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Jaaaamie

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Hello guys

This is kinda an AS question and kinda not.

I’m sure we all have TB of films and TV shows, especially with the 500 downloads.

I have just bought a 3rd 4TB drive. My question is, where does everyone store their downloads? I’m worried about hard drives failing so I have duplicates on different discs. Been thinking about cloud based like Dropbox.

What do you do?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
 
Many of us, like myself, use NAS systems. I have one that uses RAID 5 for redundancy and I back it up to 3 different USB drives at this time. I have too much data to store in a cloud nor would I want to store it in a cloud really.
 
Yup..also on NAS and WAY too much for the Cloud...over...well, way too much.
Try to keep at least a one to one backup. Raid is not backup, it's failure protection. So, if you have 3 4tb drives, purchase 3 more for backup. You could purchase a 12tb drive to cover all three, but if your backup drive fails, all of your drives would be at risk until the 12tb was replaced. Try staying one to one equal to each drive.

Speaking of 12tb drives...for those in the US...NEWEGG just put the 12tb My Books for $169 for Black Friday.
My Books 3-5 year warranty and 12tb should be equal to an ENTERPRISE drive inside.
 
Windows Server with file duplication and nightly backup. (Also stores AnyDVD images.)

The larger your collection, the more important a backup strategy can be.
 
I have also a NAS with 2 disks 6Tb with no raid and I backup only from time to time the videos I don't want to lose on another little disk that I put in my desk. Other very important files are on the disk1 and copied every night on the disk 2.
 
Jaaaamie said:
I have just bought a 3rd 4TB drive. My question is, where does everyone store their downloads? I’m worried about hard drives failing so I have duplicates on different discs. Been thinking about cloud based like Dropbox.

What do you do?
Click to expand...
QNAP NAS with 4 14TB drives in a Raid 5, with 2 external 20TB drives in a Sabrent USB hard drive bay for additional back-up.
 
RedFox 1 said:
Lets move this to General Chat. I think its more comfortable to have a conversation there.
Click to expand...

This certainly looks like a "general chat" on the surface, but is it really? AS is the first place anyone is going to run into petabyte-level storage issues. I know it was for me.

Anyway, to answer the specific question: As couple folks already posted, a Raid 5 NAS with hard drive backups is your best practice. You just have to bite the expensive bullet. I recommend QNAP for several reasons.

<brag> I store my 2,000+ movies and 500+ TV series on a NAS with eight 16TB drives in RAID 5. I back up to another NAS in JBOD with two external drive cabinets with a total of twelve 8TB drives. Include my own system, removeable drives, usb drives, etc. and I top out at 0.3 petabytes total.</brag>

I only watch about 4 hrs of TV a night, and don't share with anyone. I'm just a compulsive "collector of content". Hey, there are more expensive addictions, right? lol
 
Jaaaamie said:
Hello guys

This is kinda an AS question and kinda not.

I’m sure we all have TB of films and TV shows, especially with the 500 downloads.

I have just bought a 3rd 4TB drive. My question is, where does everyone store their downloads? I’m worried about hard drives failing so I have duplicates on different discs. Been thinking about cloud based like Dropbox.

What do you do?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
Click to expand...

So clearly ,as many have posted, many use a NAS system with backups. I think it might be helpful to you to understand how we got there because I figure you are looking up NAS system prices and saying holy cr@p.

So here is how I got there.

- first I had a hard drive for media
- then I bought a larger drive and yet a larger one
- then I got the bright idea of putting these multiple drives in RAID 0 (striping) in a PC
- this worked for a time until that RAID system kept flipping out, breaking the stipe and losing my data at which point I would have to restore
- **here is the decision point, what to do now. This is where we came to a NAS being the only solution. Nothing else can you reliably use multiple drives with redundancy that is also scalable. Well you can do this with PC raid (either BIOS or possibly Windows) as I mentioned but it is far less reliable, far less in my opinion.

I honestly think it is cheaper to start out with a NAS when you know you are going to scale pretty quickly.

Mine is a QNAP with 6 bays. I have it filled with 8TB drives and I use GoodSync to copy those files to 3 different USB drives for backup.

Hope that helps.
 
I started many years ago with Win7. Multiple 4TB drives in a large case, cables everywhere. I used Stablebit drive pool/scanner.
Drive pool ensured I always had two copies of each item available (even if a drive failed) and I could mix drive sizes.​

I then moved to VMware with a VM WinServer Essentials in a Norco 24 drive case and also used Drive pool/scanner.
I began with 6TB drives and have been replacing them with larger drives as the need arises or the prices were right. Currently a mix of 16/18/20TB drives that provide 385TB of usable space.
I also had a few smaller VMs running.​


My current Backup is a Supermicro 24 bay case running Unraid. Currently a mix of 12/14/16TB drives that provide 254TB of usable space. This also runs one of my media servers & TV recorder.
Critical items are backed up daily. Other items are backed up every other day.​


I have always built my own systems. When I upgrade my main motherboard, the old one almost always gets repurposed into the Backup system.
Currently working on a new main system in a Supermicro 36 bay case. I don't plan on using 36 bays, but you never know.
It will use Proxmox for virtualization. Not sure yet on how to serve up the drives, debating ZFS vs Drivepool.​
 
Buy larger drives and you won't need another one as often. 18TB drives are $300 now.

Backblaze is probably the cheapest remote backup service at $7 a month (or $5.41 a month with a two-year plan). You just to have connect all your drives at least once a month.
 
Main System:

Online: (in Case)

2 x 1tB SSD (Win 10/64 Pro & Win 11/64 Pro - boot to either using bios)
1 x 8tb drive (Itunes Music - kept online/powered up)
5 X 16tb drives (Disconnected/powered down except when transferring files usually once a week)

Offline:

(Cloned Acronis True Image via USB Dos Mode) backups:

3 x 1tb SDD (side mounting in Corsair 4000D is really cool)
1 x 8tb drive
5x 16tb drives

1. Whenever I get new files (daily) I insert the backup disks into the USB 3.1 docking station and backup to backup disks usually at end of day.
2. I keep these files in a directory for backing up and updating to disks inside the computer only once a week (usually Saturday or Sunday).

2nd older System:

(mainly used now for Topaz enhancement/upscaling of older files - chugging thru backlog and VHS tape conversions to .mp4's using a USB device connection)

2 SSD 1TB (System & Backup)
1 x 8tb Drive (Same as one in main system with Itunes/Music)

I'm probably an odd duck out because I don't keep my high capacity drives powered up and whenever I want to watch movies I just take one of the backup disks and insert into 3.1 USB Docking station and play into Roku Ultra USB port to TV's (does hardware upscaling).

I keep my PC running usually the whole day & don't see the need to have the wear & tear on drives or electricity consumption since I only do movies for me.

The Corsair 4000D was a good choice for me and I took the bays that are normally underneath and stacked them on top of each other at the far right of case.

This case didn't have bays for Blu Ray/CD writers, but I was creative and put my main Blu Ray writer on top of these bays (I was able to securely mount at top of bays) and then put my extra USB Blu Ray Writer (in case main writer can't read a disk - very seldom occurs) unattached, with a cable to use to plug into USB port on top.

Mike
 
If you need a reliable way to backup and to secure folders and files, I suggest to use AWS S3 as a cloud and Gs Richcopy 360 as backup tool, I think you will never face any headache again while backing up your data.
 
Zilano said:
If you need a reliable way to backup and to secure folders and files, I suggest to use AWS S3 as a cloud and Gs Richcopy 360 as backup tool, I think you will never face any headache again while backing up your data.
Click to expand...
Err, we are talking terabytes here ...
Where I live, S3 Standard costs me 2,45 Cent per Gigabyte per month ... I currently have (only) 6 TB of video data, which would sum up to 1764 Bucks per year ... no thanks!
And that does not even include the fee of 9 cent per GB, if I transfer more than 100GB per month (outgoing) so if I needed a restore of all my data, that would be around 500 Bucks o_O
 
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Zilano said:
If you need a reliable way to backup and to secure folders and files, I suggest to use AWS S3 as a cloud and Gs Richcopy 360 as backup tool, I think you will never face any headache again while backing up your data.
Click to expand...

That might make some sense for normal files although I would argue there are simpler and more cost effective ways to do this. But in the context of media I think that is a bad idea given the cost and if you consider the risk of pulling titles from AP with AS and storing them on S3, well that seems like a bad idea to me. Just my take on that.
 
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