Backup overkill

corblimey

Since I ripped all of my DVDs and copied them to a storage drive, I've been thinking about my backup situation. I currently have a 3tb drive which I back up to 2 separate 1tb drives (the 3tb isn't full, but starting to get there). I then mirror those 2 1tb drives to another set of drives. The mirror drives are kept offsite (in my car boot as I keep forgetting to bring them into work)

This situation has worked well for me, the backup drives are in constant use, so I know if one fails, at which point the mirror becomes the backup. Of course if the backup fails and in the meantime because I use it so little the mirror has also failed, then I've got the hard drives on my PC.

So it seems to me that I've got 2 backups for everything, but since I've lost whole gigs of storage before, I've gone ultra redundant. Ideally, I guess a physical backup stored offsite or in a fireproof box and maybe the stuff I need right now on online backup would suffice, but that means remembering to connect up the backups every week when I do a backup, and hoping that the backup drives hadn't failed in the meantime.

I'd be interested in how others with massive media collections manage their backups. Googling is helpful, but there's nothing better than real world examples. (BTW, I still have all my DVDs so they sort of count as a backup too, even though when ripping, I found several that gave read errors, so that's not foolproof either)

I consider ripped/downloaded media to be replaceable so I just use non-striped disk redundancy (Flexraid).

Its pretty similar to unRAID except it runs inside your normal OS rather than being a dedicated storage box.

If a disk dies I can stick in a new one and recreate the data from it. Apart from that it is no different than having a bunch of separate drives in my PC. None of the hassle of traditional RAID setups.

Multiple backups, offsite backups etc, for me are overkill for a media collection.

corblimey

I'd agree with you, but ripping the DVDs has been a gigantic investment of time, I started about 4 weeks ago, and still have some way to go (ok, it's not 4 full weeks of ripping, I generally get through half a dozen per day) - doing that over again would break my heart and my will to live.

Yep, it is about finding a balance between the hassle of reripping and the expense/hassle of multiple backups. That balance is going to be different for everybody. If mirroring and off-site backup is right for you then that's what you should go for.

I have about 10TB of media so personally it would be too expensive to employ multiple backups, especially with the way prices went after the floods. My main concern is dead HDDs. With Flexraid I have recovered from a couple of disk failures already with no data loss.

In the event of something more catastrophic (fire, flood etc) tbh im not going to be too worried about my movie collection.

corblimey

Yeah, I'm not sure RAID (or even Flexraid which I assume is built on the same principles) is even necessary for me - if I lose a drive currently, worst case I'll have to wait until tomorrow to get my mirror. As I understand RAID, it's about getting back up to speed as soon as possible after a crash; I don't really think there will ever be an emergency 'must watch Back to the Future nooooo' situation.

I think maybe I just need to get more organised with my backup and mirror, maybe using the backup for a month and then swapping over; at least that way I'll be aware of any failures sooner - of course with constant use every other month, the chance of a failure increases anyway, so who knows? I like the idea of something like a NAS or even this but I don't think they let me do anything I'm not already doing (backup and mirror).

FlexRAID and unRAID are more about achieving redundancy without buying twice as many drives.

For example you may have 5x2TB data drives, and then to achieve single-disk redundancy you just need 1x2TB parity. So its more cost effective than mirroring where you would need to buy another 10TB.

Where they both differ from traditional RAID levels is that there is no striping. Every drive has its own filesystem and full, intact files. That's ideal for media storage where you don't really need massive throughput which is why unRAID is popular for storing large video collections.