One of my drives died today... Best Backup Solution?

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
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Server Version#: 1.41.6.9685

I apologize if this has already been discussed here before, but I’m a bit lost on how to proceed. This morning, I lost one of my 8TB WD Red drives, and recovering the content is extremely expensive. Just for context, I live in Argentina, where tech costs have always been really high.

I still have two other 8TB drives and one 4TB drive left in the server.

For a few weeks now, I have been thinking about signing up for a service like Crashplan to be prepared for something like this, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. I understand that downloading everything back can be slow with these services, but aside from that, would you recommend it?

I’d love to have a physical backup too, but external drives of that size are insanely expensive here.

Right now, I’m working on finding and re-downloading each file I lost, but I’d really appreciate any advice or help you could offer on this. Thanks so much.

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As you found, the only downside to cloud backup is the speed. Assuming you find an affordable plan for your size needs. Other than that, there’s no choice but appropriately big secondary external storage. You might look for sales on large usb external drives.

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While this is NOT a backup solution, it IS failure protection.

When you have single drives, in a free-standing configuration, there is no protection against data loss if one fails.

A NAS, configured as a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks), generates parity to protect your data if/when one fails.

It gives you time to replace the failed drive WITHOUT losing any data.
As long as you replace the failed drive and repair the RAID volume in time, everything is restored and the protection is restored.

The downside to that is if you have single-disk parity (RAID 5) and lose two disks then you’ve lost all the data. I have RAID 6 (two-disk parity) which means I can lose two drives without losing anything. A third failure would lose the volume.

A commercial NAS, something like a 4-bay Synology, would give you that protection.

Yes, it’s expensive.
Yes, it’s something that, if you do it right, you’ll have for years ( I still have my DS-1815 – 2015 model ).
Most importantly, you can grow with it (swap out drives for bigger ones as you need to.

I recently had a drive fail. a 12 TB drive died during a data integrity scan.
It alerted me. I shutdown, swapped with the spare I have on hand, started it back up, and told it to start rebuilding. Other than the time to swap the drive (my machine isn’t a hot-swap system), there was no downtime. No data was lost.

The drive was sent in for RMA. When the replacement arrived, I tested it to confirm it’s ok. I put it back in the box and on the shelf until I need it.

I’ve detailed all this to give you an idea about how you can proceed forward from here.

FWIW: I have a 12 drive, with 12TB drives, RAID 6, on Ubuntu server, giving me 110 TB of usable space.

Over the years, I’ve kept another NAS and built it up to use as my backup.
That machine is a mirror-copy of my NAS.

Weekly backups (which are running as I write this) over NFS.

  1. Start up the backup machine
  2. Backup (sync) main → backup machine
  3. Shutdown the backup machine
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Sounds good ChuckPa, lots of parts though. It’s tough losing Data and though I like your method, lets not forget all of this Data is at one location.

Cross fingers it does not happen without Warning, that famous Creek is just a horrible thought without a paddle.

Cheers

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@SE56

that’s true, it is in one location.

While my upload is 400 Mbps, it’s hardly enough for moving that NAS to different location.

My “offsite backup” is a complete list of the contents stored on my google drive.
All the physical master disks ARE stored offsite. I would only need to reprocess them for a rebuild. The OTA television rebuild would be the most difficult part

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Ultimately, it comes down to

  • How much inconvenience, annoyance, and lost time and/or money would a loss of your data mean to you personally?
  • How much time and energy are you willing to expend in making regular backups?
  • How long could you tolerate that a desaster restore would take?

The answers to the above questions directly inform the backup options viable to you, and whether they are local or in the cloud.

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Yes, I’ve reached that conclusion as well. Since I didn’t plan on backing up my data from the start, switching to something like unRAID, Synology, or TrueNAS would be too expensive for me to take on all at once. Therefore, cloud backups are the most cost-effective (albeit slowest) solution for me.

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