TBs. Now I don’t think I’ll bother with even half of what he has, but I have about 500+ titles of my own I need to rip (I’m hoping he has the same stuff as I do so that I won’t have to do it). My server has 8 drive days and I have 4 WD Red 3TB HDDs (but only two are in use), available (though thinking about bumping everything up to the 8-10TB range if the bonus money is there. The drives are connected to a $600 RAID controller and the drives are using SAS (4-1 cable to the card). The two drives in use now are in a RAID 0 configuration, but I know that will be unacceptable once I start populating all of those drives.
So how do y’all setup your drives to meet your needs? RAID? JBoD? Voodoo majik? I know that I’ll need to have a backup of the server somewhere else and plan on putting a NAS device in our storm shelter.
2 x RAID units
Plex Server mapped to RAID unit 1.
RAID unit 2 turns itself on a couple of time as week and rysncs everything from RAID unit 1, then turns itself off
RAID unit 1 also running a Crashplan online backup 24x7
@sremick said:
My backups are my original source discs. I can always re-rip.
Ripped copies illegally pirated from other people aren’t “yours” to back up, regardless of your “arrangement”.
Yes, thank you, Mr. Helper. I am not here discussing legalities, I am here asking about how best to backup a massive library. I have my own that will need to be ripped soon and while I can re-rip those movies if a drive failed (because, yes, I own the physical discs- hitting nearly 500 now), it’s not something that I want to go through. And if the drive failed and I had to re-rip, how do I manage to catalogue what movies went on that disk in the first place?
BTW, ripping copy-protected discs is a violation of the DMCA, even though it’s completely BS since the DMCA says that people have the right to make archival backups but in order to do so, one has to break the encryption first, which is illegal. So are we to assume your entire collection was un-encrypted when you added them to your media library?
@Peter_W said:
There are numerous other, similar, threads to this. And all of them has as much different ideas on how to best solve this as there are users who has replied (exaggerated a tad bit). What it boils down to, imho, is how important is the data for you specifically? How much time, money and effort do you feel is “OK” to spend on this? In a few threads I’ve seen people use USB-enclosures (and a lot of disks), other use hardware RAID (even 5, without BBU, one spare drive should never be used with the size of modern drives - especially not without battery), some don’t bother at all (just pure JBOD) since they don’t have the need to rapidly get up and running in case of a disk failure- a separate backup is enough for them (and the time it takes to copy everything back is OK for them).
For me, above mentioned doesn’t cut it for me, I store more than just movies on my server. Besides the actual backup (offsite, on external disks and in the cloud too for the most important stuff (photos etc)) I use a RAID-setup that also gives me the latest in terms of protection against bitrot etc (I don’t want my files to get corrupted) thus I opted for ZFS. But it too has its disadvantages and isn’t perfect either. You need to spend a lot of time configuring it and have to have server-grade hardware (to a certain point), and expanding it later on can be troublesome.
So, chose something that you feel meets your level of expertise (using something you aren’t comfortable with if a disaster happens can just lead to more headache), and doesn’t blow out your bank account either. Most important, remember to always have an offline, offsite backup.
I am actually running server-grade hardware and software for this server; MS Server 2012 R2 Datacenter, courtesy of MS itself.
Given the capacity/cost of hard drives and the massiveness of what I have plus what I am getting (not to mention what I will get in the future), I can’t see being able to rip everything to a series of hard drives and keep them off-site, in addition to what’s in the server itself. I do intend to setup a backup system in a remote storm shelter, but that’s gonna cost some duckets. Cloud storage is just out of the question. I’ll likely have to move all machine backups and non-movie media to a separate NAS device to maximize capacity on the server itself (limited to 8 drives in the SAS bays, plus maybe a few PCI SSDs if I win the lottery, lol.
BTW, ripping copy-protected discs is a violation of the DMCA, even though it’s completely BS since the DMCA says that people have the right to make archival backups but in order to do so, one has to break the encryption first, which is illegal. So are we to assume your entire collection was un-encrypted when you added them to your media library?
There are contradicting laws (“fair use” vs DMCA) in play here when it comes to this. To date, I know of no one who has been punished for personal viewing of a ripped copy of a movie they own the physical media of.
However, there is no law that entitles one to rip copies then give them away either for free or as a form of currency/barter for services, and there have been plenty of successful prosecutions on that. That is blatant piracy. While you might not care about the the law, Plex cannot and they really can’t be condoning this publicly, regardless of the personal/individual stances/morals they might hold privately.
BTW, ripping copy-protected discs is a violation of the DMCA, even though it’s completely BS since the DMCA says that people have the right to make archival backups but in order to do so, one has to break the encryption first, which is illegal. So are we to assume your entire collection was un-encrypted when you added them to your media library?
There are contradicting laws (“fair use” vs DMCA) in play here when it comes to this. To date, I know of no one who has been punished for personal viewing of a ripped copy of a movie they own the physical media of.
However, there is no law that entitles one to rip copies then give them away either for free or as a form of currency/barter for services, and there have been plenty of successful prosecutions on that. That is blatant piracy. While you might not care about the the law, Plex cannot and they really can’t be condoning this publicly, regardless of the personal/individual stances/morals they might hold privately.
but the government goes after the companies who provide encryption-defeating software, software which allows people to make those backups. AnyDVD sent out a letter about a year ago saying they were finally forced to shut down.
Hell, you’re not even legally allowed to have a “viewing party” at your house.
