I’m running plex on Ubuntu 18.04 server and I have about 12TB of media with no backups. My oldest hard drive is about 6 years old now, so I’m starting to get worried. My initial thought is to just get a hard drive enclosure and mount it in my current OS. I could create a cron job to run an rsync periodically to backup all my movie and tv show files. Does anyone see any issue with this method?
Rsync works fine for media file backups. I’ve been using it to backup movies and tv shows for years.
I use rsync for my media backups, though I’m only backing up about 1 TB. TLDR; rsync combined with linux copies using hard links (e.g. “cp -al”) is very powerful and you can set up backups very specific to how you want them to work if you do some reading.
More info - Particularly giving your relatively large library, to keep it managable, I’d suggest an initial full backup and then incrementals of some type (nightly, weekly, whatever your need is.) For media that I essentially intend to keep forever I keep the incremental pretty simply, obviously not replicating deletes from the original. For more dynamic libraries like TV Shows (where I do delete an episode after I watch) my backup is a bit more complex, and I have rsync doing it so that I can go back and retrieve what my library looked at any point at my nightly backup time for the past week, then once a week for the past month, then once a month for three months. This is all incrementals and using linux’s ability for multiple links to the same physical file, so it doesn’t take a huge amount of extra space. The script can do annually for a certain number of years, but I figure if I haven’t noticed that a TV show is missing for several months then how much do I really need that show?
PS Yes, I know rsync has the ability to handle links without doing “cp -al” separately, and maybe that is working some of you. I’ve had issues with rsync not handling links the way I want and have had more success getting what I want using cp to create the links, then using rsync to handle the incremental changes and deletes.
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