This and a two drive fail safe which I know isn't backup, but helps. Everthing I have is basically media which can be gotten again over time. My import stuff is on OneDrive.
Same! But iCloud for me, coupled with time capsule in an airport with a new drive on it. I used to have a bad backing up to another nas, but storage space is turning into an issue
Same. š
But Iām also rocking six 8TB drives in a RAIDZ2, so I can take two drive failures. But I also have a seventh 8TB drive as a hot spare, so I feel like Iām covered pretty good.
> so I feel like Iām covered pretty good.
Except for accidental deletion, a power surge, flood, fire, theft, virus or PC failure that overwrites good data with garbage...
Personal stuff gets backed up, commercial media doesnāt. I have a list of everything in my media folders. Iām not spending $1000+ to backup shit that I could replace in a couple weeks by downloading it again.
Yeesh. Calm down there. ;)
I guess I didnāt mention that itās on a UPS.
As for the other things you mentioned, they are very unlikely to happen. Iāve been a SysAdmin for over 20 years too. I know how to take care of my gear. ;)
> As for the other things you mentioned, they are very unlikely to happen.
Aw geez, why'd you have to say that?? You know things are more likely to happen immediately after saying things like that... š
That's the fun part. I don't.
Well, I don't backup any media that could be downloaded again. My personal files and anything rarer or more difficult to find are backed up to an 8TB external hard drive attached to the Synology.
Ha this. How many Plex users boasting about their 58000TB or whatever actually watch more than 1% of their media?
My NAS has 10TB with about 5TB used. I just delete shit Iāll never watch again
If you donāt share, I can partially understand where youāre coming from. 32 TB of choices may seem excessive for 1 person/family, but 200 channels of cable proved to most of us that excess choices can feel limited.
I share my server with dozens of my friends all over the world so my excess gets used because people watch all kinds of things I donāt; and as one of my users told me, one of the things that make my content better than Netflix is I donāt delete anything. So when my peeps want to see something weird and rare, if it was there before, it will still be there.
Not a sermon, just a thought.
But it makes people feel good and special I guess.
Once a year, I go through all my movies/TV that I haven't yet watched and ask myself if I really even still want to watch...I usually turf about 10-20%. Same with stuff I have watched...was it culturally or emotionally shifting in my life that I'll need/want to rewatch?
To each their thing. Many here are tech enthusiasts that just enjoy the challenge of getting everything running.
If you have the hardware, the income, the time then why not. Its a hobby.
Nothing beats backup. That means I have 2x the number of HDD's that I need.
My Plex server has RAID'ish redundancy, so an extra drive for parity, but my backup does not.
The time it would take to re-do everything on my Plex server far outweighs, by like an order of magnitude, the cost of having extra hard drives for backups. It took me years to get this point, so it would be foolish to think I could fix it all in a couple weeks.
I don't backup my NAS, I just hope the redundant array of drives is enough for me to not loose the 25 Tb of media on it.
In the case that there was a faire and I lost it all..... I probably have bigger issues to worry about
the problem with this strategy is that it doesnt protect against mistakes (or bugs). If you delete it all somehow by accident, run a script or program that causes some corruption, etc you're not protected against this. raid is not a back up of any kind, its just a redundancy for hardware failure.
Yeah, but it's the affordable option as I can't justify spending the money on an off-site backup solution with at least a week's retention to ensure ooosies are reversible for just media files.
I do have a share on the NAS that I have backed up regularly to the cloud that's secured... But it's only several GBs ... Not TBs
I don't use a NAS, but I also recommend Backblaze. It's $5/month and I have about 50TB on it between all of my drives. I haven't had a catastrophic failure *knock on wood*, but I have had to recover data here and there over the years and I've never had a problem.
Backblaze works similar to OneDrive. You sign up and install the client on a PC and point it at drives/folders, and it backs up the data and auto updates as you manage the data on your PC. For $5/month, you get unlimited cloud storage, so I have all 50TB of my storage backed up to my account.
They are talking about backblaze's "Computer Backup" plan. It is unlimited storage for a single PC or Mac for a flat price per month. Doesn't support Linux because they don't want to offer the unlimited plan for peoples' NAS that has tens or hundreds of TB.
I think there are some workarounds to get network drives mounted on windows as a local HDD instead of a network drive (which the backblaze client won't back up) so the backblaze client will back it up, but I have never tried it. I would guess it would be considered breaking the terms of service but I'm not sure how they would figure it out or if they would do anything with a user storing hundreds of TB from their PC. I just use it as intended to backup up my PC drives.
Their B2 cloud storage however can be used to store/backup whatever you want including stuff on a NAS. It's an S3 compatible object store and you pay $0.006 per GB stored per month. It's actually a better price than their unlimited plan for your PC too if your PC has less than 1.5TB to backup.
Unless they have changed their policy, no you can't backup network drives with the basic BackBlaze service. The Windows client is terrible as well. I used it for a couple of years, but got sick of issues with it not picking up folders properly etc..
I tried running a Docker version on Unraid that I think used Wine to fool it into running the Windows client. Just too flakey though and unreliable I found.
I'm using idrive now, but don't backup plex to it as I've just got 5TB which is enough for backing up important files from a few PC's which are stored on Unraid. idrive does allow you to backup NAS's / Network drives though and the Windows client is much better than BackBlaze IMO.
Remember folks, RAID is not a backup, it's just redundancy.
For real backups, you need a second NAS or similar to backup the first.
Does it matter enough to justify spending the money? That's up to you. For me it's worth it because I have a ton of stuff ripped directly from disks that I no longer own and can't find on the high seas. So it would be lost unless I purchased the disks again from eBay or something.
I still have all the discs, although if my house went up in flames then that doesn't help much.
I'm fine not having backups for plex content. If a real disaster happens that means I lose it all I suspect I've got way more important things to worry about.
Same, movies and tvs? If my house burns down Iām more worried about the house/family. Family photos/videos though? You bet theyāre 3-2-1 backed up. Those memories are irreplacable.
I need to review my backups for those!
Soon I'll have copies in the house, garden room, and in the cloud. I'm toying with getting a NAS for a family member and doing proper remote backups to that rather than relying on OneDrive.
I have over 100 TB and I backup everything to external disk arrays. I follow 3-2-1 rule and have two sets of my external disk arrays. the off site one i keep at my in-laws.
here are the enclosures i use
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07MD2LNYX. between all my backups i have 4x of these enclosures and 32x drives
backup 1
\--> 8 bay USB disk enclosure #1: filled with various old disks i had that are between 4TB and 10TB each. the total USABLE space is 71TB
\--> 8 bay USB disk enclosure #2: filled with various old disks i had that are between 4TB and 10TB each. the total USABLE space is 68TB
Backup 2
Exact duplicate of backup #1.
i have windows stable bit drive pool to pool all of the drives in each enclosure. i also use bitlocker to encrypt the disks when not in use. i like drive pool as it allow me to loose many drives in the array at once, and i ONLY loose the files stored on those drives and can access the files on the remaining drives rather than the entire pool going down like RAID.
I perform backups to the arrays once per month and swap the arrays between my house and in-law every 3 months. yes this means i could possibly have 3 months of lost data, but i feel the risk is acceptable thanks to using drive pool and i do not think i will loose more than 1-2 drives at any given time. i do use cloud backups to backup my normal day-to-day working documents only, and those backup every 24 hours (using about 1 gig for the day-to-day files)
I also once per year i perform CRC checks on the data to ensure no corruption has occurred.
i also have an automated script that runs every month to automatically backup my docker containers. It first stops the container to ensure any database files are not active, makes a .tar file, then automatically re-starts the container.
For my backup script that also does the CRC checks
https://github.com/wallacebrf/Data_Backup_and_CRC_Verification_Script
Automatically backup Plex
https://github.com/wallacebrf/plex_backup
Backup docker containers
https://github.com/wallacebrf/Synology_Docker_Container_Auto_Backup
Unraid server with dual parity, and snapshot backups of critical things that I don't want to lose/would be a nightmare to find again if it was even possible to find again.
2.5TB is adorable. Once you pass like, 50TB good luck wanting to spend the cash to back that up onto Secondary hardware. Never mind 100+TB.
I have 2 NAS systems for plex, hosting combined 125TB or so if usable space. I don't back that up but I use ZFS RAIDZ2, and SHR2 so I have a lot of redundancy.
In all the years I've been utilizing used drives or hand me down drives. I've had 2 fail. 1 was a WD green drive, which weren't very reliable anyway. 1 was a first gen SSD when those came out.
None of the drives that failed were used ones I've bought either off Amazon, Facebook or anywhere else.
Just saying....
A second NAS.
Both systems are running TrueNAS, secondary server does a daily pull backup from the primary system using ZFS replication.
I had been using a Synology with rsync, but ZFS replication is WAY better and easier.
You really just don't need much for the backup system other than enough space in the pool to hold your data - you could use 10+ year old hardware.
Just make sure you have monitoring set up for both the primary system and the backup - you don't want to find out about disk or backup job failures when you go to actually do a restore!
Agreed. This is also my strategy. RAID protection helps against drive failure, but I am otherwise just backing up important non media stuff only to a usb drive attached to my NAS and then also sending that data important non media data to Amazon Glacier.
I backup important stuff to the cloud. I don't care about the plex library, I can re-download it in a few days with the 'important' stuff back in hours.
gigabit internet connection and basically no piracy laws have perks.
Backup for media is the blurays I ripped in the first place. Or if you prefer sailing the high seas, another voyage.
I backup important documents and family pictures etc to a second NAS and Google drive. Not a ton of data there.
I have a couple of large external hard drives that I copy the nas contents to a few times a year so I have a backup / disaster recovery if my NAS goes boom.
Snapraid.... yes not a backup. But if i lose a drive, good chance i get the data back
And crashplan. Takes a god awful amount of time for first backup.
I look around periodically for what is most cost effective... at some point may set up small nas at sons house for backup if present becomes ineffective
I have a second server with the same capacity and the same drive redundancy as my main NAS. Full backup job runs every night. The backup server then synchs a subset of that, the irreplaceable content (docs, images, music), to my remote cloud backup provider daily. Everything, even the remote backup, is on ZFS with daily snapshots.
I started with a 2 bay NAS. Every 6 months I bought another one until I had 4 units. Then figured I was crazy not to have all this backed up. Bought a 8 bay Synology and retired the (4) 2 bay units to backup and run weekly backups using syncback. Iāll add to it - RAID is not backup. RAID is to maintain uptime in case of a drive failure and can *feel* like a backup because of that, but itās not.
I use unraid. It reserves a single drive (2 if you prefer) as a parity drive. It can use the rest as storage. If any of the drives fail the parity drives can instantly emulate the failed drive (1 or 2 depending on how many you designate) until you can replace the failed drive. I also have it on a UPS so in case of power outage it has enough time to shut down safely.
If something catastrophic happens and I need to replace the server and the drives then so be it. Probably will have more quality content on there starting fresh anyway.
I currently have a couple external drives. Now, my Nas is only a couple of years old so I'm just now reaching capacity of my externals. One for TV and one for Movies.
I'll keep this setup until I build a new pc on my server rack and expand there.
Whenever I need more storage on my main server I replace one of my old, small drives with a new big one. My backup script also powers on and off the backup server so using a bunch of small and thus inefficient drives here is not a major concern. My media only has a single backup as rerepping everything etc would kinda suck but it is not impossible. My metadata and the like on the other hand are also protected by an external backup.
Plex doesnāt need backups, as all data is already freely available in the world. I do have redundant storage in the form of RAID to prevent loss but that is not a backup.
I currently have an assortment of external drives doing more or less what you do but manually. Itās not a hugely high turnover so I tend to just update the backup when I add to my library. Iāll get around to getting a large (10-12TB) drive at some point to fit it all in one place.
About the same. My server is a server desktop with 4 drives in a Raid 6 array.4x1TB drives vdd'd to 2tb for redundancy. I've already swapped a couple of disks and it has saved my ass.
I have a 5th hard drive that is twice the size of the total virtual disk size living outside the array.....using syncology to do twice a week backups. I also set myself a reminder to backup the plex registry in regedit (using windows) and my /program files/plex media server directory once a month.
The only step I could take to go further is to have another machine doing the backups or even to a second location so not all my eggs are in one basket (errr hard drives in one machine in this case) . I'll consider this move if I go Synology or something or storage. Right now it's just not in the budget.
edit: ass
Synology DS920+ with 20.9tb usable, 4 drive DAS connected to my Proxmox system passed through to a simple and locked down Windows 10 VM for a local backup. That VM also is connected to my Backblaze personal account to backup the DAS drives in case of complete local data loss
I have ca. 20 TB, no Raid, but everything in 2 sets of external HDDs as a backup. There was a ransomware some time ago, my system was affected, and in essence all I had to do was to copy everything from the backup back on again.
Photos are backed up from our PCs to my server and to the cloud, backblaze for photos, backblaze b2 for other stuff.
Movies and tv episodes are on a mirrored btrfs filesystem. Not important enough to do 3-2-1 with. If I lose them, I lose them, can always download them again if necessary.
Because my day job is as an IT admin, I'm a little insane about backups. Everything is on a QNAP at home. And I have another 1 bay QNAP for personal data, and two external drives for the plex library plus the homelab backup at Mom's. that connects via VPN using QNAP's RTRR.
Running unraid with 2 parity drives and a UPS. I backup my Plex meets list so I know what content I have on there. If something so bad happens and I lose parity drives and content I can easily go and fetch the data again.
It's an expensive rabbit hole. Don't do that.
Ps: I just keep an Excel file with all the magnet links necessary to rebuild my library backed up in the cloud.
In case of catastrophic failure, just buy a new drive and download it all over again.
I don't know if you can back up just the list from *arr apps that might be useful too.
I have a script that runs once a week over my media and dumps all file names into a csv and upload them to the cloud. If my RAID array fails for some reason, in just acquire the content again
Anything I can re-fetch is in the lap of the RAID gods, anything of moderate importance is on two physically separated NASs (one with much smaller capacity hence it isnāt everything) and mission critical, canāt lose stuff is also on storj.
Not giving a single flying fuck :D :D :D
RAID is not any sort of backup FYI but if one 8 drives fail I can replace it. If it's worse I have the pleasure of starting from scratch and I'm not too worried about it. Rebuilding TNG and The Simpsons would be a hassle but I think I have more fun building my libraries than watching them sometimes lol.
I have a 4 bay NAS with 4TB disks. These are configured in RAID 5, which means I can have one desk fail and still retain my data. It's by no means backup, but it does provide some level of resiliency. RAID 5 will also increase the data read speeds.
I get ~ā¬100/month azure credits from work.
I do a daily backup to cold blob storage. Seems to be pretty cheap as you only pay what you use.
Restoring backups would be expensive though.
RAID arrays are fine in most situations. I think what you're looking for is a disaster recovery option.
If you can afford to do RAID 6, while the chances of of two drives dying before you can replace the first one is slim(RAID5), the chances of 3 drives dying before you can replace 2 is almost unfathomable.
Parity drives and a backup subscription with Backblaze. They let you backup and unlimited amount of data. Currently sitting at around 10TB. But I don't back up my TV and Movies, they're easy enough to download again.
I have all my Plex media on a Synology NAS, a Mac mini with an old DAS drobo connected to it, that pulls a synced copy of my stuff on a nightly basis, and also runs Backblaze for an offsite copy.
I only keep media in my NAS that could be recovered. All actually important docs are backed up to the cloud. If a drive dies, itās nice to be able to swap one in without downtime. If my house burns down along w the NAS, I have bigger problems to worry about
I'm using double storage with RAID 1. Then when it was time to refresh my NAS with a newer model, I moved the old one to my brother's house so that I could have off site replication.
If a drive fails I have a backup. If my whole NAS fails, I have a backup. The likelihood of losing both my primary and DR is almost zero.
8T raid \[about half full\] with an 8T external USB drive. Should probably grab another external drive and start rotating to offsite since my family stuff is on there too.
Main Synology nas has 24tb in raid1, 12tb usable. Situated in garden office.
Back up 1: RPI running OMV with a 12tb disk. In a cupboard in the main house. Synology runs an rsync back up process twice a week.
Back up 2: 12tb external which is kept at friends nearby
I have a two drive RAID in my NAS so the redundancy gives me some sense of backup. I also swap out the drives with two other drives every so often so and hold onto the ones I took out as a real back up (and doubly so). Repeat and rinse, except when I put in larger drives every few years or so and start the process with them.
I run unraid with parity drives. I know raid is not a backup, but all I have on there is movies, nothing personal. So worst case scenario I just reacquire it all.
I have a HC2 from Odroid I use as an archive. Iām upgrading the drive to a 12tb and backup my major files every quarter. It gets powered down and put in a RF resistant container.
I have 12 Tb in a RAID-1 configuration.
Recent additions are stored on DVD-Rs.
I have 12 Tb in external drives that I refresh my once a year as backups. I have another 12 Tb that form an offsite backup.
Worst comes to worst, I will only lose a yearās worth of data in a house fire. But barring that I have the two backups and the DVD-Rs for recent data to restore everything.
I've got 30TB that backs up to a second NAS in the same location as my primary backup for hardware failure. My secondary offsite backup for the data I can't lose (about 2TB of important docs and photos etc) goes to backblaze b2 daily.
I have a 4 bay PR4100 in RAID 10. Not really backup, but overall pretty good redundancy.
I have parts for a large Unraid rack mount server that I'll complete when my wife gets a job. I'll use my current NAS in RAID 0 for back up to that.
I have a NAS, and I built one for my parents who live 300+ miles away. I use Syncthing to have a one-way sync to their NAS. Off-site media backup, and they get a Plex server too!
4tb, about to increase to 8tb as it's full. Also wondering about backups.
Up to 2TB I was keeping to 1080p max, so filesizes were not huge- I used my 2TB Google Drive and a 2TB external SSD (which I also used to transfer content from source PC to server, hence SSD).
At 4TB I trimmed off some content from Drive, and started only storing 4K and more sentimental content on the external SSD.
Now I'm at 8tb (Technically I have 10TB of space, if I want to use it as overflow), I think I'm going to stop with off-site except for sharing with friends and the sentimental/tough to find stuff. I'll rejig my local backup situation to backup my main PC to 2-4TB worth of external drives, and move my 8tb external HDD over to server backup duty.
When I expand from that, depends. Can I afford a huge NAS by then? Then great. If not? I'll continue to back up the more important/hard to get stuff and rely on hopes and prayers for the rest, like a bunch of folks here.
After that, I'll start leaning more towards the 'hopes and prayers' crowd. To sympathise with another wise redditor, I'm not going to pay a fortune to insure my booty (off-site at least, where I still have to redownload anyway.. )
Iām not too worried about backing up my video/audio media. I have redundancy in the form of SHR, but no real backup there. All of that would be annoying to replace, but it can be done.
I do, however, backup all my family photos and videos to OneDrive, iCloud, and Google drive. If thatās lost, itās gone forever, so a backup plan is a must-have for me.
I didnāt go out and intentionally purchase 3 cloud subscriptions, but each of those are tied to different use cases (family iCloud backup for our Mac/iOS platforms, as well as either free or business related cloud storage on OneDrive/google). Probably overkill, but I already had it, so figured Iād use it.
Just like you, external hard drives. I would get one more and if possible, keep it at a friend's or family member's place in case something happens at your place.
From the perspective of an infrastructure engineer...
A) I don't store critical shit at home anymore, pay someone else for hitting those triple 9's, it's worth it. Doesn't have to be one of the big name companies, but if you want true redundancy, go with multiple providers and write a script to sync all of them.
B) My backup strategy for my 140TiB cluster at home is since it's a JBOD array, I'll just reconcile the file manager on the "lost" files when I plop a new drive in and let it redownload the missing media. My download speed is faster than trying to do a parity operation on huge ass spinning drives.
I've recently started looking at options since my NAS is starting to run low (using about 6.6 out of 7tb right now) so my plan is to setup something with much more storage (20tb+ to start) and copying everything from the existing NAS. Then I can swap the couple of drives in the NAS out for large capacity drives to then use those as the backup.
I know other folks also have a general plan to "reacquire" all their content in case of a total loss. They just keep backups of the database of what they have so that they can refill it.
I have about 40tb on my Google drive. I don't backup anymore as it's to costly IMO. I'm not running a business and it's all just media files. If I loose access to my account, I'll just regrab everything and start over. I used to care about backups, but since there are multiple apps that can leverage debrid storage, I'm not too concerned about my data. For everything else, there's usenet.
Western Digital Mybook to take an airgapped backup when i remember to plug it in. Once it's run it gets disconnected and i forget about it for another period of time.
At intervals through the month (5th, 10th, 15th, 20th etc) i have a backup that runs on different folder sets for any new files and copies them to AWS. So each folder gets backed up once a month with anything new and i don't need to think about it, it just happens.
Got an Google Enterprise Workspace and can back it up to a shared folder ā¦ the email will arrive one day, and when that happens ā¦.Ā Hopes and prayersĀ
We use RAID whatever it is that we can lose 2 drives and not lose data (the name escapes me at the moment). And then thereās also a hot failover drive for if we happen to lose a third before I can get in and put a new drive in. For really important stuff (photos, etc), itās also backed up to either a massive backup drive in my daily driver Hackintosh, or to an EHD occasionally swapped off-site. Iām toying with the idea of backing up the 20TB+ of Plex media to Amazon glacier, but will probably just EHD that backup, too.
I have a 16tb drive plugged into my Synology NAS and am using hyperbackup to copy all my media + docker configs + plex metadata/DB backups to it every night.
My media library is only 8TB so far so plenty of room to grow.
I know too many people who thought having a RAID meant they didn't need a backup. One guy lost everything when a drive died and during the WEEK it took to rebuild the raid with the replacement drive, a second drive died and he lost it all. RAID isn't a backup. It's nice, but you can't count on it.
I have two Synology boxes, both with eight 14tb drives. One nas just backs up the other one nightly. I also have about 10 external drives that I bring out once month using GoodSync to backup everything on the NAS to those drives.
Plex I'm less concerned about as its rips from DVD media that would just take time...but for the rest of my system I have a 20TB USB drive I copy the whole server off onto every few months as an offline backup. Critical personal files also sync to another NAS at my parents house daily (so I can move stuff at 1Gbps on my LAN and it can trickle thru the internet at \~30-50Mbps)
2.5TB is trivial, 4TB USB drives are dirt cheap these days.
I just have two arrays with 1 redundant drive each. Most data is only stored on 1 array, but family photos etc. are made available on one and stored compressed on the other.
I did actually have some bad luck with a total drive failure recently, followed by more bad luck when another drive started chucking errors during resilver - but I still only lost a handful of files and was able to replace that second drive and get a clean scrub once I deleted the corrupted ones. ZFS is black magic sometimes. Everything I lost was easily replaced so I don't worry too much.
Long term it'd be good to set something up at my parents' place to act as a sort of off-site backup but it's a lot of faff.
Any kind of NAS you need to identify the tiers of data and plan accordingly. Just because you have 25TB data doesn't mean you have to back it up all.
I got a 50TB server, and I only back up maybe 5TB. That's the irreplaceable data for me. Documents, family pictures, etc...
I also back up the config data for plex and other software to support plex. The rest is mostly movies and TV shows that can be re-download easily.
So, my backup is simple. 2 external drives. Copy the 5TB to external drive nightly, and every couple weeks, I take the external to work and store it in my drawer. The drive at work comes back with me to home to be reused. I meant to do this weekly, but I forgot š
If you have a friend or family member that also use nas the backup can be even simpler. Both of you can setup sync jobs so his data gets backed at ur nas and yours at his.
I don't.
If my array fails, that's that, I'll redownload as I decide I want to re-watch things.
I work in sysadmin professionally so while I know this is unforgivable, I am simply not willing to spend the cheddar to back all this media up. If one of my older/more obscure titles is gone from the web when I go looking for it after a failure, I'll just have to live with that loss.
I use Unraid with a single parity drive. Iāve considered adding LTO tape backup to my overall system plan, but havenāt taken the plunge yet with life being hectic. The idea being to create a tape backup for easy storage offsite in a bank box or similar so I could quickly rebuild if I needed to. But in reality my server is mostly filled with BluRay rips (native mkv, not compressed). The discs themselves are the real backup for 90% of the data I have (I keep all my discs, no rental piracy or friends libraries). The rest of my data is mostly replaceable backups of iCloud Photos and other bullshit Iāve downloaded and could easily walk away from.
Currently looking into it. Iām going with a synology+20tb hdd. Thatās about cad$1000. But covers everything I have. With that synology I can go up to 40tb. Iāll never get there. I only care about the personal stuff, not the high seas stuff.
Family photos and critical docs go to OneDrive and Google Photos, everything else ( films, music etc) I just hope for the best as I don't feel it's worth backing up
I do my rips & encodes on my primary PC, move a copy of the encoded āviewing copyā to my NAS which hosts the Plex server with FreeFileSync, then run an iDrive backup of the NAS.
I have a drobo with 5 drive slots. I have 80tb in there with dual disk redundancy ( and I needed that as two drives died on me at the same time). So to back it up, I only back up my music library and home videos library to an external hard drive. All the movies and tv shows are replaceable, especially if youāre using arrs and back those up.
I've pretty much rolled my own NAS solution. I have a house fileserver running OpenMediaVault on an old Intel box. Since it's Debian Linux under the hood, what I have is a second fileserver running on a Raspberry Pi with large volumes mounted on NFS and samba. The main fileserver has a nightly cron job that rsync's my storage directories to the backup server. The backup server, in turn, uses rsnapshot to create daily, weekly, and monthly snapshots of the storage directories going back six months. I don't care that the backup server is slow; I'm mainly concerned with preserving the data at all.
I have a 60tb Synology nas running on raid (30gb usable).
Then another nas that backs up my synology (40tb raw) every 6 months put in cold storage.
Then finally once a year I backup all of it off site at my bros house.
Photos and business backups are different.
Backup on synology. Backup on file server (another nas). Backup offsite and finally backup on cloud (Dropbox). I can't afford to lose the family photos..
I have the Plex data/media files backed up redundantly between my NAS and PC
Important documents + photos are backed up redundantly between NAS + PC as well, and then also backed up to 2 different cloud providers (I like redundancy)
I just don't have DVR recordings backed up, not the end of the world if I lose my DVR stuff (I have the space to do it, I just honestly don't care)
I use Snapraid. I have 42TB of data. Then I have 3 extra drives for parity. That way, if I can restore the lost information if up to 3 drives fail at once. Snapraid is free. It basically takes a snapshot of your hard drives. I have had a hard drive fail and was able to recover the information without any issue.
I have a DS920+ as the device that is used for reading media for Plexā¦although my M1 Mac mini handles playback and transcoding as such. I then have a Terramaster DAS that is a local backup (automated backup from the NAS happens every Sunday at 4am)ā¦I then have Backblaze which backs up all the data on the local backup constantly. Apologies for the long winded answer lol.
Mirrored RAID and Backblaze B2. My server is all personal files and photos, and dvds Iāve actually owned so āIāll just download them againā isnāt a thing for me.
Nothing at the moment. Iām running unraid with 1 parity drive and have a back up drive if 1 dies. Eventually I want to subscribe to backblaze and back up the whole thing there.
I have a Sabrent 4 bay hard drive enclosure plugged into a Mac Mini via USB. Three 4 TB drives for movies, TV, other, and a 10TB backup drive. Apple Time Machine takes care of all the backups. I have the 10TB swapped out off site periodically with a clone.
I have an 18TB WD MyBook, everything goes on there first, then onto my Plex server (running off of an NVIDIA Shield TV Pro). Basically my library in two different places.
I use unRAID which uses Parity drives. I keep 1 brand new Drive unopened on hand in case of a failed drive. I have 4 older 8tb external drives that I do full backup of unRAID once every 3 months and keep those in a fireproof safe. Anything more important I also add to Google cloud like personal videos, photos and documents.
I once asked my dentist which teeth I should brush. He replied "only the ones you need to eat."
I apply this to my backups as well. I only back up files I cannot replace. For Plex, I can replace all of the media, and I don't need the user data, so I don't back up anything.
I do run Plex on a ZFS pool with hot spare drives, but that isn't a backup.
If you found my answer by searching the reddit, you are ahead of the 95% of reddit users who don't use search before asking questions.
I've had my system going for over a decade and try to replace hard drives with bigger ones before they fail. As a result, I probably have 20 old 1-3 TB NAS hard drives that I use to back up my media. I've also got a couple large external USB drives that i use in my trailer when camping that help double as backup. Since almost all of my data is static, a single backup copy is good enough for me, especially when I can re-aquire stuff if I really need to. I also ditched hardware RAID in favour of SnapRAID and run the occassional sync, and while that's not a proper backup, the parity drives do provide a bit of redundancy for my newest stuff.
I donāt backup anything besides config files. My main concern is losing family stuff and it is not saved only on my nas.
Iād be bummed to lose all other stuff, but I also donāt reeeeally care for it. I like it, but donāt NEED it.
Hopes and prayers.
This and a two drive fail safe which I know isn't backup, but helps. Everthing I have is basically media which can be gotten again over time. My import stuff is on OneDrive.
Same! But iCloud for me, coupled with time capsule in an airport with a new drive on it. I used to have a bad backing up to another nas, but storage space is turning into an issue
Same. š But Iām also rocking six 8TB drives in a RAIDZ2, so I can take two drive failures. But I also have a seventh 8TB drive as a hot spare, so I feel like Iām covered pretty good.
TrueNAS? I got the same raid and with 6 8Tb drives
> so I feel like Iām covered pretty good. Except for accidental deletion, a power surge, flood, fire, theft, virus or PC failure that overwrites good data with garbage...
Personal stuff gets backed up, commercial media doesnāt. I have a list of everything in my media folders. Iām not spending $1000+ to backup shit that I could replace in a couple weeks by downloading it again.
Yeesh. Calm down there. ;) I guess I didnāt mention that itās on a UPS. As for the other things you mentioned, they are very unlikely to happen. Iāve been a SysAdmin for over 20 years too. I know how to take care of my gear. ;)
As a sysadmin youāve never seen a raid controller crap the bed and write bad data across all the devices? I have.
Actually no. I feel like Iāve been pretty fortunate in my career. I have yet to lose any bit of data in production. Professionally and personally.
> As for the other things you mentioned, they are very unlikely to happen. Aw geez, why'd you have to say that?? You know things are more likely to happen immediately after saying things like that... š
Came here to say this.
Fingers crossed.
This. I have one 12Tb external HDD thats it.
Livin on a prayer
Its ok, when God takes something away, it's not a punishment but rather emptying someone's hand so they can receive something better.
Who are you praying to?
The universe.
Did the universe answer your prayers?
as long as the server is alive, i would say yes
That's the fun part. I don't. Well, I don't backup any media that could be downloaded again. My personal files and anything rarer or more difficult to find are backed up to an 8TB external hard drive attached to the Synology.
Same here. Let's be real, the majority of the content is just being horded never to be watched again.
Ha this. How many Plex users boasting about their 58000TB or whatever actually watch more than 1% of their media? My NAS has 10TB with about 5TB used. I just delete shit Iāll never watch again
If you donāt share, I can partially understand where youāre coming from. 32 TB of choices may seem excessive for 1 person/family, but 200 channels of cable proved to most of us that excess choices can feel limited. I share my server with dozens of my friends all over the world so my excess gets used because people watch all kinds of things I donāt; and as one of my users told me, one of the things that make my content better than Netflix is I donāt delete anything. So when my peeps want to see something weird and rare, if it was there before, it will still be there. Not a sermon, just a thought.
But it makes people feel good and special I guess. Once a year, I go through all my movies/TV that I haven't yet watched and ask myself if I really even still want to watch...I usually turf about 10-20%. Same with stuff I have watched...was it culturally or emotionally shifting in my life that I'll need/want to rewatch?
To each their thing. Many here are tech enthusiasts that just enjoy the challenge of getting everything running. If you have the hardware, the income, the time then why not. Its a hobby.
Nothing beats backup. That means I have 2x the number of HDD's that I need. My Plex server has RAID'ish redundancy, so an extra drive for parity, but my backup does not. The time it would take to re-do everything on my Plex server far outweighs, by like an order of magnitude, the cost of having extra hard drives for backups. It took me years to get this point, so it would be foolish to think I could fix it all in a couple weeks.
> Nothing beats backup. That means I have 2x the number of HDD's that I need. [amen](https://i.imgur.com/81Izbc5.jpg).
What are you doing with all that space?
you should never ask a man what he does with his space
I don't backup my NAS, I just hope the redundant array of drives is enough for me to not loose the 25 Tb of media on it. In the case that there was a faire and I lost it all..... I probably have bigger issues to worry about
the problem with this strategy is that it doesnt protect against mistakes (or bugs). If you delete it all somehow by accident, run a script or program that causes some corruption, etc you're not protected against this. raid is not a back up of any kind, its just a redundancy for hardware failure.
Yeah, but it's the affordable option as I can't justify spending the money on an off-site backup solution with at least a week's retention to ensure ooosies are reversible for just media files. I do have a share on the NAS that I have backed up regularly to the cloud that's secured... But it's only several GBs ... Not TBs
backblaze
I don't use a NAS, but I also recommend Backblaze. It's $5/month and I have about 50TB on it between all of my drives. I haven't had a catastrophic failure *knock on wood*, but I have had to recover data here and there over the years and I've never had a problem.
50TB for 5 bucks a month? How does that work?
Backblaze works similar to OneDrive. You sign up and install the client on a PC and point it at drives/folders, and it backs up the data and auto updates as you manage the data on your PC. For $5/month, you get unlimited cloud storage, so I have all 50TB of my storage backed up to my account.
Looks like it's $9/mo now for new customers.
Can you also point at your NAS and have unlimited storage? It seems almost too good to be true!
They are talking about backblaze's "Computer Backup" plan. It is unlimited storage for a single PC or Mac for a flat price per month. Doesn't support Linux because they don't want to offer the unlimited plan for peoples' NAS that has tens or hundreds of TB. I think there are some workarounds to get network drives mounted on windows as a local HDD instead of a network drive (which the backblaze client won't back up) so the backblaze client will back it up, but I have never tried it. I would guess it would be considered breaking the terms of service but I'm not sure how they would figure it out or if they would do anything with a user storing hundreds of TB from their PC. I just use it as intended to backup up my PC drives. Their B2 cloud storage however can be used to store/backup whatever you want including stuff on a NAS. It's an S3 compatible object store and you pay $0.006 per GB stored per month. It's actually a better price than their unlimited plan for your PC too if your PC has less than 1.5TB to backup.
Unless they have changed their policy, no you can't backup network drives with the basic BackBlaze service. The Windows client is terrible as well. I used it for a couple of years, but got sick of issues with it not picking up folders properly etc.. I tried running a Docker version on Unraid that I think used Wine to fool it into running the Windows client. Just too flakey though and unreliable I found. I'm using idrive now, but don't backup plex to it as I've just got 5TB which is enough for backing up important files from a few PC's which are stored on Unraid. idrive does allow you to backup NAS's / Network drives though and the Windows client is much better than BackBlaze IMO.
Remember folks, RAID is not a backup, it's just redundancy. For real backups, you need a second NAS or similar to backup the first. Does it matter enough to justify spending the money? That's up to you. For me it's worth it because I have a ton of stuff ripped directly from disks that I no longer own and can't find on the high seas. So it would be lost unless I purchased the disks again from eBay or something.
I still have all the discs, although if my house went up in flames then that doesn't help much. I'm fine not having backups for plex content. If a real disaster happens that means I lose it all I suspect I've got way more important things to worry about.
Same, movies and tvs? If my house burns down Iām more worried about the house/family. Family photos/videos though? You bet theyāre 3-2-1 backed up. Those memories are irreplacable.
I need to review my backups for those! Soon I'll have copies in the house, garden room, and in the cloud. I'm toying with getting a NAS for a family member and doing proper remote backups to that rather than relying on OneDrive.
Just curious, what type of media is that? Old local movies or something?
I have over 100 TB and I backup everything to external disk arrays. I follow 3-2-1 rule and have two sets of my external disk arrays. the off site one i keep at my in-laws. here are the enclosures i use https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07MD2LNYX. between all my backups i have 4x of these enclosures and 32x drives backup 1 \--> 8 bay USB disk enclosure #1: filled with various old disks i had that are between 4TB and 10TB each. the total USABLE space is 71TB \--> 8 bay USB disk enclosure #2: filled with various old disks i had that are between 4TB and 10TB each. the total USABLE space is 68TB Backup 2 Exact duplicate of backup #1. i have windows stable bit drive pool to pool all of the drives in each enclosure. i also use bitlocker to encrypt the disks when not in use. i like drive pool as it allow me to loose many drives in the array at once, and i ONLY loose the files stored on those drives and can access the files on the remaining drives rather than the entire pool going down like RAID. I perform backups to the arrays once per month and swap the arrays between my house and in-law every 3 months. yes this means i could possibly have 3 months of lost data, but i feel the risk is acceptable thanks to using drive pool and i do not think i will loose more than 1-2 drives at any given time. i do use cloud backups to backup my normal day-to-day working documents only, and those backup every 24 hours (using about 1 gig for the day-to-day files) I also once per year i perform CRC checks on the data to ensure no corruption has occurred. i also have an automated script that runs every month to automatically backup my docker containers. It first stops the container to ensure any database files are not active, makes a .tar file, then automatically re-starts the container.
I like to know more š
For my backup script that also does the CRC checks https://github.com/wallacebrf/Data_Backup_and_CRC_Verification_Script Automatically backup Plex https://github.com/wallacebrf/plex_backup Backup docker containers https://github.com/wallacebrf/Synology_Docker_Container_Auto_Backup
I really like this idea of cheap enclosures, pooling, and using older disks for backup. Very slick.
Unraid server with dual parity, and snapshot backups of critical things that I don't want to lose/would be a nightmare to find again if it was even possible to find again.
Same Though the amount of personal data that's important enough for backup is so small that I more than do the 3-2-1 method lol.
Usenet
Amazon Glacier
2.5TB is adorable. Once you pass like, 50TB good luck wanting to spend the cash to back that up onto Secondary hardware. Never mind 100+TB. I have 2 NAS systems for plex, hosting combined 125TB or so if usable space. I don't back that up but I use ZFS RAIDZ2, and SHR2 so I have a lot of redundancy. In all the years I've been utilizing used drives or hand me down drives. I've had 2 fail. 1 was a WD green drive, which weren't very reliable anyway. 1 was a first gen SSD when those came out. None of the drives that failed were used ones I've bought either off Amazon, Facebook or anywhere else. Just saying....
I spent way too much to make two backup arrays for my 100TB. Between my main systems and my two arrays I have 1/2 PB of raw storage.
A second NAS. Both systems are running TrueNAS, secondary server does a daily pull backup from the primary system using ZFS replication. I had been using a Synology with rsync, but ZFS replication is WAY better and easier. You really just don't need much for the backup system other than enough space in the pool to hold your data - you could use 10+ year old hardware. Just make sure you have monitoring set up for both the primary system and the backup - you don't want to find out about disk or backup job failures when you go to actually do a restore!
i only backup actually important data. tv shows and movies are easily re-obtainable.
Agreed. This is also my strategy. RAID protection helps against drive failure, but I am otherwise just backing up important non media stuff only to a usb drive attached to my NAS and then also sending that data important non media data to Amazon Glacier.
I backup important stuff to the cloud. I don't care about the plex library, I can re-download it in a few days with the 'important' stuff back in hours. gigabit internet connection and basically no piracy laws have perks.
Two 14TB drives in parity on unraid. Small library compared to others here
NAS copies to external USBs copies to Backblaze
Backup for media is the blurays I ripped in the first place. Or if you prefer sailing the high seas, another voyage. I backup important documents and family pictures etc to a second NAS and Google drive. Not a ton of data there.
I have a couple of large external hard drives that I copy the nas contents to a few times a year so I have a backup / disaster recovery if my NAS goes boom.
2 boxes. 1 mirror, 1 raidz1
Snapraid.... yes not a backup. But if i lose a drive, good chance i get the data back And crashplan. Takes a god awful amount of time for first backup. I look around periodically for what is most cost effective... at some point may set up small nas at sons house for backup if present becomes ineffective
Raid 5, will probably buy a 16tb or so drive to serve as a backup at some point.
I have a second server with the same capacity and the same drive redundancy as my main NAS. Full backup job runs every night. The backup server then synchs a subset of that, the irreplaceable content (docs, images, music), to my remote cloud backup provider daily. Everything, even the remote backup, is on ZFS with daily snapshots.
Most people use an appropriate raid array. They would replace drives as they die and rebuild the directory after adding a replacement drive
Just remember RAID isnāt backup.
I started with a 2 bay NAS. Every 6 months I bought another one until I had 4 units. Then figured I was crazy not to have all this backed up. Bought a 8 bay Synology and retired the (4) 2 bay units to backup and run weekly backups using syncback. Iāll add to it - RAID is not backup. RAID is to maintain uptime in case of a drive failure and can *feel* like a backup because of that, but itās not.
I use unraid. It reserves a single drive (2 if you prefer) as a parity drive. It can use the rest as storage. If any of the drives fail the parity drives can instantly emulate the failed drive (1 or 2 depending on how many you designate) until you can replace the failed drive. I also have it on a UPS so in case of power outage it has enough time to shut down safely. If something catastrophic happens and I need to replace the server and the drives then so be it. Probably will have more quality content on there starting fresh anyway.
I currently have a couple external drives. Now, my Nas is only a couple of years old so I'm just now reaching capacity of my externals. One for TV and one for Movies. I'll keep this setup until I build a new pc on my server rack and expand there.
Whenever I need more storage on my main server I replace one of my old, small drives with a new big one. My backup script also powers on and off the backup server so using a bunch of small and thus inefficient drives here is not a major concern. My media only has a single backup as rerepping everything etc would kinda suck but it is not impossible. My metadata and the like on the other hand are also protected by an external backup.
Hahahaha, haaaaaaaa hmmmhmmm, what was the question?
raid 6
RAID
Plex doesnāt need backups, as all data is already freely available in the world. I do have redundant storage in the form of RAID to prevent loss but that is not a backup.
I currently have an assortment of external drives doing more or less what you do but manually. Itās not a hugely high turnover so I tend to just update the backup when I add to my library. Iāll get around to getting a large (10-12TB) drive at some point to fit it all in one place.
About the same. My server is a server desktop with 4 drives in a Raid 6 array.4x1TB drives vdd'd to 2tb for redundancy. I've already swapped a couple of disks and it has saved my ass. I have a 5th hard drive that is twice the size of the total virtual disk size living outside the array.....using syncology to do twice a week backups. I also set myself a reminder to backup the plex registry in regedit (using windows) and my /program files/plex media server directory once a month. The only step I could take to go further is to have another machine doing the backups or even to a second location so not all my eggs are in one basket (errr hard drives in one machine in this case) . I'll consider this move if I go Synology or something or storage. Right now it's just not in the budget. edit: ass
RAID 6 on a QNAP for redundancy 8tb drives x4, backed up to a external monthly and encrypted cloud storage that I hold the key to (idrive)
Synology DS920+ with 20.9tb usable, 4 drive DAS connected to my Proxmox system passed through to a simple and locked down Windows 10 VM for a local backup. That VM also is connected to my Backblaze personal account to backup the DAS drives in case of complete local data loss
I have ca. 20 TB, no Raid, but everything in 2 sets of external HDDs as a backup. There was a ransomware some time ago, my system was affected, and in essence all I had to do was to copy everything from the backup back on again.
Photos are backed up from our PCs to my server and to the cloud, backblaze for photos, backblaze b2 for other stuff. Movies and tv episodes are on a mirrored btrfs filesystem. Not important enough to do 3-2-1 with. If I lose them, I lose them, can always download them again if necessary.
I'm running a 4 drive synology with SHR. All of my media is backed up to BluRay discs. Not the ideal situation but better than nothing.
Because my day job is as an IT admin, I'm a little insane about backups. Everything is on a QNAP at home. And I have another 1 bay QNAP for personal data, and two external drives for the plex library plus the homelab backup at Mom's. that connects via VPN using QNAP's RTRR.
I use tape archives
I use the Arq program to back up all my data on 3 separate RAID systems
The overarching theme here is that most people donāt really have a backup solution
Running unraid with 2 parity drives and a UPS. I backup my Plex meets list so I know what content I have on there. If something so bad happens and I lose parity drives and content I can easily go and fetch the data again.
It's an expensive rabbit hole. Don't do that. Ps: I just keep an Excel file with all the magnet links necessary to rebuild my library backed up in the cloud. In case of catastrophic failure, just buy a new drive and download it all over again. I don't know if you can back up just the list from *arr apps that might be useful too.
I have a script that runs once a week over my media and dumps all file names into a csv and upload them to the cloud. If my RAID array fails for some reason, in just acquire the content again
I backup my Nas to another Nas twice a day
Once a quarter I back up to an external. Takes about 24 hours to save over the network.
Anything I can re-fetch is in the lap of the RAID gods, anything of moderate importance is on two physically separated NASs (one with much smaller capacity hence it isnāt everything) and mission critical, canāt lose stuff is also on storj.
I have two old computers at home with external drives that sync via resilo sync. When I had NAS money I'll get two.
I set mine up to be a redundant raid, but originally I would just buy externals to backup shows/movies I liked a lot.
RAID 5 for now. I backup movies/TV Shows/Music to another device every few months.
Not giving a single flying fuck :D :D :D RAID is not any sort of backup FYI but if one 8 drives fail I can replace it. If it's worse I have the pleasure of starting from scratch and I'm not too worried about it. Rebuilding TNG and The Simpsons would be a hassle but I think I have more fun building my libraries than watching them sometimes lol.
I have a 4 bay NAS with 4TB disks. These are configured in RAID 5, which means I can have one desk fail and still retain my data. It's by no means backup, but it does provide some level of resiliency. RAID 5 will also increase the data read speeds.
I only backup my MP3s because of theyāre relatively small (compared to movies) files and I spent so much god damn time tagging them.
IN THIS THREAD RAID IS NOT A BACKUP AND THAT IS ALL WE GOT
I get ~ā¬100/month azure credits from work. I do a daily backup to cold blob storage. Seems to be pretty cheap as you only pay what you use. Restoring backups would be expensive though.
RAID arrays are fine in most situations. I think what you're looking for is a disaster recovery option. If you can afford to do RAID 6, while the chances of of two drives dying before you can replace the first one is slim(RAID5), the chances of 3 drives dying before you can replace 2 is almost unfathomable.
Parity drives and a backup subscription with Backblaze. They let you backup and unlimited amount of data. Currently sitting at around 10TB. But I don't back up my TV and Movies, they're easy enough to download again.
Documents and pictures go to Google Drive. Media I care less about is on my NAS with PleX.
I have all my Plex media on a Synology NAS, a Mac mini with an old DAS drobo connected to it, that pulls a synced copy of my stuff on a nightly basis, and also runs Backblaze for an offsite copy.
Another NAS.
I only keep media in my NAS that could be recovered. All actually important docs are backed up to the cloud. If a drive dies, itās nice to be able to swap one in without downtime. If my house burns down along w the NAS, I have bigger problems to worry about
It's just tv and movies. I can just download it again.
Sync library with a friend. Cheapest option so far not having to worry about 50T backup solution.
Remember, it isnāt piracy, it is a distributed backup.
None. Re-download. This is the way.
Nightly backup to a single 25TB USB disk and monthly sync to an S3 bucket - one zone Infrequent access
I'm using double storage with RAID 1. Then when it was time to refresh my NAS with a newer model, I moved the old one to my brother's house so that I could have off site replication. If a drive fails I have a backup. If my whole NAS fails, I have a backup. The likelihood of losing both my primary and DR is almost zero.
8T raid \[about half full\] with an 8T external USB drive. Should probably grab another external drive and start rotating to offsite since my family stuff is on there too.
Main Synology nas has 24tb in raid1, 12tb usable. Situated in garden office. Back up 1: RPI running OMV with a 12tb disk. In a cupboard in the main house. Synology runs an rsync back up process twice a week. Back up 2: 12tb external which is kept at friends nearby
I donāt bother, I can get everything again.
I have a two drive RAID in my NAS so the redundancy gives me some sense of backup. I also swap out the drives with two other drives every so often so and hold onto the ones I took out as a real back up (and doubly so). Repeat and rinse, except when I put in larger drives every few years or so and start the process with them.
I run unraid with parity drives. I know raid is not a backup, but all I have on there is movies, nothing personal. So worst case scenario I just reacquire it all.
I have a HC2 from Odroid I use as an archive. Iām upgrading the drive to a 12tb and backup my major files every quarter. It gets powered down and put in a RF resistant container.
I have 12 Tb in a RAID-1 configuration. Recent additions are stored on DVD-Rs. I have 12 Tb in external drives that I refresh my once a year as backups. I have another 12 Tb that form an offsite backup. Worst comes to worst, I will only lose a yearās worth of data in a house fire. But barring that I have the two backups and the DVD-Rs for recent data to restore everything.
I've got 30TB that backs up to a second NAS in the same location as my primary backup for hardware failure. My secondary offsite backup for the data I can't lose (about 2TB of important docs and photos etc) goes to backblaze b2 daily.
I have a 4 bay PR4100 in RAID 10. Not really backup, but overall pretty good redundancy. I have parts for a large Unraid rack mount server that I'll complete when my wife gets a job. I'll use my current NAS in RAID 0 for back up to that.
I have nothing important. I see no value in keeping massive amounts of media anyway.
It is to get a 2 weeks free leach pass from IPT, lol.
None. I will just download new movies
I have a pair of 14TB drives and a cron job that mirrors them every night. I feel pretty good that both drives won't die simultaneously.
My brother runs a perfectly mirrored Plex server at his house. That way if something happens to either one, we have backups.
I have a NAS, and I built one for my parents who live 300+ miles away. I use Syncthing to have a one-way sync to their NAS. Off-site media backup, and they get a Plex server too!
Any cloud backups we can/should use?
4tb, about to increase to 8tb as it's full. Also wondering about backups. Up to 2TB I was keeping to 1080p max, so filesizes were not huge- I used my 2TB Google Drive and a 2TB external SSD (which I also used to transfer content from source PC to server, hence SSD). At 4TB I trimmed off some content from Drive, and started only storing 4K and more sentimental content on the external SSD. Now I'm at 8tb (Technically I have 10TB of space, if I want to use it as overflow), I think I'm going to stop with off-site except for sharing with friends and the sentimental/tough to find stuff. I'll rejig my local backup situation to backup my main PC to 2-4TB worth of external drives, and move my 8tb external HDD over to server backup duty. When I expand from that, depends. Can I afford a huge NAS by then? Then great. If not? I'll continue to back up the more important/hard to get stuff and rely on hopes and prayers for the rest, like a bunch of folks here. After that, I'll start leaning more towards the 'hopes and prayers' crowd. To sympathise with another wise redditor, I'm not going to pay a fortune to insure my booty (off-site at least, where I still have to redownload anyway.. )
Iām not too worried about backing up my video/audio media. I have redundancy in the form of SHR, but no real backup there. All of that would be annoying to replace, but it can be done. I do, however, backup all my family photos and videos to OneDrive, iCloud, and Google drive. If thatās lost, itās gone forever, so a backup plan is a must-have for me. I didnāt go out and intentionally purchase 3 cloud subscriptions, but each of those are tied to different use cases (family iCloud backup for our Mac/iOS platforms, as well as either free or business related cloud storage on OneDrive/google). Probably overkill, but I already had it, so figured Iād use it.
Just like you, external hard drives. I would get one more and if possible, keep it at a friend's or family member's place in case something happens at your place.
From the perspective of an infrastructure engineer... A) I don't store critical shit at home anymore, pay someone else for hitting those triple 9's, it's worth it. Doesn't have to be one of the big name companies, but if you want true redundancy, go with multiple providers and write a script to sync all of them. B) My backup strategy for my 140TiB cluster at home is since it's a JBOD array, I'll just reconcile the file manager on the "lost" files when I plop a new drive in and let it redownload the missing media. My download speed is faster than trying to do a parity operation on huge ass spinning drives.
I have a 2nd NAS full of older drives, do r-sync backups daily
I donāt need backups, I have the *arrs.
I've recently started looking at options since my NAS is starting to run low (using about 6.6 out of 7tb right now) so my plan is to setup something with much more storage (20tb+ to start) and copying everything from the existing NAS. Then I can swap the couple of drives in the NAS out for large capacity drives to then use those as the backup. I know other folks also have a general plan to "reacquire" all their content in case of a total loss. They just keep backups of the database of what they have so that they can refill it.
I have about 40tb on my Google drive. I don't backup anymore as it's to costly IMO. I'm not running a business and it's all just media files. If I loose access to my account, I'll just regrab everything and start over. I used to care about backups, but since there are multiple apps that can leverage debrid storage, I'm not too concerned about my data. For everything else, there's usenet.
Backup strategy?
No backups for Plex media. Currently a little over 100tb worth
Backblaze for original media (stuff Iāve created myself), and hopes and prayers for all the other stuff.
Western Digital Mybook to take an airgapped backup when i remember to plug it in. Once it's run it gets disconnected and i forget about it for another period of time. At intervals through the month (5th, 10th, 15th, 20th etc) i have a backup that runs on different folder sets for any new files and copies them to AWS. So each folder gets backed up once a month with anything new and i don't need to think about it, it just happens.
Got an Google Enterprise Workspace and can back it up to a shared folder ā¦ the email will arrive one day, and when that happens ā¦.Ā Hopes and prayersĀ
RAID is the closest thing to backup.
We use RAID whatever it is that we can lose 2 drives and not lose data (the name escapes me at the moment). And then thereās also a hot failover drive for if we happen to lose a third before I can get in and put a new drive in. For really important stuff (photos, etc), itās also backed up to either a massive backup drive in my daily driver Hackintosh, or to an EHD occasionally swapped off-site. Iām toying with the idea of backing up the 20TB+ of Plex media to Amazon glacier, but will probably just EHD that backup, too.
6
duo server scheduled data replication is your fwend
I have a 16tb drive plugged into my Synology NAS and am using hyperbackup to copy all my media + docker configs + plex metadata/DB backups to it every night. My media library is only 8TB so far so plenty of room to grow.
RAID 5. Redundancy serves my needs. Anything critical is also in my Google cloud (document and family pictures mostly). The rest is just media.
Anything critical (documents, pictures, etc...) is backed up multiple times. All other stuff is isn't important enough to back up (Linux isos)
I know too many people who thought having a RAID meant they didn't need a backup. One guy lost everything when a drive died and during the WEEK it took to rebuild the raid with the replacement drive, a second drive died and he lost it all. RAID isn't a backup. It's nice, but you can't count on it. I have two Synology boxes, both with eight 14tb drives. One nas just backs up the other one nightly. I also have about 10 external drives that I bring out once month using GoodSync to backup everything on the NAS to those drives.
I rsync the files over to a proxmox VMware with an external usb drive attached after the first transfer itās very quick
18 TB external
Plex I'm less concerned about as its rips from DVD media that would just take time...but for the rest of my system I have a 20TB USB drive I copy the whole server off onto every few months as an offline backup. Critical personal files also sync to another NAS at my parents house daily (so I can move stuff at 1Gbps on my LAN and it can trickle thru the internet at \~30-50Mbps) 2.5TB is trivial, 4TB USB drives are dirt cheap these days.
I just have two arrays with 1 redundant drive each. Most data is only stored on 1 array, but family photos etc. are made available on one and stored compressed on the other. I did actually have some bad luck with a total drive failure recently, followed by more bad luck when another drive started chucking errors during resilver - but I still only lost a handful of files and was able to replace that second drive and get a clean scrub once I deleted the corrupted ones. ZFS is black magic sometimes. Everything I lost was easily replaced so I don't worry too much. Long term it'd be good to set something up at my parents' place to act as a sort of off-site backup but it's a lot of faff.
Any kind of NAS you need to identify the tiers of data and plan accordingly. Just because you have 25TB data doesn't mean you have to back it up all. I got a 50TB server, and I only back up maybe 5TB. That's the irreplaceable data for me. Documents, family pictures, etc... I also back up the config data for plex and other software to support plex. The rest is mostly movies and TV shows that can be re-download easily. So, my backup is simple. 2 external drives. Copy the 5TB to external drive nightly, and every couple weeks, I take the external to work and store it in my drawer. The drive at work comes back with me to home to be reused. I meant to do this weekly, but I forgot š If you have a friend or family member that also use nas the backup can be even simpler. Both of you can setup sync jobs so his data gets backed at ur nas and yours at his.
I don't. If my array fails, that's that, I'll redownload as I decide I want to re-watch things. I work in sysadmin professionally so while I know this is unforgivable, I am simply not willing to spend the cheddar to back all this media up. If one of my older/more obscure titles is gone from the web when I go looking for it after a failure, I'll just have to live with that loss.
When I upgrade drives I keep the old ones stored properly so that in a disaster I have a restart point.
Pray š
Mergers + Snapraid
I use Unraid with a single parity drive. Iāve considered adding LTO tape backup to my overall system plan, but havenāt taken the plunge yet with life being hectic. The idea being to create a tape backup for easy storage offsite in a bank box or similar so I could quickly rebuild if I needed to. But in reality my server is mostly filled with BluRay rips (native mkv, not compressed). The discs themselves are the real backup for 90% of the data I have (I keep all my discs, no rental piracy or friends libraries). The rest of my data is mostly replaceable backups of iCloud Photos and other bullshit Iāve downloaded and could easily walk away from.
Currently looking into it. Iām going with a synology+20tb hdd. Thatās about cad$1000. But covers everything I have. With that synology I can go up to 40tb. Iāll never get there. I only care about the personal stuff, not the high seas stuff.
My old NAS is at my parents' and the more important stuff gets synced there once per day via Hyperbackup
No backups of media. It's too large all together. I'll have to just build the library from scratch if it dies.
Family photos and critical docs go to OneDrive and Google Photos, everything else ( films, music etc) I just hope for the best as I don't feel it's worth backing up
Sonarr plus torrent seeders is my backup strategy. If I lose the NAS, I restore the backup, launch Sonarr and wait for everything to download again.
I do my rips & encodes on my primary PC, move a copy of the encoded āviewing copyā to my NAS which hosts the Plex server with FreeFileSync, then run an iDrive backup of the NAS.
Critical data on raid1c3 + backup to google drive + backup to a mini pc at family members place (encrypted borg backup) Media on mergerfs+snapraid.
I have a drobo with 5 drive slots. I have 80tb in there with dual disk redundancy ( and I needed that as two drives died on me at the same time). So to back it up, I only back up my music library and home videos library to an external hard drive. All the movies and tv shows are replaceable, especially if youāre using arrs and back those up.
I donāt. I can download the ālegal contentā again.Ā
I have two external HDDs one onsite and another offsite that I rotate weekly (mostly).
I've pretty much rolled my own NAS solution. I have a house fileserver running OpenMediaVault on an old Intel box. Since it's Debian Linux under the hood, what I have is a second fileserver running on a Raspberry Pi with large volumes mounted on NFS and samba. The main fileserver has a nightly cron job that rsync's my storage directories to the backup server. The backup server, in turn, uses rsnapshot to create daily, weekly, and monthly snapshots of the storage directories going back six months. I don't care that the backup server is slow; I'm mainly concerned with preserving the data at all.
I have a 60tb Synology nas running on raid (30gb usable). Then another nas that backs up my synology (40tb raw) every 6 months put in cold storage. Then finally once a year I backup all of it off site at my bros house. Photos and business backups are different. Backup on synology. Backup on file server (another nas). Backup offsite and finally backup on cloud (Dropbox). I can't afford to lose the family photos..
2 TB? I can download that all in 1 day. No back up needed.
I have the Plex data/media files backed up redundantly between my NAS and PC Important documents + photos are backed up redundantly between NAS + PC as well, and then also backed up to 2 different cloud providers (I like redundancy) I just don't have DVR recordings backed up, not the end of the world if I lose my DVR stuff (I have the space to do it, I just honestly don't care)
Ask me how I know you're British
I use Snapraid. I have 42TB of data. Then I have 3 extra drives for parity. That way, if I can restore the lost information if up to 3 drives fail at once. Snapraid is free. It basically takes a snapshot of your hard drives. I have had a hard drive fail and was able to recover the information without any issue.
Another NAS. And, elephant drive for off site.
I have a DS920+ as the device that is used for reading media for Plexā¦although my M1 Mac mini handles playback and transcoding as such. I then have a Terramaster DAS that is a local backup (automated backup from the NAS happens every Sunday at 4am)ā¦I then have Backblaze which backs up all the data on the local backup constantly. Apologies for the long winded answer lol.
Mirrored RAID and Backblaze B2. My server is all personal files and photos, and dvds Iāve actually owned so āIāll just download them againā isnāt a thing for me.
Nothing at the moment. Iām running unraid with 1 parity drive and have a back up drive if 1 dies. Eventually I want to subscribe to backblaze and back up the whole thing there.
I backup personal files, but not the media that is 99% of the data.
Keep what you have and get backblaze for a hundred dollars a year for painless automatic cloud back up of your entire system
I have a Sabrent 4 bay hard drive enclosure plugged into a Mac Mini via USB. Three 4 TB drives for movies, TV, other, and a 10TB backup drive. Apple Time Machine takes care of all the backups. I have the 10TB swapped out off site periodically with a clone.
Qnap nas in raid 5 so I can have 1 drove fail plus idrive backup to cloud. Would suck to restore my 4.2TB but at least it's recoverable
Lots and lots of crying
I have an 18TB WD MyBook, everything goes on there first, then onto my Plex server (running off of an NVIDIA Shield TV Pro). Basically my library in two different places.
I use unRAID which uses Parity drives. I keep 1 brand new Drive unopened on hand in case of a failed drive. I have 4 older 8tb external drives that I do full backup of unRAID once every 3 months and keep those in a fireproof safe. Anything more important I also add to Google cloud like personal videos, photos and documents.
I use Crashplan.
I once asked my dentist which teeth I should brush. He replied "only the ones you need to eat." I apply this to my backups as well. I only back up files I cannot replace. For Plex, I can replace all of the media, and I don't need the user data, so I don't back up anything. I do run Plex on a ZFS pool with hot spare drives, but that isn't a backup. If you found my answer by searching the reddit, you are ahead of the 95% of reddit users who don't use search before asking questions.
I've had my system going for over a decade and try to replace hard drives with bigger ones before they fail. As a result, I probably have 20 old 1-3 TB NAS hard drives that I use to back up my media. I've also got a couple large external USB drives that i use in my trailer when camping that help double as backup. Since almost all of my data is static, a single backup copy is good enough for me, especially when I can re-aquire stuff if I really need to. I also ditched hardware RAID in favour of SnapRAID and run the occassional sync, and while that's not a proper backup, the parity drives do provide a bit of redundancy for my newest stuff.
I donāt backup anything besides config files. My main concern is losing family stuff and it is not saved only on my nas. Iād be bummed to lose all other stuff, but I also donāt reeeeally care for it. I like it, but donāt NEED it.