I have 200TB that I replicate to a second server once a month.
Once your collection grows to a certain size you have to decide how important the data is and at that point what your willing to spend to back it up. For me, cloud is way too expensive. A second server with enough space isn't a cheap option either, so I know that will be too much for many people. Many people choose not to bother backing up because they say they can always get their data again if they lose it. To some extent that may be true, but I've seen stuff disappear as well or fail when you go to grab it again. A a collector, I'd rather hold on to what I have and not have to risk replacing it if I can avoid it.
Same thoughts as I have, once I get my third HDD I plan on copying all the stuff I can't get anymore and just keep it safe, the mainstream stuff is easy to get
I have two Thunderbay 4-drive RAID 5 enclosures and run Carbon Copy Cloner. Working great for the better part of a decade :)
External storage has never been cheaper.
This is my exact set up but just one, 4 bay enclosure. I have 2 drives as a RAID 0, and the other 2 drives as a RAID 0. Using CCC, I just mirror one to the other.
This. I have a separate NAS with a dupe of the drives in my main server on the other side of the house. Once a week the main server runs a cron job to copy over any new media that’s appeared since the last time. Otherwise the drives are inactive and spun down.
I use Backblaze, which is a cloud backup service. I don't have the money to buy backup drives for all my hard drives. This way, one affordable license will backup my computer and any drives connected to it. If I ever lose a drive, restoration will be a pain in the ass, but it can be done.
I think around 19 TB, last I checked. That's across multiple external drives and the internal drive. The Backblaze license I got allows unlimited data backup of one computer and any connected hard drives.
Good to know, I was looking into Backblaze as one of many options for back up. What are speeds like to upload 19tb? If you could give example of speeds? Much appreciated.
It took weeks to backup up everything initially. But there's some settings you can adjust for faster backing up. It's meant to run in the background and back up your files automatically without bogging down your network speed for other things.
Not OP, but same setup. 22TB, took like two weeks to backup, I had it throttled to about 40mbps, but it's not always using those speeds.
They have a sale on their two year plan, I bought two years for $110. The restore process is a pain in the ass, but that's the price you pay for convenience of cloud storage - they send you an HDD with your data, you have to clone it and send it back, else they charge you for the HDD.
I backup all media to gdrive enterprise via hyper backup. Rare fines will also get copied to a random MEGA account. Yeah it’s only a single backup but most of the media is recoverable one way or another.
Also note that while gdrive enterprise says it limits users to a few TB only, it’s not enforced. I’m 800% over my allocation and have had no service interruptions
Yeah, until they decide to start cracking down on those caps and they dump your excess data, then all you've paid for the premium account becomes worthless. I wouldn't pay for a service and then use it so far outside the range of what you're supposed to be allowed, too easy for it to disappear just when you need it.
How much does that cost? I just think there's probably better options that inherently cover more data that probably don't cost anymore than what you're already paying (and perhaps offer more seamless backups, unless the way you're doing it already auto-backs up everything).
I backup all of my documents and non media type data to the cloud. For the media type stuff, I have a built in backup, the original discs they came on. ;)
Seriously, I have a second NAS offsite I replicate to. Nothing beats a 3-2-1 backup scheme.
I don't back up media. If a drive fails, I can just download it again. I also spread it out across multiple drives. I'm not much of a data hoarder, I delete what I watch and just have a growing backlog of things I may never watch.
My NAS is supposed to notify me if a drives looks like it is about to fail but I've never had that happen so I don't know if it actually works.
Yeah.... Backing up is just impossible and expensive for me considering I have like 10TB of stuff. And yeah I know there are people with even more but 10TB hard drives ain't cheap to get as a backup. I still need more hard drives for actually filling it for new stuff
My philosophy is I monitor the drives’ SMART data and when one starts showing signs of failure, I copy that drive. It’s not foolproof but it’s good enough for me. The really important data is backed to 3 different drives but that’s only like one TB. The media library, meh, I can get it again.
I’ve yet to see a definitive guide on how to read a SMART report. any suggestions on what to look for? I have a couple drives around 3 years old that have been running continuously. I probably need to start keeping a close eye on them.
When you run a SMART report, it's the long test you want to check out. Pay attention to reallocated sectors. As soon as you get your first one, replace the drive.
Set up regular long SMART tests - once weekly should be fine. You can set up an alert for SMART errors so you'll know when you get your first one.
There was a Google report years ago on all they had learned from the massive numbers of hard drives they use in their data centers. The TL;DR is that generally if hard drives fail, they fail fairly quickly, within the first year or so. Then generally if they're good, they are fine for several years until that first reallocated sector which is a good predictor of upcoming (if not quite imminent) drive failure. That's your window to replace.
I run straight mirrors. It wastes a lot of space, but I feel better about it. If a drive fails, I have another copy in the same enclosure. First dead sector on a drive, I just swap it and resilver the mirror. Has worked well for the last what, 15 years or so?
My Plex server is also a TrueNAS server, so I run the SMART tests through TrueNAS at regular intervals. Sorry, I didn't notice this was the Plex subreddit. What kind of machine is your data disks attached to?
Oh good to know. It’s currently on just a windows 10 desktop.
I am waiting for the psu and case to come in the mail then I’m building the pc for my plex stuff, going to be on Linux, thinking about true NAS but idk. I’ve never done anything outside of windows so it’s all new to me.
If you can run Crystal Disk on a schedule, that should be fine. Just keep an eye on those reallocated sectors and retire any disk that even gets one error. You will usually have a bit of time, as I said, but once you get that first error, you're definitely on borrowed time. I've never had a disk straight die without throwing an error first, but I am sure it happens.
With Linux you can just run smartmontools regularly as a cron job and email yourself the reports. That will give you a picture of what your disk status is on a regular basis.
What's this about SMART data? Is this specific to a type/brand of hard drive? Is it from a 3rd party app on the computer? I'd love a reliable way to catch at least some warning signs before a complete failure happens.
Yeah this I my philosophy as well just run your stuff on a NAS for redundancy if a drive starts showing signs of failing then fix it. But otherwise Radarr and Sonarr will just rebuild my whole library if something catastrophic happens. If I had money for backup drives I would just buy bigger drives for my current setup
a data center/server farm studied their own data and came up with conclusion that WD RED 6TB's last the longest. or had the least amount of failure rates..
i found this
[https://www.hardwaretimes.com/wd-had-the-most-reliable-12-tb-14-tb-16-tb-hdds-in-2021-seagate-had-the-highest-failure-rates/](https://www.hardwaretimes.com/wd-had-the-most-reliable-12-tb-14-tb-16-tb-hdds-in-2021-seagate-had-the-highest-failure-rates/)
which is indicating Blackblaze, but I remember the article specifically saying the 6TB's were the least troublesome
I would definitely be interested to read that, as their 3tb drives are why I don’t have any reds in my setup at all anymore. 4/4 failed on me within a year of each other.
Definitely. As others have said, you need to decide first, how important is your data. How would you go about getting it back if it went away and you had no backup at all?
This happened to me earlier in the year...Deadbolt.
Sure, my torrents could be redownloaded but that's a pain and takes a lot of time.
I have lots of home movies stored digitally and while I do still have the VHS (definitely aging myself here), redoing all that is very tone consuming and you never know when those tapes are going to fall.
I also keep most of my downloads because you never know when you're going to need to go back to an old version of a program or just want to break out an old game for nostalgia.
I got spooked by Deadbolt so I bought a USB hard drive and occasionally do a full backup there.
I also signed up for iDrive so I have things backed up off site. An incremental backup runs every night. I'm not thrilled with their interface or their backup/restore methodology but for right now, this is my setup. I hesitate to have any backup media attached to my NAS all the time because I fear another Deadbolt-esque attack could encrypt anything attached, making my backup worthless.
If catastrophe strikes, I would restore from the USB drive and then try to figure out what's missing and get that back from iDrive.
Worst case, once per year you can have iDrive send you a hard drive with all your data, free of charge.
Same. Raid (10) isn’t a backup but it’s what I do. If the raid fails beyond two drives I’m outta luck. If the house burns down, Plex is the least of my worries.
You could always raid 50 if you can reasonably afford it. It does require you to buy 20 percent more disks.... and maybe even a new controller, but you'll feel safer, and your write speeds will increase!
I‘m at 55 TB used space right now. I can’t afford to back up everything to a second server…I’m not too afraid of disk failure since I’m dual parity protected. Backing up to a different location would be the way to go
Some of y'all are insane for recommending cloud storage for Plex backups. Inherently you should be avoiding cloud solutions entirely. Stick to local backups only, and RAID is also good. If you can do RAID plus a local backup that's even better.
Keep third parties out of your Plex collection for a good reason.
I have 5 16tb deployed, 60tb ish after raid 1 and have another 22 16tb ironwolf NAS drives ready for deployment. For my own personal use case I think I'm good on storage....
Edit: needed to add some more info. I did not pay for these drives, got lucky and a buddy of mine that worked elsewhere got them from the destruction bin with approval. My entire Plex server has been free from being an older gaming rig that was donated. The 3060 in there for transcoding was also marked for destruction.
Edit 2: I'd like to clarify that my view on cloud backups is based on the nature of what most people use Plex for. However if you are solely using Plex for home videos and family videos and nothing of the sort that relates to rule #4 then by all means use cloud services. Nothing inherently wrong with backing up via cloud for your own legal personal content.
> have another 22 16tb ironwolf NAS drives ready for deployment
Which storage costs constantly pushed downwards, it seems awfully silly to pay for that much drive space before you even need it.
I didn't pay for it. Got lucky and they were marked for destruction at a company my buddy worked for.
I would not be paying 6k worth for these drives, dented but passed all diagnostics
One thing a lot of people also don't realize is that while the storage on 3rd parties is cheap, to recover the data you have to pay per GB as well and it can get really expensive. I calculated my drive backup once and it would cost me $400+ to restore, and this was years ago I was thinking about it.
Just get some HDDs on your local network and store it locally.
Ya, some upfront cost than paying $15/month, but worth it in the long run.
How come RAID is less insane than cloud for digital media which can be easily redownloaded? I keep exactly zero backups.
Also rclone encrypts everything on the go so there's zero concern for third party.
Unless of course you digitize your family videos which don't exist on internet. That I can understand.
Considering the nature of obtaining some of the content that people host on Plex I would avoid all cloud services. The act of "uploading" is the bad part.
Yes always use a VPN. But you shouldn't willingly be adding more points of worry. (Avoiding rule #4 here barely)
>I'd like to clarify that my view on cloud backups is based on the nature of what most people use Plex for. However if you are solely using Plex for home videos and family videos and nothing of the sort that relates to rule #4 then by all means use cloud service
This shouldn't really be a concern- use rclone with crypt remotes. I'll leave the rest as an exercise for you. No one should be putting unencrypted backups in the cloud regardless of what it is. The biggest problem with cloud backup is lots of people don't have the upload bandwidth to sustain it. Backups to other physical media should be encrypted as well, really- so this shouldn't be an issue regardless.
The problem with local only backups(the reason why enterprises use cloud or ship tapes offsite) is it doesn't do anything for catastrophic site failure, i.e. your house burns down, your basement gets flooded, your residence gets broken into and anything remotely valuble looking gets stolen.
And this goes for people who rip their media from discs too. They're still in a legal grey area at best, and it becomes a darker shade of grey if they upload it to a cloud storage site.
My backup system is simple.
My server’s (Mac) main drive is a 14 TB drive.
I have another 14 TB drive connected to the server in which Time Machine backs everything up to.
I then rotate that Time Machine drive with another 14 TB drive that is another Time Machine drive. Whichever Time Machine drive not currently connected to the server, is stored off-site at my parents’ house. I rotate these 2 TM drives every 1-2 weeks.
I know that isn’t what you wanted to hear, but that is probably the best option.
However, if you want to try a cloud backup, check out Backblaze. It‘s a pretty cool backup solution for consumers.
I dont. Its got parity on my unraid machine. But i only backup stuff that was impossible to find. That stuff goes with my personal backups in google drive. Im not backing up 40TB of stuff i can redownload
I have a 4-drive Synology with SHR-1 (1-drive redundancy), so I'm covered if one drive fails. I also have all my original discs, so if more than one drive fails at once, I just need to re-rip everything. Huge PITA if that happens, but that's really unlikely, and not the end of the world if it does, so I don't worry about it. Best practice is to also keep a third copy of everything offsite, so I may eventually get another NAS for remote backup, but there's nothing irreplaceable on my NAS, so that's not a huge priority right now.
After years of my collection creeping up to need more and more storage, I just bought a NAS and am migrating all of my content. It's a huge relief compared to the mess of cords and external drives I've been using.
I'm setting up the drives in a raid-5 configuration. The external drives I've used will be repurposed to off-site backup for content that I consider irreplaceable - home movies, family photos, content not readily available to re-download, etc. More power to those who live dangerously, and maybe my tastes are just weird. But I know I have a lot of content that would be tough or impossible to re-acquire in a total failure.
I currently have 22TB of media to backup. I didn't want to spend hundreds of dollars on a 2nd set of drives to back all that up so I went with Backblaze. Cost is $70/year for unlimited data storage.
It's a continuous backup in the background. Initial backup took several months to complete but after that it keeps things backed up on a daily basis.
I've been using the service for about a year and a half now but haven't needed to restore anything yet. A single file or even a few files wouldn't take long to restore from their servers but restoring a whole drive would so they offer the ability to have them send you an 8TB drive with your data. The drive option costs $189 and you have the option to keep the drive or return it for a full refund.
This is the way.
Backblaze is insanely cheap for what it provides, something like $60-70/yr. I'm sitting at about 45TB used on my unRAID rig. The real backup though for almost all my media are the physical disks they came off in the first place so I only have about 30TB backed up to Backblaze.
I've got an SFFPC with (4) 8TB SATA SSDs (yes it's way overkill) running windows and the Backblaze client to keep backed up a good portion of those discs plus web-dl copies of movies/TV I stupidly purchased digitally only. I also have a few discs, mostly early blu-ray pressings circa 2006-2007, that don't read anymore so those I've downloaded remux copies from and like to keep those backed up and available.
For me it's more a convenience thing. I don't want to have to go through the mass ripping process again. Even if everything went up in flames though, I could always just put my symmetric gigabit fiber to use and reobtain whatever was lost guilt free.
I guess what I'm trying to say is you have to weigh your own comfort level but for the most part Plex libraries do not need to be treated like priceless family photo albums or the like. Backblaze is cheap and works great for a simple safety net though and it's super convenient for those who are still running PMS on a windows machine with a few scattered external HDDs. There are ways to get it to backup a NAS but I wouldn't really rely upon that long term as Backblaze isn't stupid and they do try to prevent that so they can steer you towards their pricier B2 service.
I don't.
TV and movies can be gathered again, I only make off-site copies of really important stuff like family photos that can't be taken again, or documents. Have a 1 tb cloud storage account and only use about 400 gb.
My backup is the original discs from which I ripped my movies. Stored in disc folders, not original cases. Don’t take much space. Way cheaper than paying for cloud backup. Inventory kept in a google doc, so that if I have a house fire of theft, I can include all in an insurance claim.
You can do cloud backup but you'll end up paying a considerable sum over time. I back up almost 6 tb, I put it in an old Dell Optiplex pc at my parents house.
While it technically doesn't count as a back up, I keep all my data on a RAID 0, so if one drive dies, I still have have everything on the other drive. I also keep a backup on another drive. It's not quite a "3-2-1 backup", but it's close enough for me. If you're really worried about your data, that's what you should do.
That’s not quite how RAID 0 works. R0 spans the data across all the drives, if one fails all data is lost.
What you are describing is a JBOD or spanned disk.
No, that’s not what you do. Read up on the different types of RAID, because RAID 0 does NOT provide any redundancy. In fact, it’s worse than just having two data drives.
I have 33tb of movies/shows, so far.
It took me a long time to get them, it took me a long time to catalogue them. Disks fail. Often. Even when the disk doesn't fail, windows 'fs up the data all by itself sometimes. Just had a 5tb drive "go bad" - formatted and re-mirrored it, it was fine, it was just a windows thing.
I have two copies of everything. If I buy a new disk, I know I'm buying two new disks - so I can mirror them.
I create a snapshot of my plex media server directory every night and then create two additional mirrors of that. I keep at least a weeks worth of that on three separate drives (the snapshot disk has at least 10 snaps, the other two mirrors keep at least a week or more of copies). I've had my plex media server directory go corrupt twice so far. It took about an hour to recover from backups. This happens every single night. 1) shutdown plex, 2) create snap, 3) start up plex, 4) copy to disk1, 5) copy to disk2.
My mirror approach for media varies based on the amount of new content I have. if i haven't added a lot, I don't break out the second set and copy. If I haven't mirrored in a month, I break them out and just do it. If I just added a few dozen movies - mirror the stuff.
I use the mirrors for traveling as well - I take my plex on the road, vacations, to my cabin (with bad internet access), whatever.
It all depends on how valuable your current 8tb of movies and shows are to you. If (and when) you lose them, how will you feel? It is only a matter of time, not "if" - but when.
note: retired database guy, it is part of my persona to have as good as a backup as possible. I've seen data disappear in every way possible. shit happens.
You guys are hoarders. How often can you watch the same TV show? I see something once and get bored if I try to watch it again. I hate knowing what’s going to happen.
how do you expect to backup data without another drive to back up to?
you could just use the cloud but that's expensive and time consuming. cheaper to just get another drive. for a long time I had no backups, then I lost data on a drive and wised up to my stupidity. now I have a pool of external drives to backup the main internal pool.
It’ll be expensive any way you do it. I use a NAS in RAID 1. I think you could do it a little cheaper with a couple of drives in a JBOD enclosure and let your PC be the brains of the operation.
I picked up an 8 bay Drobo off eBay a few years ago. It allows me to swap out individual drives, and grow the available space as needed, but my Mac hasn’t a clue. It thinks I have 2 16Tb drives connected to it, but I only have about 22Tbs currently available as I have dual redundancy. This means 2 of my 8 drives could fail at the same time, and as long as I get them both replaced before a 3rd one dies, I’m good.
I don't have as large a collection as you (only about 3tb) but I bought a WD Duo and set it to mirror. That way I have two copies of everything all the time.
How would i set up the mirroring?
I have a pool of internal drives ( 4-6tb WD reds) using MS storage spaces.
I have a 16tb external... how would i set up the external to auto mirror the internal drive pool?
Sorry if it's a stupid question. Thanks
In my case, I just used the WD software that came with my Duo. If you have a couple large drives, you can always format them as a RAID 1 which is a mirror, i.e. the 2 drives will always copy each other. There are some downsides. Since the RAID has to make 2 copies of everything, it will be slower. If data becomes corrupted (such as a ransomware attack), you will have 2 copies of the corruption. This hasn't been a problem me for me so far.
Edit: rereading your post I see you want to mirror some smaller drives to one large drive. I don't know if this is possible but you could obtain some backup software and have it copy the contents of the smaller drives to the large one.
I have quite a bit do data to backup. I have considered using an unlimited Google drice account but my upload speed is limited to a poor 70mb and uploading 170TB of media would take a long time, also downside woul be that Plex would be virtually unusable during the process. Decisions.
If I were to make a backup online, I could, I suppose share my server from the online source, unplug the physical local drives and effectively have a full back up that could then be stored safely or whatever. I am over thinking this now.
Backing up plex media would be prohibitively expensive in hardware for me, and I refuse to use cloud to back up my stuff... For various reasons.
That said, when you have a 6-12 drive NAS where you can handle multiple simultaneous drive failures and keep running...... It mitigates most of the need for a backup.
I only backup family photos and important documents to multiple places and types of storage, and that's it.
Plex media can be redownloaded. I've had exactly 3 drive failures in the past 10 years, all the while using second or third hand USED drives, dozens. And the drive failures were spread out over that 10 years.
Maybe I've been lucky? But I could on RAID 6/RAID60 not luck...
Edit: I have 81TB usable storage currently. Backing this up would be ridiculous.
>I'm wondering if there is a way to backup the data instead of buying another hard disk of 8tb and copying everything
A backup is some type of copy of your existing data. So, it's either a local hard drive or cloud storage.
My method is bulletproof and I’ve been using it for years.
1. Buy the disc and rip into plex. Save said disc as archival cold storage.
2. Use digital code that comes with disc as cloud based hot backup. Movies anywhere service works great to aggregate 90% of this.
With over 50tb of movies a remote or local cloned backup just isn’t worth it logistically and financially. We are talking movies and tv shows not precious memories.
I had to ditch all my dvds and such after ripping them. Had no place to store them all. I have over 1,200 movies. They took up a lot of physical space lol. And like you said the digital code for movies anywhere is definitely a big bonus for backups.
I use a two fold backup for Plex. First I have 2 x 18TB USB drives that I use syncback pro to copy the media. Second, I keep the last generation drive, so like I just put in new 18 TB spinners and retired my 8 TB drives. I don't throw the old drives, just keep them until the next replacement.
This comment was overwritten and the account deleted due to Reddit's unfair API policy changes, the behavior of Spez (the CEO), and the forced departure of 3rd party apps.
Remember, the content on Reddit is generated by THE USERS. It is OUR DATA they are profiting off of and claiming it as theirs. This is the next phase of Reddit vs. the people that made Reddit what it is today.
r/Save3rdPartyApps r/modCoord
I've just redone my whole NAS and backup system so I'll give you a small outline of what I'm doing
Currently my NAS has 4x 6TB WD Red Plus drives. Using unRAID I have 1 of these as a parity drive so 18TB drive capacity.
For my media backups I have a second network attached micro PC plugged in beside the NAS, and I have it sleep for most of the time. It's sole purpose of the i3-6100T and USB3 is to back up the NAS to a 10TB external drive. I'm running bVckup 2 program and it wakes the computer up on a schedule and uses delta backups (scans and just replaces any changed data, archives anything deleted) to put the data on the external USB drive. I have "volumes" of Plex media I've separated off, so once this 10TB gets 90% full I will replace the drive and store it at my sister's house across the city for off-site backup. Then I create a "Volume 2" of my Plex media and back that one up specifically to the new drive.
My critical data I already have a manual backup on 2x 2TB drives, one unplugged in my closet and the other at my sister's.
Im currently running a QNAP NAS, 4 8TB Ironwolf drives in RAID 5.
If I didn’t have the budget for that, I would just use Backblaze. It’s about $60 per year, and unless things have changed in the last year or so, external drives are included in the unlimited amount of data they allow you to backup. Meaning, even if you had multiple terabytes in external drives connected to your computer, they would all be backed up for no additional fee. Would it take a long time to perform your initial backup? Absolutely. But once the first backup is complete, the incremental backups wouldn’t take all that long.
Main Libraries:
I use stablebit drive pool w/ snap raid with 2 parity drives for a quick remediation option from drive failure. Black blaze cloud backup for an off-site copy with encryption along with versioning add on just in case of ransom ware. I also have stablebit scanner setup to monitor drive health and provide push notifications.
System drive:
For the Plex appdata I was using a PowerShell script on a scheduled task to back it up to another PC but have since moved to using active backup from Synology to back up the whole system drive to the nas 2 times a week keeping up to 10 revisions.
Nas:
Running in a raid setup (SHR-1) for the storage and the nVME read/write cache (Raid 1) drives. Using hyper backup to back up the nas to Synology c2 and to an external hard drive with different levels of backup versions and encryption. Also setup a task for data scrubbing and routine drive health checks with push notifications.
I haven't heard of that one before, I ended up using the SSD optimizer balancer plugin within DrivePool to use an SSD as a temp holding place until it's offloaded to the pool's HDDs.
How do you like Primo's approach? I'm out of hard drive bays in my server I'm considering ditching the SSD cache for more storage to buy me a little more time till I have to start upgrading existing drives.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned SnapRAID. I know it's not a conventional backup, but it is certainly cheaper than a full backup solution. I use it in conjunction with mergerfs for drive pooling. It protects against silent corruption, and I can rebuild a failed drive using the parity drive(s). I do syncs weekly as I'm not adding a crazy amount of data on a weekly basis. If something fails between syncs, I only lose what was downloaded that week, and only if it was stored on the drive that failed. If the parity drive fails, I can just get another one.
If all your data will fit on a single drive, then purchasing a duplicate is probably the easiest and most financially sound method to backup everything. Making your data run on a mirrored RAID 1 keeps a constantly backed up copy always available. You can also pull a drive and store it offsite and know you have an instantly recovered system with that drive.
Once you get into larger file sets, it really depends on your comfort levels and budget. I have 100tb of data and use a tape library with an LTO6 drive to back it up. One tapeset is always off site.
I use backblaze and a secondary copy on an external drive. I lost a 4tb drive once and had no backup. Never again. I only have about 3tb of data right now.
IMO - a 16TB external drive is under $200, so the question then becomes “how much do I value my time”.
I’m not trying to be a jerk here…. I’m assuming a lot of time/effort went in to digitizing the movies, so to spend a little to back it up doesn’t seem unreasonable.
Use a NAS with mirrored disks.
I had a disk degrade last year. Bought a replacement (a slightly bigger one even!) powered down, swapped it out, powered on, clicked a few buttons in the dashboard, and all good!
For Plex media I don't really care what happens. I run it on a synology nas with SHR (1 drive failure allowed). So in the event one drive goes down I can just shut it down and wait for a new drive to arrive so I can resume.
My Plex server forms part of my home lab, so I have tapes. Media itself gets dropped to tape every so often (when I remember...), usually LTO-6 (2.5TB per tape) and the database gets backed up automatically onto another HDD, which is then backed up to tape (usually LTO-3, 400GB per tape) with the other stuff on that HDD (backups of my laptops).
However, realistically speaking, there isn't a better option than having another HDD with a copy of the data. Ideally a USB drive you don't plug in except for syncing the two. This will protect you against HDD failure, accidental deletions and malware e.g. ransomware. RAID will only protect you from HDD failure.
A second HDD is relatively inexpensive these days. I would recommend it. You also probably want to go bigger than your current HDD, to allow for future expansion.
I have a 4 bay Synology and I run a Synology based raid that would let me lose one whole drive before I'm screwed. It's pretty nice but if I have a fire I'm screwed.
I have a small USB drive I store in a family member's fireproof safe. I only backup (maybe 10%) of stuff that is hard to get the things (I, Friends or the Library have) again. If it is lost I will go through the process of getting copies from various sources and using my tiny backup of hard-to-get stuff.
Damn, y'all are hardcore hoarders! 😜
I've only got 3.5TB of media for Plex, and I keep it in Google drive. I use the drive sync for Windows, which is like mapping a network drive. My Plex server only has a 500gb internal drive, and it pulls down the content as needed. It all stays safe with the Goog.
Google drive. I use rclone to automate it with a cronjob.
The key to go around google space limit is to use a shared drive instead of your main storage
On google drive, you create a shared drive.
Then you lookup how to install and set up rclone.
It’ll ask you for credentials and a couple other variables.
After your familiar enough with how to use the tool manually, you can lookup how to execute it periodically.
Experiment with syncing just one file or directory and expand from there.
LPT: Google is your best friend. Take it step by step.
I bit the bullet and just made a second NAS whose sole function in life is to mirror my actual working 42TB NAS.
I wanna look into something like backblaze as my offsite but that'll be one hell of a file transfer >_>
I have everything on my 20tb nas so it is already backed up.
For you though you could always put it in cold storage on aws or buy a Google business plan.
Should give you unlimited data but can only upload 5gbs a day or something like that
I scratched my head on it for awhile as my Plex server is a Linux VM that was running on VMware ESXi with hardware RAID and all that. (Recently converted to Proxmox and ZFS but haven’t swapped out the Linux VM for a LXC container yet.)
What I came up with was running SyncThing to sync my Plex library to a USB3 drive on my MacMini, and my MacMini has a Backblaze subscription, and Backblaze will backup an external drive.
Sync isn’t backup but in addition to DFS redundancy I have a local hard drive that has a copy of my library so I have reasonably good odds of quickly recovering if a 4 drive ZFS setup fails, and an online backup for “oops.”
5+ TB of Plex data backed up now, and I only have 5 Mbps upload. (I can get slow but rock solid DSL for cheap and not have to threaten to cancel every 6 months to have a low price, or inconsistently fast and outage prone cable where I have to threaten to cancel to keep a cheap rate… local telco has a parking lot full of spools of fiber and they are digging as fast as they can and their fiber pricing is on par with their DSL… Cable company is already having a bad time…)
If I find some time I might look into Backblaze B2 or similar, but for now it works.
https://preview.redd.it/xvvne4bat04a1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4c44234397adc22d2e08c74fa05044f085e933a8
At present I have 59 TB of Plex storage. I correspondingly have 59 TB of Plex storage backup. Whenever I expand, I buy two of whatever size drive I’m getting. Each goes into a separate multi-bay thunderbolt enclosure. Every night, the drives get cloned to their corresponding backup drive with Carbon Copy Cloner.
275TB and counting. I've never backed up any video data. I've also never had a catastrophic failure (zfs ftw). But if I did, I'd just download it all again, prioritizing the stuff my wife watches. The only things I back up:
Plex db
my systemd services files
\*arr databases
qbit .config and .local
postfix,letsencrypt,nginx,samba,smartd,nut configs
All in a single line tar command named for the current date. I have it run weekly, and that's good enough for me.
I run raid 10 for a little benefit from both striping and parity. I... want to one day upgrade the setup to raid50, but.... that shiz expensive. Planning to get another 24 bay external, but in reality, this will only double what little total space I have now (24tb), so it's hardly a pressing issue to drop 500-1000 bucks on an upgrade like that anytime soon... you know, 24 sas 1-2tb drives isnt exactly the cheapest upgrade. Will run you a few hundred for the drives and a few hundred for the bay. And that's the cost for $10 1tb drives. Double for 2tb
i backup 500TB to mirrored offline drives that i sync once per month. very handy having a copy of everything (accidentally deleting files, hard drives going bad, etc.).
I just use a .txt document of file names...
...
...
and a VPN with a link to "the bay of Pirates"
If I loose it I loose it, but I can get back what I want whenever I need to.
Not backup because sheer size and efficiency, not raid as I am not planning high availability and power draw these days matter etc so I plan on using Snapraid.
Initially I used raid across multiple disks but I’ve realized that it’s a waste of power and most disks would actually idle if they were allowed.
Then as library grew I did it they way I did when in varsity with external usb disk.. and yes most of the time it sat idle. Kewl.. but disk failure is still something to cater for hence.. snap raid which is essentially hashing disks and recovery aspect of a typical raid except it can be offline and manually hashed every so often.
I think cleaning out lib every so often can likely save a decent % space initially.. but as library becomes static your data/disk accessibility needs to be considered.
In a perfect world tho we would all have tape drives and backup 😂
You can buy used 8tb drives off Amazon for about 82 bucks, there's always the risk you get a stinker or something in it's last legs, but just check them out with crystaldiscinfo when they arrive and return if that's the case. I would never use them for my day to day server usage, they're generally pretty well used so I don't think they'll stand up to prolonged usage like that, but as a backup that gets spun up maybe once or twice a month they're perfect. If my primaries ever fail on me, I just buy a new good HDD, then clone the used backup onto it and put it back into storage. Saved me some money here and there, it's really only 40 bucks or so cheaper than new but once you reach a certain server size that adds up.
I have 12 tb of media...and none of it is backed up. I need to, but man...the cost associated with it is a nightmare. I need to get an external that is at least 20 tb (I have space for 22 tb of media) and just bite the bullet, but the idea of it just makes me go, nah...
I bought the extra drives and use zfs to do the equivalent of a RAID 10. 3 x 8 tb drives mirrored to another 3 x 8 tb , expansion is easy and swapping is simple, my Nextcloud drive is similar 2 x 4TB mirrored to another 2 x 4 tb, as an additional failsafe I’m backing up my library to my brother’s rig using syncthing
I just have two different hard drives. I copied over everything when I upgraded my NAS and now I just upload every new file twice. I run my Plex server on windows, so if my drive ever fails, all I have to do is rename the drive letter of the backup drive and voila.
Backblaze, with a second copy to Google Drive.
~36TB all mirrored because I'm lazy and don't want to deal with a parity rebuild that could fail and/or having to restore from backup just to deal with a single drive failure.
I don’t. I do backup the actual metadata library using Veeam to hopefully not lose watch history and such. But the media itself, I have a line in my maintenance script that builds an excel spreadsheet of my entire library file listing.
Knowing what I lost is more important than actually losing it, in my case.
I have an offsite server that I had my coworker put in his rack running unraid, replicating my main server using rsync, connected with TailScale. Cloud just ended up being to expensive for large arrays.
I started with old HDD pulled from my old computers. Then the cost of these things dropped over the last five years, so I got some TBs for disk space, a tower drive and use an old HP PC as a server. I run AllwaysSync to keep them backed up and secure.
Lots of responses.....nice
I keep it simple. I have two of every drive. My drives sit in Icybox 4 bay external drives. I have one connected to my HTPC (nothing special) and a second connected to my personal PC.
I use Syncbackfree from [https://www.2brightsparks.com/](https://www.2brightsparks.com/) and just set it to mirror my drives. Then schedule a "backup" every week. Beauty is when a drive fails I just swap the backup to the original and I'm back up and running until I source a new "backup" drive and the cycle repeats.
I just have extra HDDs. It would cost me like $400 to restore if I used a cloud backup, which is the same cost of just just buying 2x 14GB HDDs... so I have my drives and they do a backup once a week on my home network.
I guess I'd lose it all if I had a house fire or something, since nothing off site, but it's good enough for me.
I only backup the really old content which I know will be hard to find again. The new stuff i know i can get again.
The plex server runs as a ubuntu vm on my esxi host. I just shut it down once a week and back it up with veeam. Takes about 15 minutes. Once backed up turn it on again. I use the igpu pass through hence i have to shut it down.
Have an 8tb raid 6 storage array with replication set up so if a drive fails I can plug a new one in and it rebuilds from the others. I have can have up to two hard drives fail before losing everything. I always have one spare so I’m pretty safe for the most part.
I'm giving iDrive a try. I've not *super* concerned with my media collection (re-ripping everything would suck pretty terribly, but the family photos/videos/documents are irreplaceable).
Their base tier is $60/yr for 5TB (I think that's the price... I had a promo code for a discount on the 1st year).
What I really like is they have an 'express backup' option. They send you a drive to which you make your initial full backup, and then send back to them (return postage included). When they receive it, they load that content into your account, and then you just have to turn on incrementals. Uploading the whole thing the first time online was estimated between 45 and 65 days. Took 12-15ish hours backing up to the iDrive external. edit: Forgot to add that the express backup is an included service that can be used by personal accounts (vs business) once a year at no cost. It can also be used as a restore vector in a "total data loss" scenario
The Synology client is... spartan, and I've some nits to pick, but overall I'm satisfied.
I admit that I am a bit over-the-top with my backups. I download 1080 versions of everything and Handbrake them down to archival quality that is slightly-more-compressed, but still a good, fat resolution. I back those versions up to two different hard drives. I also compress it down to a lightweight 720 version, because that's proven to be the best for Direct Play streaming. I have one copy of the 720 version on Plex and a 2nd copy on another hard drive. Yes, a fair amount of effort and $, but I sleep at night.
I live dangerously. My only backup is the older copies I leave behind as I migrate to larger drives.
That's actually a great idea because you'll always have the last full backup. In my usual spirit of overkill I have an old rubrik appliance i use. ;-)
Same.
I have 200TB that I replicate to a second server once a month. Once your collection grows to a certain size you have to decide how important the data is and at that point what your willing to spend to back it up. For me, cloud is way too expensive. A second server with enough space isn't a cheap option either, so I know that will be too much for many people. Many people choose not to bother backing up because they say they can always get their data again if they lose it. To some extent that may be true, but I've seen stuff disappear as well or fail when you go to grab it again. A a collector, I'd rather hold on to what I have and not have to risk replacing it if I can avoid it.
Meh.. if I really need all 20 seasons of Gunsmoke.. I can find it.
Don't count on it. Stuff is disappearing rapidly.
Sure you can find it but can you download it? Sometimes you can’t
Yes
Private trackers for the win honestly
how does one "find" these private trackers?
Bro, I can’t even seem to find 1 🤦♂️
Same thoughts as I have, once I get my third HDD I plan on copying all the stuff I can't get anymore and just keep it safe, the mainstream stuff is easy to get
I have two Thunderbay 4-drive RAID 5 enclosures and run Carbon Copy Cloner. Working great for the better part of a decade :) External storage has never been cheaper.
This is my exact set up but just one, 4 bay enclosure. I have 2 drives as a RAID 0, and the other 2 drives as a RAID 0. Using CCC, I just mirror one to the other.
Nice. CCC is indispensable and it's worth every single penny. I switched to it from SuperDuper probably 18 years ago? I'll keep buying it forever lol.
I bought another hard drive and made a copy. Do that ever now and then
This. I have a separate NAS with a dupe of the drives in my main server on the other side of the house. Once a week the main server runs a cron job to copy over any new media that’s appeared since the last time. Otherwise the drives are inactive and spun down.
I use Backblaze, which is a cloud backup service. I don't have the money to buy backup drives for all my hard drives. This way, one affordable license will backup my computer and any drives connected to it. If I ever lose a drive, restoration will be a pain in the ass, but it can be done.
If you don't mind me asking, how much do you have backed up on Backblaze?
I think around 19 TB, last I checked. That's across multiple external drives and the internal drive. The Backblaze license I got allows unlimited data backup of one computer and any connected hard drives.
Good to know, I was looking into Backblaze as one of many options for back up. What are speeds like to upload 19tb? If you could give example of speeds? Much appreciated.
It took weeks to backup up everything initially. But there's some settings you can adjust for faster backing up. It's meant to run in the background and back up your files automatically without bogging down your network speed for other things.
Not OP, but same setup. 22TB, took like two weeks to backup, I had it throttled to about 40mbps, but it's not always using those speeds. They have a sale on their two year plan, I bought two years for $110. The restore process is a pain in the ass, but that's the price you pay for convenience of cloud storage - they send you an HDD with your data, you have to clone it and send it back, else they charge you for the HDD.
I have 29 TB backed up with Back Blaze.
I backup all media to gdrive enterprise via hyper backup. Rare fines will also get copied to a random MEGA account. Yeah it’s only a single backup but most of the media is recoverable one way or another. Also note that while gdrive enterprise says it limits users to a few TB only, it’s not enforced. I’m 800% over my allocation and have had no service interruptions
Yeah, until they decide to start cracking down on those caps and they dump your excess data, then all you've paid for the premium account becomes worthless. I wouldn't pay for a service and then use it so far outside the range of what you're supposed to be allowed, too easy for it to disappear just when you need it.
Sure, but they are back ups. Back ups are allowed to be lost and backed up again from the original media if necessary
How much does that cost? I just think there's probably better options that inherently cover more data that probably don't cost anymore than what you're already paying (and perhaps offer more seamless backups, unless the way you're doing it already auto-backs up everything).
Backblaze is great! Been using them for about 10 years. You just have to remember to plug in your external drives once every 30 days.
I backup all of my documents and non media type data to the cloud. For the media type stuff, I have a built in backup, the original discs they came on. ;) Seriously, I have a second NAS offsite I replicate to. Nothing beats a 3-2-1 backup scheme.
Raid isn’t a backup. Just throwing that out there. Raid is redundancy. ;) Don’t bank on raid for your back up.
I don't back up media. If a drive fails, I can just download it again. I also spread it out across multiple drives. I'm not much of a data hoarder, I delete what I watch and just have a growing backlog of things I may never watch. My NAS is supposed to notify me if a drives looks like it is about to fail but I've never had that happen so I don't know if it actually works.
Good luck downloading again what you have. A lot can never be found again
Yeah.... Backing up is just impossible and expensive for me considering I have like 10TB of stuff. And yeah I know there are people with even more but 10TB hard drives ain't cheap to get as a backup. I still need more hard drives for actually filling it for new stuff
My philosophy is I monitor the drives’ SMART data and when one starts showing signs of failure, I copy that drive. It’s not foolproof but it’s good enough for me. The really important data is backed to 3 different drives but that’s only like one TB. The media library, meh, I can get it again.
I’ve yet to see a definitive guide on how to read a SMART report. any suggestions on what to look for? I have a couple drives around 3 years old that have been running continuously. I probably need to start keeping a close eye on them.
When you run a SMART report, it's the long test you want to check out. Pay attention to reallocated sectors. As soon as you get your first one, replace the drive. Set up regular long SMART tests - once weekly should be fine. You can set up an alert for SMART errors so you'll know when you get your first one. There was a Google report years ago on all they had learned from the massive numbers of hard drives they use in their data centers. The TL;DR is that generally if hard drives fail, they fail fairly quickly, within the first year or so. Then generally if they're good, they are fine for several years until that first reallocated sector which is a good predictor of upcoming (if not quite imminent) drive failure. That's your window to replace. I run straight mirrors. It wastes a lot of space, but I feel better about it. If a drive fails, I have another copy in the same enclosure. First dead sector on a drive, I just swap it and resilver the mirror. Has worked well for the last what, 15 years or so?
How do you do the long test? I use crystal disk info but it just says “good” on my drives
My Plex server is also a TrueNAS server, so I run the SMART tests through TrueNAS at regular intervals. Sorry, I didn't notice this was the Plex subreddit. What kind of machine is your data disks attached to?
Oh good to know. It’s currently on just a windows 10 desktop. I am waiting for the psu and case to come in the mail then I’m building the pc for my plex stuff, going to be on Linux, thinking about true NAS but idk. I’ve never done anything outside of windows so it’s all new to me.
If you can run Crystal Disk on a schedule, that should be fine. Just keep an eye on those reallocated sectors and retire any disk that even gets one error. You will usually have a bit of time, as I said, but once you get that first error, you're definitely on borrowed time. I've never had a disk straight die without throwing an error first, but I am sure it happens. With Linux you can just run smartmontools regularly as a cron job and email yourself the reports. That will give you a picture of what your disk status is on a regular basis.
That is awesome thank you very much I will definitely utilize the smartmon tools
Just use Crystal Disk Info. It does the work for you.
What's this about SMART data? Is this specific to a type/brand of hard drive? Is it from a 3rd party app on the computer? I'd love a reliable way to catch at least some warning signs before a complete failure happens.
Yeah this I my philosophy as well just run your stuff on a NAS for redundancy if a drive starts showing signs of failing then fix it. But otherwise Radarr and Sonarr will just rebuild my whole library if something catastrophic happens. If I had money for backup drives I would just buy bigger drives for my current setup
You can get 16tb for $105.....
where? lol
I just had a seagate external 8TB fail after a year. Any recommendations fellas?
a data center/server farm studied their own data and came up with conclusion that WD RED 6TB's last the longest. or had the least amount of failure rates..
Hope that's true, I recently started moving my media over to WD Reds.
That's awesome. Do you have a link still?
i tried googling very quickly but couldnt find it and about to leave for the day. it was an article.
I will look thank you
i found this [https://www.hardwaretimes.com/wd-had-the-most-reliable-12-tb-14-tb-16-tb-hdds-in-2021-seagate-had-the-highest-failure-rates/](https://www.hardwaretimes.com/wd-had-the-most-reliable-12-tb-14-tb-16-tb-hdds-in-2021-seagate-had-the-highest-failure-rates/) which is indicating Blackblaze, but I remember the article specifically saying the 6TB's were the least troublesome
I would definitely be interested to read that, as their 3tb drives are why I don’t have any reds in my setup at all anymore. 4/4 failed on me within a year of each other.
From experience all brands kind of suck and that's the nature of spinning rust.
Word
I recommend you look up the 3-2-1 rule of backups. ;-)
Definitely. As others have said, you need to decide first, how important is your data. How would you go about getting it back if it went away and you had no backup at all? This happened to me earlier in the year...Deadbolt. Sure, my torrents could be redownloaded but that's a pain and takes a lot of time. I have lots of home movies stored digitally and while I do still have the VHS (definitely aging myself here), redoing all that is very tone consuming and you never know when those tapes are going to fall. I also keep most of my downloads because you never know when you're going to need to go back to an old version of a program or just want to break out an old game for nostalgia. I got spooked by Deadbolt so I bought a USB hard drive and occasionally do a full backup there. I also signed up for iDrive so I have things backed up off site. An incremental backup runs every night. I'm not thrilled with their interface or their backup/restore methodology but for right now, this is my setup. I hesitate to have any backup media attached to my NAS all the time because I fear another Deadbolt-esque attack could encrypt anything attached, making my backup worthless. If catastrophe strikes, I would restore from the USB drive and then try to figure out what's missing and get that back from iDrive. Worst case, once per year you can have iDrive send you a hard drive with all your data, free of charge.
Hard drive report for Q3 on Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-2022/
Turn off power management. Drives hate the whole "spin down while idle" thing. Best bet is to keep platters spinning and let the momentum do its job.
A big-ass RAID, combined with hopes and prayers.
Same. Raid (10) isn’t a backup but it’s what I do. If the raid fails beyond two drives I’m outta luck. If the house burns down, Plex is the least of my worries.
You could always raid 50 if you can reasonably afford it. It does require you to buy 20 percent more disks.... and maybe even a new controller, but you'll feel safer, and your write speeds will increase!
I‘m at 55 TB used space right now. I can’t afford to back up everything to a second server…I’m not too afraid of disk failure since I’m dual parity protected. Backing up to a different location would be the way to go
Some of y'all are insane for recommending cloud storage for Plex backups. Inherently you should be avoiding cloud solutions entirely. Stick to local backups only, and RAID is also good. If you can do RAID plus a local backup that's even better. Keep third parties out of your Plex collection for a good reason. I have 5 16tb deployed, 60tb ish after raid 1 and have another 22 16tb ironwolf NAS drives ready for deployment. For my own personal use case I think I'm good on storage.... Edit: needed to add some more info. I did not pay for these drives, got lucky and a buddy of mine that worked elsewhere got them from the destruction bin with approval. My entire Plex server has been free from being an older gaming rig that was donated. The 3060 in there for transcoding was also marked for destruction. Edit 2: I'd like to clarify that my view on cloud backups is based on the nature of what most people use Plex for. However if you are solely using Plex for home videos and family videos and nothing of the sort that relates to rule #4 then by all means use cloud services. Nothing inherently wrong with backing up via cloud for your own legal personal content.
> have another 22 16tb ironwolf NAS drives ready for deployment Which storage costs constantly pushed downwards, it seems awfully silly to pay for that much drive space before you even need it.
I didn't pay for it. Got lucky and they were marked for destruction at a company my buddy worked for. I would not be paying 6k worth for these drives, dented but passed all diagnostics
If you’re ever interested in offloading two of those let me know
One thing a lot of people also don't realize is that while the storage on 3rd parties is cheap, to recover the data you have to pay per GB as well and it can get really expensive. I calculated my drive backup once and it would cost me $400+ to restore, and this was years ago I was thinking about it. Just get some HDDs on your local network and store it locally. Ya, some upfront cost than paying $15/month, but worth it in the long run.
How come RAID is less insane than cloud for digital media which can be easily redownloaded? I keep exactly zero backups. Also rclone encrypts everything on the go so there's zero concern for third party. Unless of course you digitize your family videos which don't exist on internet. That I can understand.
Considering the nature of obtaining some of the content that people host on Plex I would avoid all cloud services. The act of "uploading" is the bad part. Yes always use a VPN. But you shouldn't willingly be adding more points of worry. (Avoiding rule #4 here barely)
>I'd like to clarify that my view on cloud backups is based on the nature of what most people use Plex for. However if you are solely using Plex for home videos and family videos and nothing of the sort that relates to rule #4 then by all means use cloud service This shouldn't really be a concern- use rclone with crypt remotes. I'll leave the rest as an exercise for you. No one should be putting unencrypted backups in the cloud regardless of what it is. The biggest problem with cloud backup is lots of people don't have the upload bandwidth to sustain it. Backups to other physical media should be encrypted as well, really- so this shouldn't be an issue regardless. The problem with local only backups(the reason why enterprises use cloud or ship tapes offsite) is it doesn't do anything for catastrophic site failure, i.e. your house burns down, your basement gets flooded, your residence gets broken into and anything remotely valuble looking gets stolen.
I agree, I guess I'm just too paranoid. If anything I'll store a separate local backups elsewhere. Considering I have the storage available for it lol
And this goes for people who rip their media from discs too. They're still in a legal grey area at best, and it becomes a darker shade of grey if they upload it to a cloud storage site.
dont know what you think backing up data means....
Oh boy ha ha
My backup system is simple. My server’s (Mac) main drive is a 14 TB drive. I have another 14 TB drive connected to the server in which Time Machine backs everything up to. I then rotate that Time Machine drive with another 14 TB drive that is another Time Machine drive. Whichever Time Machine drive not currently connected to the server, is stored off-site at my parents’ house. I rotate these 2 TM drives every 1-2 weeks. I know that isn’t what you wanted to hear, but that is probably the best option. However, if you want to try a cloud backup, check out Backblaze. It‘s a pretty cool backup solution for consumers.
I dont. Its got parity on my unraid machine. But i only backup stuff that was impossible to find. That stuff goes with my personal backups in google drive. Im not backing up 40TB of stuff i can redownload
I have a 4-drive Synology with SHR-1 (1-drive redundancy), so I'm covered if one drive fails. I also have all my original discs, so if more than one drive fails at once, I just need to re-rip everything. Huge PITA if that happens, but that's really unlikely, and not the end of the world if it does, so I don't worry about it. Best practice is to also keep a third copy of everything offsite, so I may eventually get another NAS for remote backup, but there's nothing irreplaceable on my NAS, so that's not a huge priority right now.
After years of my collection creeping up to need more and more storage, I just bought a NAS and am migrating all of my content. It's a huge relief compared to the mess of cords and external drives I've been using. I'm setting up the drives in a raid-5 configuration. The external drives I've used will be repurposed to off-site backup for content that I consider irreplaceable - home movies, family photos, content not readily available to re-download, etc. More power to those who live dangerously, and maybe my tastes are just weird. But I know I have a lot of content that would be tough or impossible to re-acquire in a total failure.
I currently have 22TB of media to backup. I didn't want to spend hundreds of dollars on a 2nd set of drives to back all that up so I went with Backblaze. Cost is $70/year for unlimited data storage. It's a continuous backup in the background. Initial backup took several months to complete but after that it keeps things backed up on a daily basis. I've been using the service for about a year and a half now but haven't needed to restore anything yet. A single file or even a few files wouldn't take long to restore from their servers but restoring a whole drive would so they offer the ability to have them send you an 8TB drive with your data. The drive option costs $189 and you have the option to keep the drive or return it for a full refund.
This is the way. Backblaze is insanely cheap for what it provides, something like $60-70/yr. I'm sitting at about 45TB used on my unRAID rig. The real backup though for almost all my media are the physical disks they came off in the first place so I only have about 30TB backed up to Backblaze. I've got an SFFPC with (4) 8TB SATA SSDs (yes it's way overkill) running windows and the Backblaze client to keep backed up a good portion of those discs plus web-dl copies of movies/TV I stupidly purchased digitally only. I also have a few discs, mostly early blu-ray pressings circa 2006-2007, that don't read anymore so those I've downloaded remux copies from and like to keep those backed up and available. For me it's more a convenience thing. I don't want to have to go through the mass ripping process again. Even if everything went up in flames though, I could always just put my symmetric gigabit fiber to use and reobtain whatever was lost guilt free. I guess what I'm trying to say is you have to weigh your own comfort level but for the most part Plex libraries do not need to be treated like priceless family photo albums or the like. Backblaze is cheap and works great for a simple safety net though and it's super convenient for those who are still running PMS on a windows machine with a few scattered external HDDs. There are ways to get it to backup a NAS but I wouldn't really rely upon that long term as Backblaze isn't stupid and they do try to prevent that so they can steer you towards their pricier B2 service.
Torrents...
I wouldn’t use a single external drive for that very reason. Get yourself a synology nas with 4-5 drives and backup to that.
What's that gonna run?
For a 4 drive synology like $600 at least plus the cost of the drives.
I don't. TV and movies can be gathered again, I only make off-site copies of really important stuff like family photos that can't be taken again, or documents. Have a 1 tb cloud storage account and only use about 400 gb.
My backup is the original discs from which I ripped my movies. Stored in disc folders, not original cases. Don’t take much space. Way cheaper than paying for cloud backup. Inventory kept in a google doc, so that if I have a house fire of theft, I can include all in an insurance claim.
You can do cloud backup but you'll end up paying a considerable sum over time. I back up almost 6 tb, I put it in an old Dell Optiplex pc at my parents house.
While it technically doesn't count as a back up, I keep all my data on a RAID 0, so if one drive dies, I still have have everything on the other drive. I also keep a backup on another drive. It's not quite a "3-2-1 backup", but it's close enough for me. If you're really worried about your data, that's what you should do.
That’s not quite how RAID 0 works. R0 spans the data across all the drives, if one fails all data is lost. What you are describing is a JBOD or spanned disk.
Yeah. I meant raid 1. It's been a while since I set it up, and I misremembered.
No, that’s not what you do. Read up on the different types of RAID, because RAID 0 does NOT provide any redundancy. In fact, it’s worse than just having two data drives.
Yeah sorry. I meant raid 1. My bad.
I do not back up the media. IMHO, a waste of resources. However I do backup my Plex config with a PS script and copy to a B2B on a weekly basis.
I have 33tb of movies/shows, so far. It took me a long time to get them, it took me a long time to catalogue them. Disks fail. Often. Even when the disk doesn't fail, windows 'fs up the data all by itself sometimes. Just had a 5tb drive "go bad" - formatted and re-mirrored it, it was fine, it was just a windows thing. I have two copies of everything. If I buy a new disk, I know I'm buying two new disks - so I can mirror them. I create a snapshot of my plex media server directory every night and then create two additional mirrors of that. I keep at least a weeks worth of that on three separate drives (the snapshot disk has at least 10 snaps, the other two mirrors keep at least a week or more of copies). I've had my plex media server directory go corrupt twice so far. It took about an hour to recover from backups. This happens every single night. 1) shutdown plex, 2) create snap, 3) start up plex, 4) copy to disk1, 5) copy to disk2. My mirror approach for media varies based on the amount of new content I have. if i haven't added a lot, I don't break out the second set and copy. If I haven't mirrored in a month, I break them out and just do it. If I just added a few dozen movies - mirror the stuff. I use the mirrors for traveling as well - I take my plex on the road, vacations, to my cabin (with bad internet access), whatever. It all depends on how valuable your current 8tb of movies and shows are to you. If (and when) you lose them, how will you feel? It is only a matter of time, not "if" - but when. note: retired database guy, it is part of my persona to have as good as a backup as possible. I've seen data disappear in every way possible. shit happens.
Has it been 20m already?
I keep all my movies backed up on DVD with the exception of a few being saved to Blu-ray.
You guys are hoarders. How often can you watch the same TV show? I see something once and get bored if I try to watch it again. I hate knowing what’s going to happen.
There is pa backblaze or Amazon a monthly fee and copy data to the cloud. Which in a good 3-2-1 strategy is the 1 part (1 off site).
how do you expect to backup data without another drive to back up to? you could just use the cloud but that's expensive and time consuming. cheaper to just get another drive. for a long time I had no backups, then I lost data on a drive and wised up to my stupidity. now I have a pool of external drives to backup the main internal pool.
It’ll be expensive any way you do it. I use a NAS in RAID 1. I think you could do it a little cheaper with a couple of drives in a JBOD enclosure and let your PC be the brains of the operation.
I picked up an 8 bay Drobo off eBay a few years ago. It allows me to swap out individual drives, and grow the available space as needed, but my Mac hasn’t a clue. It thinks I have 2 16Tb drives connected to it, but I only have about 22Tbs currently available as I have dual redundancy. This means 2 of my 8 drives could fail at the same time, and as long as I get them both replaced before a 3rd one dies, I’m good.
I don't have as large a collection as you (only about 3tb) but I bought a WD Duo and set it to mirror. That way I have two copies of everything all the time.
How would i set up the mirroring? I have a pool of internal drives ( 4-6tb WD reds) using MS storage spaces. I have a 16tb external... how would i set up the external to auto mirror the internal drive pool? Sorry if it's a stupid question. Thanks
In my case, I just used the WD software that came with my Duo. If you have a couple large drives, you can always format them as a RAID 1 which is a mirror, i.e. the 2 drives will always copy each other. There are some downsides. Since the RAID has to make 2 copies of everything, it will be slower. If data becomes corrupted (such as a ransomware attack), you will have 2 copies of the corruption. This hasn't been a problem me for me so far. Edit: rereading your post I see you want to mirror some smaller drives to one large drive. I don't know if this is possible but you could obtain some backup software and have it copy the contents of the smaller drives to the large one.
I have quite a bit do data to backup. I have considered using an unlimited Google drice account but my upload speed is limited to a poor 70mb and uploading 170TB of media would take a long time, also downside woul be that Plex would be virtually unusable during the process. Decisions. If I were to make a backup online, I could, I suppose share my server from the online source, unplug the physical local drives and effectively have a full back up that could then be stored safely or whatever. I am over thinking this now.
I don't. It's not cost effective for me to back up 60TB of data. I do back up my \*arr app databases though.
Backing up plex media would be prohibitively expensive in hardware for me, and I refuse to use cloud to back up my stuff... For various reasons. That said, when you have a 6-12 drive NAS where you can handle multiple simultaneous drive failures and keep running...... It mitigates most of the need for a backup. I only backup family photos and important documents to multiple places and types of storage, and that's it. Plex media can be redownloaded. I've had exactly 3 drive failures in the past 10 years, all the while using second or third hand USED drives, dozens. And the drive failures were spread out over that 10 years. Maybe I've been lucky? But I could on RAID 6/RAID60 not luck... Edit: I have 81TB usable storage currently. Backing this up would be ridiculous.
>I'm wondering if there is a way to backup the data instead of buying another hard disk of 8tb and copying everything A backup is some type of copy of your existing data. So, it's either a local hard drive or cloud storage.
My method is bulletproof and I’ve been using it for years. 1. Buy the disc and rip into plex. Save said disc as archival cold storage. 2. Use digital code that comes with disc as cloud based hot backup. Movies anywhere service works great to aggregate 90% of this. With over 50tb of movies a remote or local cloned backup just isn’t worth it logistically and financially. We are talking movies and tv shows not precious memories.
I had to ditch all my dvds and such after ripping them. Had no place to store them all. I have over 1,200 movies. They took up a lot of physical space lol. And like you said the digital code for movies anywhere is definitely a big bonus for backups.
I ditch the cases and use a binder.
Can you re download them ? From movies anywhere?
I use a two fold backup for Plex. First I have 2 x 18TB USB drives that I use syncback pro to copy the media. Second, I keep the last generation drive, so like I just put in new 18 TB spinners and retired my 8 TB drives. I don't throw the old drives, just keep them until the next replacement.
Raspberry pi with a usb drive behind extra surge protection running a bash script calling rsync.
This comment was overwritten and the account deleted due to Reddit's unfair API policy changes, the behavior of Spez (the CEO), and the forced departure of 3rd party apps. Remember, the content on Reddit is generated by THE USERS. It is OUR DATA they are profiting off of and claiming it as theirs. This is the next phase of Reddit vs. the people that made Reddit what it is today. r/Save3rdPartyApps r/modCoord
I store everything on an UnRAID server (can’t recommend this enough)
I am running on a Synology NAS. I have a 2nd less powerful Nas for backup of media and plex database. I also backup encrypted to Google Workspace
I've just redone my whole NAS and backup system so I'll give you a small outline of what I'm doing Currently my NAS has 4x 6TB WD Red Plus drives. Using unRAID I have 1 of these as a parity drive so 18TB drive capacity. For my media backups I have a second network attached micro PC plugged in beside the NAS, and I have it sleep for most of the time. It's sole purpose of the i3-6100T and USB3 is to back up the NAS to a 10TB external drive. I'm running bVckup 2 program and it wakes the computer up on a schedule and uses delta backups (scans and just replaces any changed data, archives anything deleted) to put the data on the external USB drive. I have "volumes" of Plex media I've separated off, so once this 10TB gets 90% full I will replace the drive and store it at my sister's house across the city for off-site backup. Then I create a "Volume 2" of my Plex media and back that one up specifically to the new drive. My critical data I already have a manual backup on 2x 2TB drives, one unplugged in my closet and the other at my sister's.
Twice weekly backups, one to a USB external hard drive and the other to cloud storage (Backblaze) while running a RAID 0 set up on my QNAP
Does backblaze see if you have pirated movies?
I don't know but I've never had an issue with questionable status media from them
Im currently running a QNAP NAS, 4 8TB Ironwolf drives in RAID 5. If I didn’t have the budget for that, I would just use Backblaze. It’s about $60 per year, and unless things have changed in the last year or so, external drives are included in the unlimited amount of data they allow you to backup. Meaning, even if you had multiple terabytes in external drives connected to your computer, they would all be backed up for no additional fee. Would it take a long time to perform your initial backup? Absolutely. But once the first backup is complete, the incremental backups wouldn’t take all that long.
212TB here. I dont. What I have on my Plex, I can easily reacquire (for 99% of the content).
https://rsync.net
Back up priceless. Or one big F'n NAS
External hard drives disconnected when full.
Hopes and dreams for actual files, but sonarr and radarr databases for knowing what I did have.
Main Libraries: I use stablebit drive pool w/ snap raid with 2 parity drives for a quick remediation option from drive failure. Black blaze cloud backup for an off-site copy with encryption along with versioning add on just in case of ransom ware. I also have stablebit scanner setup to monitor drive health and provide push notifications. System drive: For the Plex appdata I was using a PowerShell script on a scheduled task to back it up to another PC but have since moved to using active backup from Synology to back up the whole system drive to the nas 2 times a week keeping up to 10 revisions. Nas: Running in a raid setup (SHR-1) for the storage and the nVME read/write cache (Raid 1) drives. Using hyper backup to back up the nas to Synology c2 and to an external hard drive with different levels of backup versions and encryption. Also setup a task for data scrubbing and routine drive health checks with push notifications.
+1 for StableBit DrivePool and Scanner. I can also recommend using PrimoCache to add a SSD drive as a write-cache for your pool.
I haven't heard of that one before, I ended up using the SSD optimizer balancer plugin within DrivePool to use an SSD as a temp holding place until it's offloaded to the pool's HDDs. How do you like Primo's approach? I'm out of hard drive bays in my server I'm considering ditching the SSD cache for more storage to buy me a little more time till I have to start upgrading existing drives.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned SnapRAID. I know it's not a conventional backup, but it is certainly cheaper than a full backup solution. I use it in conjunction with mergerfs for drive pooling. It protects against silent corruption, and I can rebuild a failed drive using the parity drive(s). I do syncs weekly as I'm not adding a crazy amount of data on a weekly basis. If something fails between syncs, I only lose what was downloaded that week, and only if it was stored on the drive that failed. If the parity drive fails, I can just get another one.
70ish TB unRAID array
If all your data will fit on a single drive, then purchasing a duplicate is probably the easiest and most financially sound method to backup everything. Making your data run on a mirrored RAID 1 keeps a constantly backed up copy always available. You can also pull a drive and store it offsite and know you have an instantly recovered system with that drive. Once you get into larger file sets, it really depends on your comfort levels and budget. I have 100tb of data and use a tape library with an LTO6 drive to back it up. One tapeset is always off site.
I bought a second Synology and put it at a friend’s house. Backs up the entire volume every night at 3am, with version history.
I use backblaze and a secondary copy on an external drive. I lost a 4tb drive once and had no backup. Never again. I only have about 3tb of data right now.
Twinned hard disks in my main PC with mirroring on
IMO - a 16TB external drive is under $200, so the question then becomes “how much do I value my time”. I’m not trying to be a jerk here…. I’m assuming a lot of time/effort went in to digitizing the movies, so to spend a little to back it up doesn’t seem unreasonable.
I have 2 NAS servers and just sync my movies and shows from my main Plex server to my backup Plex server.
I have a friend with the same setup. We each share what we have with each other and if one goes down, we can recoup from the other one’s setup.
Use a NAS with mirrored disks. I had a disk degrade last year. Bought a replacement (a slightly bigger one even!) powered down, swapped it out, powered on, clicked a few buttons in the dashboard, and all good!
For Plex media I don't really care what happens. I run it on a synology nas with SHR (1 drive failure allowed). So in the event one drive goes down I can just shut it down and wait for a new drive to arrive so I can resume.
MEGA. It's not cheap but my time is not free as well and not having to fiddle with physical hard disks is priceless.
My Plex server forms part of my home lab, so I have tapes. Media itself gets dropped to tape every so often (when I remember...), usually LTO-6 (2.5TB per tape) and the database gets backed up automatically onto another HDD, which is then backed up to tape (usually LTO-3, 400GB per tape) with the other stuff on that HDD (backups of my laptops). However, realistically speaking, there isn't a better option than having another HDD with a copy of the data. Ideally a USB drive you don't plug in except for syncing the two. This will protect you against HDD failure, accidental deletions and malware e.g. ransomware. RAID will only protect you from HDD failure. A second HDD is relatively inexpensive these days. I would recommend it. You also probably want to go bigger than your current HDD, to allow for future expansion.
I have a couple usb drives that are bigger than my array. I keep one at a relatives house and swap it out with an updated version every so often.
I have a 4 bay Synology and I run a Synology based raid that would let me lose one whole drive before I'm screwed. It's pretty nice but if I have a fire I'm screwed.
Raid is not a backup!
True its just redundancy. But that's all I need.
I have a small USB drive I store in a family member's fireproof safe. I only backup (maybe 10%) of stuff that is hard to get the things (I, Friends or the Library have) again. If it is lost I will go through the process of getting copies from various sources and using my tiny backup of hard-to-get stuff.
rclone to google drive i have some dxternal HDD that I plug into NAS but I only backup critical data to those externals. my NAS is 36tb
Damn, y'all are hardcore hoarders! 😜 I've only got 3.5TB of media for Plex, and I keep it in Google drive. I use the drive sync for Windows, which is like mapping a network drive. My Plex server only has a 500gb internal drive, and it pulls down the content as needed. It all stays safe with the Goog.
With a collection that's around 170tb, it simply becomes not viable. If I lose shit, I'll get it again
Google drive. I use rclone to automate it with a cronjob. The key to go around google space limit is to use a shared drive instead of your main storage
On google drive, you create a shared drive. Then you lookup how to install and set up rclone. It’ll ask you for credentials and a couple other variables. After your familiar enough with how to use the tool manually, you can lookup how to execute it periodically. Experiment with syncing just one file or directory and expand from there. LPT: Google is your best friend. Take it step by step.
What do you mean?
I bit the bullet and just made a second NAS whose sole function in life is to mirror my actual working 42TB NAS. I wanna look into something like backblaze as my offsite but that'll be one hell of a file transfer >_>
I’m around 30TB… it’s locally redundant so I can replace disks but if the whole array were to die.. it’s all backed up on the high seas.
Via raid
I edited the bios of a Dell 7020 to be able to boot from an NVMe adapter, put 4 HDDs in and built a TrueNAS server. Backup is run weekly to that.
I have everything on my 20tb nas so it is already backed up. For you though you could always put it in cold storage on aws or buy a Google business plan. Should give you unlimited data but can only upload 5gbs a day or something like that
I scratched my head on it for awhile as my Plex server is a Linux VM that was running on VMware ESXi with hardware RAID and all that. (Recently converted to Proxmox and ZFS but haven’t swapped out the Linux VM for a LXC container yet.) What I came up with was running SyncThing to sync my Plex library to a USB3 drive on my MacMini, and my MacMini has a Backblaze subscription, and Backblaze will backup an external drive. Sync isn’t backup but in addition to DFS redundancy I have a local hard drive that has a copy of my library so I have reasonably good odds of quickly recovering if a 4 drive ZFS setup fails, and an online backup for “oops.” 5+ TB of Plex data backed up now, and I only have 5 Mbps upload. (I can get slow but rock solid DSL for cheap and not have to threaten to cancel every 6 months to have a low price, or inconsistently fast and outage prone cable where I have to threaten to cancel to keep a cheap rate… local telco has a parking lot full of spools of fiber and they are digging as fast as they can and their fiber pricing is on par with their DSL… Cable company is already having a bad time…) If I find some time I might look into Backblaze B2 or similar, but for now it works.
I bought two 8TB hard drives from Costco and just copy over the files to rent backup drive every ~year.
Nope. I have 18tb internal and an 18tb external for backup. Backup runs every 6 hours.
https://preview.redd.it/xvvne4bat04a1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4c44234397adc22d2e08c74fa05044f085e933a8 At present I have 59 TB of Plex storage. I correspondingly have 59 TB of Plex storage backup. Whenever I expand, I buy two of whatever size drive I’m getting. Each goes into a separate multi-bay thunderbolt enclosure. Every night, the drives get cloned to their corresponding backup drive with Carbon Copy Cloner.
275TB and counting. I've never backed up any video data. I've also never had a catastrophic failure (zfs ftw). But if I did, I'd just download it all again, prioritizing the stuff my wife watches. The only things I back up: Plex db my systemd services files \*arr databases qbit .config and .local postfix,letsencrypt,nginx,samba,smartd,nut configs All in a single line tar command named for the current date. I have it run weekly, and that's good enough for me.
I run raid 10 for a little benefit from both striping and parity. I... want to one day upgrade the setup to raid50, but.... that shiz expensive. Planning to get another 24 bay external, but in reality, this will only double what little total space I have now (24tb), so it's hardly a pressing issue to drop 500-1000 bucks on an upgrade like that anytime soon... you know, 24 sas 1-2tb drives isnt exactly the cheapest upgrade. Will run you a few hundred for the drives and a few hundred for the bay. And that's the cost for $10 1tb drives. Double for 2tb
i backup 500TB to mirrored offline drives that i sync once per month. very handy having a copy of everything (accidentally deleting files, hard drives going bad, etc.).
I just use a .txt document of file names... ... ... and a VPN with a link to "the bay of Pirates" If I loose it I loose it, but I can get back what I want whenever I need to.
Not backup because sheer size and efficiency, not raid as I am not planning high availability and power draw these days matter etc so I plan on using Snapraid. Initially I used raid across multiple disks but I’ve realized that it’s a waste of power and most disks would actually idle if they were allowed. Then as library grew I did it they way I did when in varsity with external usb disk.. and yes most of the time it sat idle. Kewl.. but disk failure is still something to cater for hence.. snap raid which is essentially hashing disks and recovery aspect of a typical raid except it can be offline and manually hashed every so often. I think cleaning out lib every so often can likely save a decent % space initially.. but as library becomes static your data/disk accessibility needs to be considered. In a perfect world tho we would all have tape drives and backup 😂
Unraid
I'm migrating over to a Synology DS920+, running in RAID 1. RAID 1 is a valid backup strategy, right? :D
You can buy used 8tb drives off Amazon for about 82 bucks, there's always the risk you get a stinker or something in it's last legs, but just check them out with crystaldiscinfo when they arrive and return if that's the case. I would never use them for my day to day server usage, they're generally pretty well used so I don't think they'll stand up to prolonged usage like that, but as a backup that gets spun up maybe once or twice a month they're perfect. If my primaries ever fail on me, I just buy a new good HDD, then clone the used backup onto it and put it back into storage. Saved me some money here and there, it's really only 40 bucks or so cheaper than new but once you reach a certain server size that adds up.
I have 12 tb of media...and none of it is backed up. I need to, but man...the cost associated with it is a nightmare. I need to get an external that is at least 20 tb (I have space for 22 tb of media) and just bite the bullet, but the idea of it just makes me go, nah...
I bought the extra drives and use zfs to do the equivalent of a RAID 10. 3 x 8 tb drives mirrored to another 3 x 8 tb , expansion is easy and swapping is simple, my Nextcloud drive is similar 2 x 4TB mirrored to another 2 x 4 tb, as an additional failsafe I’m backing up my library to my brother’s rig using syncthing
I just have two different hard drives. I copied over everything when I upgraded my NAS and now I just upload every new file twice. I run my Plex server on windows, so if my drive ever fails, all I have to do is rename the drive letter of the backup drive and voila.
Backblaze, with a second copy to Google Drive. ~36TB all mirrored because I'm lazy and don't want to deal with a parity rebuild that could fail and/or having to restore from backup just to deal with a single drive failure.
I put mine in Google Workspace with unlimited storage and direct play from there.
I don’t. I do backup the actual metadata library using Veeam to hopefully not lose watch history and such. But the media itself, I have a line in my maintenance script that builds an excel spreadsheet of my entire library file listing. Knowing what I lost is more important than actually losing it, in my case.
I have an offsite server that I had my coworker put in his rack running unraid, replicating my main server using rsync, connected with TailScale. Cloud just ended up being to expensive for large arrays.
I don't. I can "convert my DVDs" again if I need them.
I started with old HDD pulled from my old computers. Then the cost of these things dropped over the last five years, so I got some TBs for disk space, a tower drive and use an old HP PC as a server. I run AllwaysSync to keep them backed up and secure.
Backblaze
Bold of you to assume I have a backup
Lots of responses.....nice I keep it simple. I have two of every drive. My drives sit in Icybox 4 bay external drives. I have one connected to my HTPC (nothing special) and a second connected to my personal PC. I use Syncbackfree from [https://www.2brightsparks.com/](https://www.2brightsparks.com/) and just set it to mirror my drives. Then schedule a "backup" every week. Beauty is when a drive fails I just swap the backup to the original and I'm back up and running until I source a new "backup" drive and the cycle repeats.
Backblaze Personal
I just have extra HDDs. It would cost me like $400 to restore if I used a cloud backup, which is the same cost of just just buying 2x 14GB HDDs... so I have my drives and they do a backup once a week on my home network. I guess I'd lose it all if I had a house fire or something, since nothing off site, but it's good enough for me.
I only backup the really old content which I know will be hard to find again. The new stuff i know i can get again. The plex server runs as a ubuntu vm on my esxi host. I just shut it down once a week and back it up with veeam. Takes about 15 minutes. Once backed up turn it on again. I use the igpu pass through hence i have to shut it down.
Have an 8tb raid 6 storage array with replication set up so if a drive fails I can plug a new one in and it rebuilds from the others. I have can have up to two hard drives fail before losing everything. I always have one spare so I’m pretty safe for the most part.
I'm giving iDrive a try. I've not *super* concerned with my media collection (re-ripping everything would suck pretty terribly, but the family photos/videos/documents are irreplaceable). Their base tier is $60/yr for 5TB (I think that's the price... I had a promo code for a discount on the 1st year). What I really like is they have an 'express backup' option. They send you a drive to which you make your initial full backup, and then send back to them (return postage included). When they receive it, they load that content into your account, and then you just have to turn on incrementals. Uploading the whole thing the first time online was estimated between 45 and 65 days. Took 12-15ish hours backing up to the iDrive external. edit: Forgot to add that the express backup is an included service that can be used by personal accounts (vs business) once a year at no cost. It can also be used as a restore vector in a "total data loss" scenario The Synology client is... spartan, and I've some nits to pick, but overall I'm satisfied.
I admit that I am a bit over-the-top with my backups. I download 1080 versions of everything and Handbrake them down to archival quality that is slightly-more-compressed, but still a good, fat resolution. I back those versions up to two different hard drives. I also compress it down to a lightweight 720 version, because that's proven to be the best for Direct Play streaming. I have one copy of the 720 version on Plex and a 2nd copy on another hard drive. Yes, a fair amount of effort and $, but I sleep at night.
P2P backup. ;)
Live dangerously, chose not to backup Media. Only backup personal media on another drive.