No backup at the moment. But I was thinking about Amazon ws3 or crashplan. Anyone with experience?
I guess Amazon is the cheapest, except the first month of backup. Currently I have 1.4tb, but growing fast.
@cayars said:
@cayars said:
@jjross sure I can do this. I’ll add this in my “cayars” thread which is listed in my sig. I’ll try and get this done for you in a little while but should surely get it posted today.I use StableBit DrivePool also so this should make it a “no brainer” for you to setup. BTW, I’ve had to use it a few times to recover data. Both for hardware (drive crash) and for “user error(s)”.
This “user error” mistake was very cool in the sense that since I hadn’t synced the parity I was able to recover my data. Had I been using any hardware/software that does real-time parity I would have been screwed.
EDIT: POSTED
Thanks!
Things I’ve learned. 1) backups never really mattered to me, that is, until I had to replace something that took me months to collect, and some of your collection will not be easy to replace. 2) You’re building a media library, it’s going to grow, and grow, and grow, so start early and buy the backup right along with the primary drive you’re adding. 3) If you’re using external drives, keep them organized. A couple of things I do is label every drive AND I make a directory/label in my file structure. Who knows, it could be handy to me the next time I physically move to a new system or, in total crisis mode, have to rebuild my Plex structure.
I just run 2 freenas servers with zfs2 which lets me loose 4 drives before anything major happens.
Then I backup everything to google drive,you know, if like my servers both explode in two different locations miles away from each other.
I do it the old school way, with hardware raid5. I looked at raid6 but it was too much of a over head for my needs.
I’m a huge fan of the old hp proliant servers.
Started my Plex adventure with a DL360G5 6x1TB then added a MSA70 and 5 more dives, Now I’m using a DL180G6 ( SE326M1 ) added 5 more drives to the mix.
So I’m now up to 15 drives of raid5 with 10 more slots empty for dives, but still, That is yielding me 13TB.
I left one drive in the DL360 so it could still be a game server
I wish the price of 2.5" drives would go down in price.
Here’s the drives I use http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145875 , don’t seem to give me any problems even when I was hosting a minecraft server with 6 of them.
I am thinking about adding a MSA60 to the mix to get them cheap 3.5" drives you all run
Good questions. I definitely need to get a backup solution in place.
Richcopy/Robocopy to a QNAP. If my array ever blows up, I stop Plex, change the drive letter of the QNAP mount to the one of the array and start Plex back up. Rebuild the array, re-copy and fail back.
@sluquet said:
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.
This is an interesting approach, what type of dedup are you seeing from Veeam when it’s all media?
I am lazy I have two NAS units with an rsync job to copy any changes to the backup NAS.
Mainly for quick recovery so I can keep watching TV lol .
Then look at fixing the the fault later and restoring the data if required :).
But I do have 3 backups of the family photos/videos (Tape/disk and private cloud)
@ND40oz said:
This is an interesting approach, what type of dedup are you seeing from Veeam when it’s all media?
On the Plex vm nothing at all. I run several other vms in another backup job and there I get 1,7x dedupe 1,4x compression. I have loads of space so there is no issue there, so I use Veeam for the ease of use and low downtime should I ever crash.
I don’t waste money on hardware for backup. I use filefactory. Super fast and unlimited space. I have a 120Mb unlimited connection so uploading/downloading is fast. Been using it for over 4 years to store my 12TB collection with no issues. I have had to do a small backup restore once already… a 3TB drive.
@Allan68 Doesn’t filefactory have a limit of 5GB per file? I thought I remember that back in the days when I was evaluating online storage providers. I had liked it up to that point.
Is this still true or did they change it? If it’s still 5GB file limit how do you work around that for your files?
That’s a bummer as it looked promising up to that point. Torrent, FTP, simultaneous upload/download, no speed caps…
I wonder how this how well this could work for cloud sync? I don’t think a 5GB limit would be catastrophic for this purpose.
@cayars said:
@Allan68 Doesn’t filefactory have a limit of 5GB per file? I thought I remember that back in the days when I was evaluating online storage providers. I had liked it up to that point.Is this still true or did they change it? If it’s still 5GB file limit how do you work around that for your files?
I have no files bigger then 5GB. But if i did i would just split the file using winrar and “store” for compression. This way it packs/unpacks super fast as it uses no compression. You can do this with just a few simple steps in winrar. Make the parts any size. Works awesome! The 5GB limit is no biggie with the right tools 
I’ve got an external esata drive hooked up to my NAS. It’s set to back up the NAS when the external is on so I turn it on after I’ve added stuff to my library.
I use Time Machine for my computer HD, just a WD MyBook. I previously had a 4-drive RAID enclosure with 4 1-tb drives in it in RAID 5, but the enclosure corrupted all the drives at once (or else it corrupted them over time but didn’t warn me) and I lost approximately 4 years of backup. That made me leery of low grade RAID boxes.
I have an internal 8 disk Raid5 for my working set. I create archives to a Drobo5N2 and backup to Backblaze should something happen to my house or anything else. Backblaze is inexpensive and doesn’t throttle uploads, not to mention the quick recovery of your entire library should you need it (they’ll send you disks to restore directly).
My local internal is being an HP P410 controller which has served me very well for many years. My drives of choice are HGST Ultrastar of which i have 2TB and 6TB flavors.
I have only abot 2 TB which I have a local backup and then use the Crashplan back up to a friend. I seeded a drive and took it to his place then he also gave me one that he had seeded with his stuff. We then run the Crashplan software to keep them up date. Works pretty well had to restore my back up drive after a failure and decided to see how the recovery worked. The remote recovery would be pretty slow so I went to my friends, grabbed the drive hooked it up at home and the software rebuilt the files to my new back up. Works great. Gives off site back up with the convenience of restoring from local. Oh and it is free.
Prior to 2009, my business only NAS (single drive) died. I was able to send the hard disk out a recovery service who saved about 99% of the data for $1000. Was worth the cost but not the week it took to get my data back. That is when I get iDrive.
My media is just photos and music, business records, and some software images, totaling almost 1TB. I have been using iDrive since 2009. In February of this year, my NAS died and I was able to get a new NAS and start the restore focusing on business that evening, then photos, then music, then images in the order of importance. It took about a week to restore. Once it was up and running, the new backup took about 4 weeks to complete.
One of my business entities using Dropbox lost its files due to someone deleting files on his computer. Restore only took about 20 minutes.
I recommend off site backup in case your house burns down or otherwise you cannot access your data.
With all my media in full size BD rips I have almost 30TB of media. I built a small formfactor tower and use BTSync to keep everything duplicated. I take the backup computer to the office and stick it under my desk. I cart it home once a month to sync up.
I used to use Crashplan but the overhead on some recent restores made me unhappy. I like this solution more since BTSync is file level, I have a duplicate server as well for all practical purposes.
