I’m running my media server with a 36tb raid5 array with 3 disks, so I do have some resilience to drives failing. But currently can only afford to loose a single drive at a time, which got me thinking about backups. Normally I’d just do a backup to my NAS, but that quickly gets ridiculous for me with the size of my library, which is significantly larger than my NAS storage of only a few tb. And buying cloud storage is much too expensive for my liking with these amounts of storage.
Do you backup only the most valuable parts of your library?
I think I’m bad at this
I have 4 main places I put stuff:
My 2018 external 4tb WD HDD (filled up at around ¾)
My 1tb laptop ssd
My 256gb phone
My laptop’s previous 2016 1tb hdd
On my external drive I put ~all of my data; my camera files, my screenshots, my phone’s app data (like expenses, call logs, contacts, sms, game data, fitness logs), documents etc.
On my laptop I have some stuff which I havent synced to my external drive for around 3 years (oops), but they probably arent the most important stuff.
On my phone I have a lot of important stuff, like around ⅔ of my total camera files (I try to keep the most important ones) and my app data.
On my old laptop’s 1tb hdd I keep movies/series and personal books/notebooks I have scanned. Those data dont exist anywhere else. If they get lost, especially the scanned books, it’s gonna be bad, because it both took a lot of time to scan them and I have thrown away many of the physical books.
If my external drive fails, around ¼ of the data it contains might be unrecoverable. They might not be the most important files, but still it’s gonna hurt a loooot.
I’m currently in the process of reorganizing my files on my laptop and my external drive for various reasons, some of them being 1) I will clear unnecessary/duplicate/temporary/etc files (which will reduce the used space) and 2) it will help me sync my files better.
In the near future I’ll probably buy 500gb lifetime on filen.io (cloud storage) to keep the most important stuff, possibly another 4tb drive to mirror my current one to this and ~hopefully I’ll make a nas next year to sync everything there.
It’s just to expensive for me tho🫤. Filen storage is around 100€, 4tb another 100€ (or I might buy 6tb at 150€) and the nas I want to make costs around 800€…
I want to make a nas to both store and stream stuff. Like a personal home server. I’m thinking of getting 2 12tb hdds and have one of two asynchronously mirror itself onto the other (that way one of the two will be off/disconnected ~most of the time, protecting it from wear and cyber attacks (not sure of the latter will work)).