Hello!! Some recent technical problems on my family’s NAS gave me a big scare and finally pushed me to figure out a way to back it all up. I’m asking here specifically because I really don’t know where to even starts because of the fact I’ve got just under 50 terabytes worth of data stored in a 7-disk RAID-5 and would prefer to keep it cheap. What are your suggestions?
Edit: thank you for all the suggestions, I’ll probably be considering using Backblaze for backups, or perhaps seeing if I can scrounge up old unused disks from people I know. Thank you all again <3
Tape Drive?
is the best resource for finding cheap personal digital storage, last i looked into it not sure how up-to-date that site is kept though
First thing is decide what data you have that can be readily replaced. e.g. publicly available Linux ISOs. Then remove that from your backup strategy. You may end up with a lot less data needing backup.
Exactly, you can just redownload them later. But pay attention if you have rare Linux ISOs, maybe because of their quality or if they’re in a specific language.
Slightly provocative take: Let it go, it doesn’t matter. The desire to hoard data is, like hoarding money, understandable but unnecessary. What do you do with all this media. You time on this planet is finite.
so trash all family memories. ok.
50 terabyte of family memories? Maybe trash 49 then. :)
Nobody said this here but storj is one of the cheapest storage out there and it’s has redundancy and is distributed. And if you have truenas, it’s kinda baked right in. They had some hiccups when communicating changes to the community, but overall nice folks.
$15/TB (I’m assuming USD) is incredible!
I am actualy paying about 5 bucks per terabyte, but I think I am still on old tarif… Oh wait they still offer it, its now called active archive and its 6 dollars per terabyte.
Tape is still the cheapest and best archival medium. Drives are expensive, but the actual tape is cheap. But 50TB might not be enough to justify.
The tape drive costs more or less 2000€ (without VAT), the tapes cost about 80-100 for a 15tb drive (and compressed capacity doesnt count as the to be backed up data is probably not just a database or text.
Don’t think there are much economic options beside finding the cheapest S3 storage or a secondary backup server.
I just came here to say exactly the same thing. Tapes for the long term, but you also have to take reaaaaaly good care of how they’re stored ie. don’t store them under the kitchen sink in your bathroom
My kitchen sink in the kitchen is fine though? What about the bathroom sink?
/s
I’m heavily researching tape for my data, I currently sit around 400TBs Total but only around 200 in data that id actually want to backup and can’t just redownload.
Iirc the break even point 100-150TB
ETA: that break even point might actually be lower now that I think about it since that number is probably outdated when I did it and doesn’t account for the shortage crap
My suggestion: Buy 3x 28TB drives. Mirror the data to them. Then move them off site.
The off-site location could either be a family member’s home where you can then sync to the drives over the internet. Or in a PO box nearby that you retrieve them from time to time to re-sync the data.
I would definitely keep them warm, as in a running machine.
Drives on a shelf die more often than always-on drives.
Really? Do you have any source on that?
If it’s true, I bet it’s only if they’re actually running without ever spinning down.
Nothng official, sorry, wish I did!
Mostly personal experience. But that experience is also shared among a group of peers and friends in the SMB space where their clients think they can keep stuff on externals in an office safe only to find they’ve gone tits up nearly every time they pull them out a couple years later. And not the enclosures, the drives themselves - they all have external drive readers for just these kinds of circumstances.
In the enterprise you’d get laughed out of a datacenter for even suggesting cold drives for anything. Of course that’s based around simple bit rot concerns, and why file systems like ZFS use a methodology to test/verify bits on a regular basis.
If nothing else, that bit rot should be enough of a reason to not store data on cold drives. It’s not what drives were designed (or tested) to do.
But what about Amazon Glacier? That’s exactly what they do. Cheap storage on cold drives.
In the backup world, 50TB isn’t really a lot, and you’re not really ready to talk about tape systems or maintaining an always-on disk system. Also, HDD’s have been getting more expensive due to AI idiocy. But, cheapest is probably a second raid system, like 4x 20tb drives. Do the backup at home and then move the backup system off site and either keep it spinning, or make sure to spin up and test the individual drives every so often.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NFS Network File System, a Unix-based file-sharing protocol known for performance and efficiency SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SFTP Secure File Transfer Protocol for encrypted file transfer, over SSH SMB Server Message Block protocol for file and printer sharing; Windows-native SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.
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How much of that 50 terabytes is media downloaded from the Internet? Because the cheapest way would be to trust that it’s already backed up on the Internet and then use one of the usual services like B2 by Backblaze or Storagebox by Hetzner to back the rest of it up.
It’s kinda complicated because a good chunk of that is data that is technically redownloadable, but has been tweaked (most of my movies are a multiplexed high-res eng version merged with audio from lower-res dub.) Either way, thank you for the suggestions
I suggest making a script that uses existing software (ie mkvtoolnix) to extract the dubbed audio and then backing that up and l leaving the high quality video to the Web to backup.
I know it’s less than ideal but you can automate both extracting it and muxing it back in. It may take some effort to setup, but it’s well worth the huge recurring costs incurred from backing up that amount of data.
Just an idea to consider.
This is a good compromise. When I was tight on backup space, I just had a “backup” script that ran nightly and wrote all the media file names to a text file and pushed that to my backup.
It would mean tons of redownloading if my storage array failed, but it was preferable to spending hundreds of dollars I didn’t have on new hardware.
If you back up the modern day Arrs databases then it’s essentially the same thing and already built into the software that will redownload them for you. That’s my solution. I backup my backups of those, of my home assistant, my Immich library, my Nextcloud, etc… Pirated media is, for the most part, out there backed up on several places already.
This is what I do - well, I back up there entire container. But functionally the same.
There’s only a few pieces of media that I have backed up manually due to their rarity, but even those I don’t really care about.
But… can we trust that we will have stuff available on the internet in the future?
Exactly. Regimes want to kill this as fast as they can to milk us of every penny witghr their shitty services. I dont trust any sites will stay up.
You can replicate across more than one provider and do automated regular monitoring that backups are still accessible.
If one goes down you hopefully have time to figure out a replacment before the other(s) do.
Probably not worth it for a bunch of xvid dvdrips or historical archives of full system-level backups but for critical data it’s sensible.
All my TV shows and movies, I don’t bother. But my 150gb mp3 library I keep backed up because it’s much smaller and I know some of that stuff is not readily available online.
Yeah, if 90% of that is movies/shows, then you really don’t need a backup of that as you can always re-download it. Then you have a 5TB backup problem which is much cheaper to solve.
Because the cheapest way would be to trust that it’s already backed up on the Internet
That’s a shit load of downloading. LOL wow!
I have 45TB of data and the majority of that is definitely downloaded media. They call us data hoarders for a reason.
Oh sure I understand data hoarding. I was just thinking, to restore 50 tb from the internet is going to take more than a fortnight.
Imagine having to back up 50Tb to S3 :p
Not everyone has a symmetric connection.
Backblaze personal is about the cheapest I know of: $99 per year unlimited. Caveats would be that the drives have to be physically connected to the computer doing the backup. Additionally, should you ever need to restore the backup, the best way would be to buy a 10 tb drive from Backblaze, restore the data, then send the drive back for a full refund x 5. Restoring 50 tb online would be excruciating.
But isn’t it available only for Windows/macOS?
Yes, however you could run it in Wine, or create a Windows VM.
4-bay DAS with a handful of big HDDs in RAIDZ1. Load it up, then store it in your office at work or at a friend or family member’s house. Retrieve, update, and scrub somewhere between once every few weeks to once every few months, depending on how often your critical data is changing.
Sort your data into stuff you absolutely need to keep (personal files and such) and stuff you’d be okay with losing (less important files, device backups, downloads you can redownload, etc). Then only back up the former. As for backup medium, ServerPartDeals often has some pretty good deals on storage; they were selling refurbished 12TB drives for $80 a pop a while back.
Gee, that’s a lot of homework.
Is it data you would trust in the hands of random strangers on the internet? If so, I can easily store 50TB for you, as long as it’s temporary.
Oh, and I have various storage solutions in various jurisdictions, so if you have any preferences as to places you do NOT want to store it, that’s something you need to hilight.
… this is odly nice of you. Sorry, but are you really willing to trust a random internet stranger to store up to 50TB of data on your machines? The data could be literally anything and might put you into trouble 😵💫
No offense, just curiosity
