Just wondering what others with large libraries doing for backup?
The best solution I’ve found so far is Amazon “Unlimited Everything” cloud storage. I got it around Christmas time for $5 for the first year, but even at its regular price of $60 per year, it seems like a good deal for “unlimited” storage. Its interface is a little quirky, but it has reasonable upload and download speeds which would be critical if one of my 8TB drives failed. Lately, the upload speeds haven’t been amazing, but acceptable.
I also have Crashplan online backup family plan for my computers, but the restore (download) times would be ridiculous if I ever had a drive fail in my media server (like months or years to restore). I think crashplan is great for “regular” user data, but not for Terabytes of video.
I already had to make use of the amazon backup once when I accidentally deleted a folder that had about 80 movies in it. Got everything back in a reasonable amount of time.
Other solutions folks are using? Or just praying you don’t have a HD crash?
I broke up my titles alphabetically and decided on cold storage archive drives. You can get Seagate Archive 8TB drives for $202 per drive. Duplicate your library and store in a safe cool location. Backing up will go faster as well as restoring over SATA, eSATA, Thunderbolt or USB 3.0.
Backing up 8TB to a cloud provider with the average home internet connection is not a realistic method for frequent backups until we start seeing FTTH/FTTP Gigabit internet connections for consumers.
I use crashplan. The initial sync took months but keeping it up to date isn’t bad. That being said in the 2+ years I’ve been paying for it I haven’t had a need to restore. I’m sure that would be painful also.
The one benefit CrashPlan has over Amazon Cloud Drive is the ability to encrypt the data you upload to their server. Currently, unless you encrypt the data yourself, anyone on Amazon’s end can inspect what ever you upload to their service.
I use Crashplan, but utilise a rather large external HDD rather than the Crashplan servers. The drive sits in a draw outside the house and every couple of weeks I have a calendar reminder to take it home and I plug it it and it backs up everything new.
I use Backlaze online backup for all my files with the exception of my movie library. I replicate my movies on external drives using WD MyBook enclosures. For every 4TB drive I have in my NAS, I have another one in a MyBook enclosure.
I do not ever use any form of online storage. It is MUCH too slow to get anything significant uploaded. At 4 mbps it would take weeks. maybe months, to get a good part of my data uploaded and it clogs my upload pipe for that entire time. It is just not worth the overhead. Also I do not trust someone else to “hold” my data any more than I would trust a drug dealer to “hold” my money. Hard storage is so inexpensive that it makes little sense to use online anyway.
I have the original disks for much of my library and most of the rest I use local backup. If I lost my home to a fire or some such I would loose much of my data but if that were to happen my problems would would be much greater than just a loss of data.
My file server runs DrivePool with duplication turned on and I keep the pool large enough where the loss of any single disk would not loose any data.
@Elijah_Baley said:
I do not ever use any form of online storage. It is MUCH too slow to get anything significant uploaded. At 4 mbps it would take weeks. maybe months, to get a good part of my data uploaded and it clogs my upload pipe for that entire time. It is just not worth the overhead. Also I do not trust someone else to “hold” my data any more than I would trust a drug dealer to “hold” my money. Hard storage is so inexpensive that it makes little sense to use online anyway.
I have the original disks for much of my library and most of the rest I use local backup. If I lost my home to a fire or some such I would loose much of my data but if that were to happen my problems would would be much greater than just a loss of data.
My file server runs DrivePool with duplication turned on and I keep the pool large enough where the loss of any single disk would not loose any data.
I am in total agreement.
I do not use drivepool, but will use BTRFS shortly in RAID1
I backup all the files on my media drive, and the documented stuff by Plex for the configuration (to include registry settings) nightly to an external USB 3.0 HD. I’ve had to recover from it once before and it worked perfectly to restore.
Plex running as a vm on a esxi host with local storage. Backup of the whole vm to a seperate NAS in a different location using Veeam, and also all the pictures gets synced to Dropbox.
Should the primary server crash i can mount the backup files almost instantly from the NAS and also migrate it live to another server, which is very nice.
@danjames92 said:
I don’t have a backup plan. Media is spread across 2 x 3TB drives and 1 2TB. It gets difficult when you have 7.4TB of media.
YOLO :))
7.4 TB of media is nothing. (Well not nothing but quite small) I have almost 18 TB of media and my library is quite small compared to many that post here. There are several folks with upwards of 30-40 TB of data.
With the prices of drives being as low as they and the difficulty of re-ripping and recreating libraries it really makes little sense to not at least back up the videos themselves. But that is entirely up to each person’s desires.
Whether local or online it is simply a good idea to backup any and all data that is not real easy to recreate.
@danjames92 said:
I don’t have a backup plan. Media is spread across 2 x 3TB drives and 1 2TB. It gets difficult when you have 7.4TB of media.
YOLO :))
7.4 TB of media is nothing. (Well not nothing but quite small) I have almost 18 TB of media and my library is quite small compared to many that post here. There are several folks with upwards of 30-40 TB of data.
With the prices of drives being as low as they and the difficulty of re-ripping and recreating libraries it really makes little sense to not at least back up the videos themselves. But that is entirely up to each person’s desires.
Whether local or online it is simply a good idea to backup any and all data that is not real easy to recreate.
I don’t have a huge monthly income anymore so can’t afford to go and build a backup server. Wish I did while I had the money.
@danjames92 said:
I don’t have a huge monthly income anymore so can’t afford to go and build a backup server. Wish I did while I had the money.
You don’t need a backup server. Just buy a couple of USB drives and attach them to your server and run a copy command to copy the media onto them. You can disconnect them once the copies are done and just attach them when you need to refresh the backup.
@danjames92 said:
I don’t have a huge monthly income anymore so can’t afford to go and build a backup server. Wish I did while I had the money.
You don’t need a backup server. Just buy a couple of USB drives and attach them to your server and run a copy command to copy the media onto them. You can disconnect them once the copies are done and just attach them when you need to refresh the backup.
A couple of USB drives to hold 7.4TB will cost at least £200.
I’m building a RAID6 of 16x8TB=104TB to replace a RAID6 of 16x2TB=25.5TB and RAID6 of 12x4TB=37TB. Its going to be a challenge to back up this new beast. May need to reconsider the approach.
@danjames92 said:
I don’t have a backup plan. Media is spread across 2 x 3TB drives and 1 2TB. It gets difficult when you have 7.4TB of media.
YOLO :))
7.4 TB of media is nothing. (Well not nothing but quite small) I have almost 18 TB of media and my library is quite small compared to many that post here. There are several folks with upwards of 30-40 TB of data.
With the prices of drives being as low as they and the difficulty of re-ripping and recreating libraries it really makes little sense to not at least back up the videos themselves. But that is entirely up to each person’s desires.
Whether local or online it is simply a good idea to backup any and all data that is not real easy to recreate.
Yea, 7.4 TB is easy to backup. Just pickup a Seagate 8TB Archive drive and call it a day.
I’ve got 2 independent backups offsite in the cloud.
I use Snapraid with 2 parity drives at present locally. So at present it would take a 3 drive failure for me to loose data on any one drive. In that case I can pull 1 drive worth of content down from the cloud in about 2 days (done it testing).
I just ordered a few more drives. I’m going to add a 3rd parity drive as well as add more drive space as I’m getting low. Starting next month I’m going to start ordering a new drive each paycheck to use strictly for backup. I’ll connect the drive, fill it and then remove and archive it (offsite).
By end of March I should have 4 parity drives as well as a complete backup on HDDs that are offsite.
While backing up to the cloud has worked well for me in the past/present it’s far to easy for any cloud provider to change their terms. I’ve gotten burnt by Bitcasa and MS Onedrive. Wouldn’t surprise me if Amazon was to do the same thing in the near future.
@danjames92 said:
I don’t have a backup plan. Media is spread across 2 x 3TB drives and 1 2TB. It gets difficult when you have 7.4TB of media.
YOLO :))
7.4 TB of media is nothing. (Well not nothing but quite small) I have almost 18 TB of media and my library is quite small compared to many that post here. There are several folks with upwards of 30-40 TB of data.
With the prices of drives being as low as they and the difficulty of re-ripping and recreating libraries it really makes little sense to not at least back up the videos themselves. But that is entirely up to each person’s desires.
Whether local or online it is simply a good idea to backup any and all data that is not real easy to recreate.
Yea, 7.4 TB is easy to backup. Just pickup a Seagate 8TB Archive drive and call it a day.
I’ve got 2 independent backups offsite in the cloud.
I use Snapraid with 2 parity drives at present locally. So at present it would take a 3 drive failure for me to loose data on any one drive. In that case I can pull 1 drive worth of content down from the cloud in about 2 days (done it testing).
I just ordered a few more drives. I’m going to add a 3rd parity drive as well as add more drive space as I’m getting low. Starting next month I’m going to start ordering a new drive each paycheck to use strictly for backup. I’ll connect the drive, fill it and then remove and archive it (offsite).
By end of March I should have 4 parity drives as well as a complete backup on HDDs that are offsite.
While backing up to the cloud has worked well for me in the past/present it’s far to easy for any cloud provider to change their terms. I’ve gotten burnt by Bitcasa and MS Onedrive. Wouldn’t surprise me if Amazon was to do the same thing in the near future.
The Seagate Archive 8TB are looking like the way for me to do cold storage backup of the new array being built. They are $200/drive so the price is not completely terrifying.
