how much backing up would you do of a media server?
I have a nas with 2x10tb drives. I mostly just have music, movies and tv shows on it.
People talk about raid not being a backup, but is that relevant for non-original data? I mean I can always get the media again if need be. It would just be an inconvenience.
I have some rare media that I know would be extremely difficult to replace, so I back that up, but the general stuff is less important.
However, with rights holders constantly trying to move away from the idea of permanent physical ownership, some media will become harder and harder to find in their best or purest forms, disks will go out of print and the used market will start to slowly die as media ages and rots.
I only back up things that would make me sad if I lost it or cause me a lot of time-sensitive work. Personal data files and configuration files. Media? I wouldn’t sweat it if my media drive got corrupted by malware or a hack or a lightning strike. I’d just live with a smaller library until I get things re-download again. And I’d be ok if I can’t find a handful of the rarer things. Pictures of my family? Backed up locally and on a remote server with immutable backups. Configuration files? Synced with a remote git repository.
I backup my music, photos, docker settings and that’s about it. Daily backups to one external HDD, but recently setup a second backup that’s runs weekly juuuuust in case. The music is only because it’s taken me a long time to build upy library, and that would be painful to lose. TV, movies, meh.
I just want to add, you may not need to backup what you think you can redownload easily.
There are cases of series or movies being really difficult to find or it takes you a long time to find a working torrent. For those it definitely should make sense to back them up, but its a bit subjective feeling which ones those might be.
Another thing in my case, I got movies and seriea for my child on the server. He expects that is accessible, always, and is too young to understand that data can get lost. So I am also backing that up, it could be easily replaced but it would take me time and this would result in my child being unhappy. Not worth it!
Depending on how large your collection is, would you remember every item in it? How much effort did you put into organizing it?
IME it’s far more of an inconvenience and expense rebuilding data from scratch than properly backing it up. And the peace of mind from a robust, tried and true DR process is golden.
Well that’s my usual approach however we now live in the world of censored tv shows by netflix meaning some of the new media you may get might not be the original thing. :(
I do n+2 of my media. It’s overkill but I have the space. You might want local n+1 for convenience of restoring, but it’s not necessary. You could absolutely consider the ability to torrent something as one of your backups.
So technically I have n+3. If my house burns down (n+1), and my off-site storage (+1) explodes, I can always still torrent (+1).
I use Linode object storage for backups using Restic. 500gb of storage for 5eur/month.
I don’t backup logs, backups made by an app, cache, thumbnails and other stuff. I backup actual container data, so I can reatore it, restart docker and it works like nothing happened.
I only backup data I’ve generated myself, nothing that was autogenerated or downloaded from somewhere else.
This goes far beyond backing up since not a long ago I had to deal with emptying the house of a deceased person that had been locked for a while and got to the conclusion the only things worth keeping are original ones (photos, handwritten letters and so…). Anything that could have been bought somewhere else, no matter the antique it was resulted to be almost worthless, not just to me but also to pawn shops, as it seems to be easy to find the exact same thing somewhere else.
So I took that as a life learning and apply the same concept to my data :)
I only back up my music collection because I put extra effort into organising and tagging everything, plus some of it is rips of CDs not available anywhere. As for movies and TV shows, I only back up configurations and catalogues of the relevant apps, the contents themselves are 1) too big to be feasible to back up and 2) 99% of the time available to re-download.
This is how I do it. I have all my media on a raid 5 tho. Broken hdds are unavoidable in the long run, so I want protection for that. If something goes sideways at rebuilding, so be it. Most of the movies and shows I’m wondering what I save them for anyways. My music collection is worth more to me and backed up properly. Same goes for my personal stuff.
I have the equivalent of RAID 5 too, but mind the usual “RAID is not a backup” - if you deliberately delete something (or something goes wrong with an app managing your media), hardware redundancy won’t save you in any way; it only helps if the data is intact and you want to remedy a hardware failure.
Add comment