What is the best solution for my 35TB film Library?

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
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Hello!

I am a film student and have been collecting films for years now inspired by my father’s collection. However, my film library is now approaching almost 35TB and I no longer want to keep buying more harddrives for it. I want to put everything on the cloud and use Plex as the interface. I will be going to study in abroad for a year and I would like to be able to access all my films as I travel and study.

I have been looking into affordable cloud hosting services like dropbox for business and G-suites (google drive) and they are roughly the same price, 50 - $60 dollars a month for unlimited cloud storage.

Does Plex work with G-suites and business dropbox?
What is the best solution for someone in my situation?

Thank You

  • Karl
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Are you serious?? There are a plethora of threads on here talking about unlimited storage on Google G-Suite for Business at $10 a month. And before you start banging on about the 5 user minimum, it is not enforced.

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While it does seem to be true that the user requirement is not, currently, being enforced that does not say that they will not enforce it in the future.

It is a good solution for many if you are willing to trust that Google will continue to look the other way and if you are willing to trust your media to the web.

Personally I do not trust either of those options.

But, clearly if you travel on a regular basis it is easier to have your media in the cloud than it is to carry drive(s) with you.

Plex will work with any cloud based system that allows you to map the storage as a regular drive.

Keep in mind that even $10.00/month is $120.00/year and a 4-6 tb drive can be bought for that.

I am currently running 60tb of external hard drives attached to my Plex server using StableBit’s DrivePool to combine them into one large drive.

I have been running that system for several years and have never lost any data and the only drives I have lost was one that I had for 5 years and one other that I dropped when moving my system.

I just do not trust the web to keep my data either safe or private.

1 Like
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But Plex Cloud is not available for new users so if you never had it before, you can’t create it until further notice. Unless that was changed?

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From what I heard plex cloud is crap anyway. Most people will use rclone or Google drive file stream rather than paying plex pass for plex cloud that barely work

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Plex Cloud never provided storage. Storage as always been up to the user to link to the Plex Cloud “server” engine.

Since this thread is general in nature and not specific to any particular OS, I am removing the server-specific tagging. It will remain in “Plex Media Server - Computers” where it currently resides.

Thanks.

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Don’t believe all you hear. For me & many other users Plex Cloud works wonderfully well but is not now available to new users. There are cheap & easy alternatives. If you have no remote requirements then just mount your Google Drive on a local PMS otherwise rent a VPS & keep everything in the Cloud.

1 Like
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Hi there, I am curious about how exactly you have your plex cloud set up. Does plex accept the cloud folder like any other folder? And after that plex works normally? Is it any slower than having a server?

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Hi there, what was the cost of your server set up with the drives? How do you have them configured? Do you back them up or have a redundancy?

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Can the single user use more than 1TB?

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I run Plex on Linux & use rclone to mount my Google Drive directories. They appear as local. Performance is fine. You wouldn’t know that the files live off in a Google computer room somewhere off in the Cloud. You need reasonable network bandwidth. Mine is 75Mbps/30Mbps.

There are solutions to mount Google Drive as local on Windows & Mac.

1 Like
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Assuming you are referring to Google Drive the answer is “Yes”. The often quoted limit of 1TB per user for less than five users has never been enforced & as far as I can see is not in the T&Cs when you sign up. Be sure to get G Suite for Business though.

1 Like
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Wow, great to know. Before I launch my own server this seems like how I plan on doing things! Quick question about your streaming speeds at that bandwidth. I’m building this for my family that is spread across the USA and there are 15 of us. Have you had multiple people streaming off your network, does it slow things down? What do you think think will bottle neck first, your cpu or your bandwidth? What would happen if 5 people all stream from me at the same time? Would my computer crash or something?

Thanks for all your help !!

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Many of us have used the excellent guide from @per_PLEX_ed that has all you need to know about setting up Plex on your own Linux server with Google Drive https://www.techperplexed.ga/p/index.html

Check out the long thread in the old Plex Cloud forum https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-cloud-vs-vps-why-we-went-with-a-vps

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