I have a nas with 2x10tb drives. I mostly just have music, movies and tv shows on it.
People talk about raid not being a backup, but is that relevant for non-original data? I mean I can always get the media again if need be. It would just be an inconvenience.
I only back up things that would make me sad if I lost it or cause me a lot of time-sensitive work. Personal data files and configuration files. Media? I wouldn’t sweat it if my media drive got corrupted by malware or a hack or a lightning strike. I’d just live with a smaller library until I get things re-download again. And I’d be ok if I can’t find a handful of the rarer things. Pictures of my family? Backed up locally and on a remote server with immutable backups. Configuration files? Synced with a remote git repository.
I was just thinking about this recently. For my original data I already have multiple copies: 2 desktop PCs, home and office, synced with a home NAS, adding a server in the office soon too, laptop has everything but photos (which is a lot since I am into photography and timelapses). My non original media has only one copy, but will soon have a second copy in the server at my office.
But I can’t count on using my office at my job as a long term thing. For my original data, I have been planning on getting something like Backblaze for a full professional off-site copy. For all my non original media, well… It would be ok to lose it I suppose, but I would rather not. Would this be a good use case for some sort of other stable media? I forgot what it was called, but I recently saw a post about some high density disk (like some sort of multi TB blu ray disk thing?) That seems like a decent solution, better to lose 1 year of piracy instead of 20 years of piracy haha. I have lots of obscure stuff that would be hard to get again, curated by and copied from cinephile and audiophile friends, rare movies I ripped from university library DVD discs and even VHS tapes!
Maybe I need to start learning about some alternative storage media for that stuff. Anyone have suggestions? Some sort of tape or disc for this kind of large but immutable media?
If you lose everything, just download new stuff you want to watch, or redownload a few TV series/movies.
Music? There are streaming services.
Only backup configurations and maybe application data, so that the reinstall will be easy. Those few kB/MB could sit anywhere. I’m using GitLab for this purpose.
Edit: Images! If you have your photos on there, back them up! They can’t be replaced!
The streaming services wont work if you have no access to interner lol.
At my last job I had to travel to my work dailly for over an hour in one way, for almost the whole travel I didn’t have any network or phone reception.
Will much rather just have music on a media server and a client that allows me to locally download some of my favouritr music for such situations like navidrome and synfonium than pay for spotify premium to allow me to do that.
We’re talking about replacing lost content here though. And as such you can use the streaming services as a “backup” by re-ripping your whole collection if you lose it.
I’m actually doing this now as part of a library cleanup. Zotify + beets are a great combo to pull down vast quantities of music and properly sort and tag it.
Then I stream it to my phone in my truck using ampache and ultrasonic, which does have a local buffering option.
However if you have some exotics that you ripped from rare discs, demos or prerelease, live recordings with sentimental value etc. I would suggest keeping those properly backed up. I don’t have many of these, but the ones I do have are backed up both cloud and offsite.
Personally I live in a very rural location and I farm, so I can spend a lot of time on the road or in my tractor. 1gb wouldn’t get me through a day in the field, so I have a pretty big collection with a lot of variety. We don’t even have reliable FM radio here, so it’s bring your own music or listen to the diesel roar.
I back up everything. I use Stablebit Drivepool with duplication for all of my source code, media, photos, documents, music, books, laptop backups, etc. I back that up periodically to a Drobo DAS and 8 Bay USB enclosure setup under Drivepool. I also have off site backup (working on a new NAS which will be accessed over a VPN). I don’t want to spend the time worrying about loosing anything I have put time and effort into. Been there and done that. Drives are relatively inexpensive but can fail without warning.
To extend on this: Anybody ever did a test recovery to see if the backups are ok and to dry-test their backup/restore strategy?
I have to admit that until now I was too cheap to keep a spare drive array just for testing.
I had a similar idea of 2×12TN drives, with one at home and backed up to monthly, whilst the other being in a remote location and backed up to physically every quarter
That’s a decent idea. I was planning to keep one off-site backup on the same drive in perpetuity, but this might be better in the long-run. Do you think I should maintain a staggered back-up strategy or keep both backups in sync (by backing them up together at the same time)? What would be the demerit of this method?
Yeah. I only have 6TB. Most of it is just movies and shows for plex. I don’t have backup at all. I could always redownload what i want to watch. I noticed that i rarely rewatch what i download. It’s pointless to backup it.
I only back up my music collection because I put extra effort into organising and tagging everything, plus some of it is rips of CDs not available anywhere. As for movies and TV shows, I only back up configurations and catalogues of the relevant apps, the contents themselves are 1) too big to be feasible to back up and 2) 99% of the time available to re-download.
This is how I do it. I have all my media on a raid 5 tho. Broken hdds are unavoidable in the long run, so I want protection for that. If something goes sideways at rebuilding, so be it. Most of the movies and shows I’m wondering what I save them for anyways. My music collection is worth more to me and backed up properly. Same goes for my personal stuff.
I have the equivalent of RAID 5 too, but mind the usual “RAID is not a backup” - if you deliberately delete something (or something goes wrong with an app managing your media), hardware redundancy won’t save you in any way; it only helps if the data is intact and you want to remedy a hardware failure.
I only backup data I’ve generated myself, nothing that was autogenerated or downloaded from somewhere else.
This goes far beyond backing up since not a long ago I had to deal with emptying the house of a deceased person that had been locked for a while and got to the conclusion the only things worth keeping are original ones (photos, handwritten letters and so…). Anything that could have been bought somewhere else, no matter the antique it was resulted to be almost worthless, not just to me but also to pawn shops, as it seems to be easy to find the exact same thing somewhere else.
So I took that as a life learning and apply the same concept to my data :)
I use Linode object storage for backups using Restic. 500gb of storage for 5eur/month.
I don’t backup logs, backups made by an app, cache, thumbnails and other stuff. I backup actual container data, so I can reatore it, restart docker and it works like nothing happened.
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I only back up things that would make me sad if I lost it or cause me a lot of time-sensitive work. Personal data files and configuration files. Media? I wouldn’t sweat it if my media drive got corrupted by malware or a hack or a lightning strike. I’d just live with a smaller library until I get things re-download again. And I’d be ok if I can’t find a handful of the rarer things. Pictures of my family? Backed up locally and on a remote server with immutable backups. Configuration files? Synced with a remote git repository.
If you woke up and all of that data was gone tomorrow but you didn’t care, then there is no reason to back it up IMO.
Hell, I download things multiple times sometimes just to spite Comcast.
I was just thinking about this recently. For my original data I already have multiple copies: 2 desktop PCs, home and office, synced with a home NAS, adding a server in the office soon too, laptop has everything but photos (which is a lot since I am into photography and timelapses). My non original media has only one copy, but will soon have a second copy in the server at my office.
But I can’t count on using my office at my job as a long term thing. For my original data, I have been planning on getting something like Backblaze for a full professional off-site copy. For all my non original media, well… It would be ok to lose it I suppose, but I would rather not. Would this be a good use case for some sort of other stable media? I forgot what it was called, but I recently saw a post about some high density disk (like some sort of multi TB blu ray disk thing?) That seems like a decent solution, better to lose 1 year of piracy instead of 20 years of piracy haha. I have lots of obscure stuff that would be hard to get again, curated by and copied from cinephile and audiophile friends, rare movies I ripped from university library DVD discs and even VHS tapes!
Maybe I need to start learning about some alternative storage media for that stuff. Anyone have suggestions? Some sort of tape or disc for this kind of large but immutable media?
Media Server? No content backup at all.
If you lose everything, just download new stuff you want to watch, or redownload a few TV series/movies.
Music? There are streaming services.
Only backup configurations and maybe application data, so that the reinstall will be easy. Those few kB/MB could sit anywhere. I’m using GitLab for this purpose.
Edit: Images! If you have your photos on there, back them up! They can’t be replaced!
The streaming services wont work if you have no access to interner lol.
At my last job I had to travel to my work dailly for over an hour in one way, for almost the whole travel I didn’t have any network or phone reception.
Will much rather just have music on a media server and a client that allows me to locally download some of my favouritr music for such situations like navidrome and synfonium than pay for spotify premium to allow me to do that.
We’re talking about replacing lost content here though. And as such you can use the streaming services as a “backup” by re-ripping your whole collection if you lose it.
I’m actually doing this now as part of a library cleanup. Zotify + beets are a great combo to pull down vast quantities of music and properly sort and tag it.
Then I stream it to my phone in my truck using ampache and ultrasonic, which does have a local buffering option.
However if you have some exotics that you ripped from rare discs, demos or prerelease, live recordings with sentimental value etc. I would suggest keeping those properly backed up. I don’t have many of these, but the ones I do have are backed up both cloud and offsite.
Do people really have so much music that it’s get’s hard to just keep it backed up?
I personally never went over 1gb in size of my music library,
Personally I live in a very rural location and I farm, so I can spend a lot of time on the road or in my tractor. 1gb wouldn’t get me through a day in the field, so I have a pretty big collection with a lot of variety. We don’t even have reliable FM radio here, so it’s bring your own music or listen to the diesel roar.
I grew up on a farm, still help out sometimes. And same our fm radio doesnt work on most ny routes.
My songs were almost always just highly compressed mp3’s I would get years ago si ce back then spotify wasnt in Croatia so my only way was yt.
Streaming services let you just mark playlists for offline use, I have my whole spotify library offline.
Most streaming services have that under a paywall, which in that case I will much rather just make my own if I have a system to do it.
What music streaming service is even usable without paying?
Spotify is the only one that I know of that has a free plan and it’s (supposed to be) terrible
What I’m saying is that if I already have hardware to make one my self, why pay for it?
Edit: also some people just can’t afford to payfor streaming services
Sure you can, but I very much prefer the experience of something like Spotify. It’s very easy to find songs and to just listen to them at any time.
And some obviously don’t like piracy (I don’t care much since I have around 8 TBs of films, shows and other shit with Plex.)
I back up everything. I use Stablebit Drivepool with duplication for all of my source code, media, photos, documents, music, books, laptop backups, etc. I back that up periodically to a Drobo DAS and 8 Bay USB enclosure setup under Drivepool. I also have off site backup (working on a new NAS which will be accessed over a VPN). I don’t want to spend the time worrying about loosing anything I have put time and effort into. Been there and done that. Drives are relatively inexpensive but can fail without warning.
deleted by creator
To extend on this: Anybody ever did a test recovery to see if the backups are ok and to dry-test their backup/restore strategy? I have to admit that until now I was too cheap to keep a spare drive array just for testing.
I had a similar idea of 2×12TN drives, with one at home and backed up to monthly, whilst the other being in a remote location and backed up to physically every quarter
deleted by creator
That’s a decent idea. I was planning to keep one off-site backup on the same drive in perpetuity, but this might be better in the long-run. Do you think I should maintain a staggered back-up strategy or keep both backups in sync (by backing them up together at the same time)? What would be the demerit of this method?
deleted by creator
I am too, but on the other hand I’m also paranoid haha
Yeah. I only have 6TB. Most of it is just movies and shows for plex. I don’t have backup at all. I could always redownload what i want to watch. I noticed that i rarely rewatch what i download. It’s pointless to backup it.
Mine is fully backed up.
I only back up my music collection because I put extra effort into organising and tagging everything, plus some of it is rips of CDs not available anywhere. As for movies and TV shows, I only back up configurations and catalogues of the relevant apps, the contents themselves are 1) too big to be feasible to back up and 2) 99% of the time available to re-download.
This is how I do it. I have all my media on a raid 5 tho. Broken hdds are unavoidable in the long run, so I want protection for that. If something goes sideways at rebuilding, so be it. Most of the movies and shows I’m wondering what I save them for anyways. My music collection is worth more to me and backed up properly. Same goes for my personal stuff.
I have the equivalent of RAID 5 too, but mind the usual “RAID is not a backup” - if you deliberately delete something (or something goes wrong with an app managing your media), hardware redundancy won’t save you in any way; it only helps if the data is intact and you want to remedy a hardware failure.
My brother also has his own NAS at his house. We sync our media between both of our servers to both share it and to serve as an off-site backup.
Everything else on my nas gets backed up to a cloud provider.
Like you said, it could be replaced it’d just be inconvenient, and media is kinda bulky so cloud storage for all of it would get a little pricy.
Doesn’t that mean you already have backup? It may not be the easiest to restore, but it is a backup nevertheless.
I wouldn’t really class that as a backup, that’s like saying you have a spare tyre because you can always buy one from a garage!
It’s different because when you need a tire, you need it now. When you need a movie it can wait 5 minutes.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
[Thread #357 for this sub, first seen 16th Dec 2023, 03:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I only backup data I’ve generated myself, nothing that was autogenerated or downloaded from somewhere else.
This goes far beyond backing up since not a long ago I had to deal with emptying the house of a deceased person that had been locked for a while and got to the conclusion the only things worth keeping are original ones (photos, handwritten letters and so…). Anything that could have been bought somewhere else, no matter the antique it was resulted to be almost worthless, not just to me but also to pawn shops, as it seems to be easy to find the exact same thing somewhere else.
So I took that as a life learning and apply the same concept to my data :)
I have a similar setup.
I have a 16tb USB HDD that syncs to my NAS whenever my workstation is idle for 20 mins.
I use Linode object storage for backups using Restic. 500gb of storage for 5eur/month.
I don’t backup logs, backups made by an app, cache, thumbnails and other stuff. I backup actual container data, so I can reatore it, restart docker and it works like nothing happened.
If you live in Europe you have 1TB by € 3.81 / month with Hetzner. It works fantastic with Restic (I’m using it too for my backups).
Whoa! Will take a look. Thanks!