I’ll echo others in this thread regarding Windows storage spaces, not quite fully baked yet. I think we’ll see it production-ready in Server 2016 RTM. I’ve tried running Plex from storage spaces and had lots of problems retrieving metadata, also had problems with various other applications primarily using structured databases. Much more trouble than worth.
As for a backup solution, RAID is not a backup! RAID5 vs RAID6 almost entirely depends on the disk size you’re using. Plenty of studies out there regarding the statistics of disk failures during rebuild based on disk size.
I use Backblaze to backup my library. $50 a year for unlimited storage - and they mean unlimited. They’ve never batted an eye as I’ve uploaded TB of data to their service. Unless your ISP has bandwidth restrictions, I highly recommend it.
FreeNAS is a great solution if you’ve got decent hardware to run it. Their CIFS engine is a bit hungry on RAM and CPU imo, but it’s very flexible software and reliable in my experience. I’d recommend against option 3 having done that myself. If your PC starts transcoding while you’re gaming, it could affect performance. Plus you don’t want to have to power on your rig everytime you want to watch a movie. Unless you’re cool with that.
Happy Plexing, and congrats on your new house!
@therealknewman If you dont mind, how much have you uploaded?
@Plexhilarated What do you use to duplicate. Do you run this at night mainly?
I use a simple utility (FreeFileSync) that mirrors data from one drive at 2:00am, then the next drive at 2:15am, then 2:30am, then 2:45am, etc… until all 7 drives are checked for changes and mirrored as necessary. Since it’s Plex movie and TV files, there aren’t many changes in the drives, except when I add or move movies or shows around.
In essence, the FreeFileSync utility creates batch files that I run using Windows Task Scheduler during the wee hours of the morning.
Thanks for the info! I currently use raid 1, but am upgrading to dual Xeons, and need a new MB. I want to move away from raid 1, and as I will already have two sets of data, initail sync will be non-existant.
I will check out the program.
@dextros said:
@therealknewman If you dont mind, how much have you uploaded?
Not using them for all my data, only around 4TB.
@sremick said:
- I can’t recommend unRAID. It lacks basic features necessary to really support you in the event of failure, and while it’s great that “sometime soon” they should be getting features that will make it more RAID-like and bring it into 2005, I’d rather see someone on something that has been there for a while. Most proponents of unRAID have not had to recover from real failure yet… akin to recommending a fire extinguisher based on price and how easy it was to hang on the wall. unRAID also has no checksumming and cannot protect your data integrity from URE, soft corruption and bitrot.
I’m not sure what you mean by basic features as I have not found it lacking. It is also not RAID-like to overcome some of the downsides. For example, let’s consider a dead drive that is in the process of being rebuilt and at the same time another drive goes belly up. In the UNRAID system you would indeed lose data on JUST the newly dead drive, but all other data would be preserved. Depending on the RAID level system you could lose the entire array. What do you consider real failure. I have had a drive completely lock up and die, pulled it out and replaced it all without losing access to the array, or any data. There is a healthy plug-in environment and checksumming can be added, as can many other utilities. The last release has added dual parity, so that now you can have 2 drives die at the same time and recover. There is also support for virtualization and Docker use. Seems pretty full-featured to me.
@dextros said:
Thanks for the info! I currently use raid 1, but am upgrading to dual Xeons, and need a new MB. I want to move away from raid 1, and as I will already have two sets of data, initail sync will be non-existant.
I will check out the program.
When I used to do this, I used robocopy. (I believe its now included in windows, if not it can be downloaded for free from MS). It mirrors directories or whole disks, just copying changes. Placed the command in the windows scheduler and it worked like a champ.
I prefer using built-in tools when possible and since it did what I needed I never had to look any further, so I don’t know how it compares to other tools.
@ratmice said:
@sremick said:
- I can’t recommend unRAID. It lacks basic features necessary to really support you in the event of failure, and while it’s great that “sometime soon” they should be getting features that will make it more RAID-like and bring it into 2005, I’d rather see someone on something that has been there for a while. Most proponents of unRAID have not had to recover from real failure yet… akin to recommending a fire extinguisher based on price and how easy it was to hang on the wall. unRAID also has no checksumming and cannot protect your data integrity from URE, soft corruption and bitrot.
I’m not sure what you mean by basic features as I have not found it lacking. It is also not RAID-like to overcome some of the downsides. For example, let’s consider a dead drive that is in the process of being rebuilt and at the same time another drive goes belly up. In the UNRAID system you would indeed lose data on JUST the newly dead drive, but all other data would be preserved. Depending on the RAID level system you could lose the entire array. What do you consider real failure. I have had a drive completely lock up and die, pulled it out and replaced it all without losing access to the array, or any data. There is a healthy plug-in environment and checksumming can be added, as can many other utilities. The last release has added dual parity, so that now you can have 2 drives die at the same time and recover. There is also support for virtualization and Docker use. Seems pretty full-featured to me.
I disagree
Unraid has checksumming via an “addon”, not a standard feature but does not repair your files like Btrfs does.
you have to install par2 for this which is far from perfect.
The bottom line is Unraid is not where Btrfs is currently, and is behind.
I want to add that this has been marginally tested compared to Btrfs.
Parity is not to recover specific files that would have been damaged due to bitrot, but for a batch of files on a specific drive.
