RAID5 and unlimited downloads on my 1Gbps fibre. All I backup is my library metadata itself, using a 2N+C strategy.

“Cloud” storage is indeed more expensive. But depending where you live, you count the electricity cost in, and you use the storage ‘only’ for backups. Maybe it makes more sense to pay for remote storage in a datacenter. Check out Hetzner Storage Box, it’s what I use.

If it’s still too expensive, maybe ask a friend or family member (maybe someone that uses your media) to setup a nas at their home for backup purpose. (I use this for my media)

Make sure you encrypt your backups if you use a remote location for your backups.

You have to decide what’s valuable for you. For me my media is, I can just download everything again, but the time I put in to have every movie the correct subtitles without ads, the correct posters, metadata etc. I value my time, I don’t want to do it again if I loose everything.

I admit this is not a helpful answer but…

If you want to have hundreds of gigabytes or more of media storage plus backups, its going to be expensive. There is no secret cheap way.

This is what makes debrid options so appealing. You can amass terabytes of media data for a cheap monthly cost.

You can then supplement that with a small nas or drive of rare or hard to find media / offline selection in which case you could probably run raid 10 with the small amount that you would actually need to backup.

Remote storage (Pi at parents house with a big disk) and cron’ed btrfs send over ssh.

Raid 5 is the worst raid, at least move to 6

I feel like other people seeding is enough backup for me. I don’t backup my library at all.

I save the documents in a usb and format all my drives. Can’t have backup troubles if you never back anything up.

Personally, I back up everything on my NAS except my movie library, because that is something I can relatively easily restore by just downloading buying it again, and because it’s of course the biggest chunk of data. For the other data, I’m using a very affordable Hetzner server auction system with a lot of disks in a striped array. This gives me the maximum amount of storage, and given that I can just create the backup again should the stripe fail, I’m not worried about redundancy on the backup itself.

You can put a big hard drive in an external enclosure and use it for offline backups. There is no point in paying for cloud storage for something you can just download again if needed. Save the cloud storage for backing up non-replaceable data.

36tb? I’d go for tape. It has a higher upfront cost but it can store TBs of data.

Otherwise I’d go for mdisc, like I do. It’s basically a high quality Blu-ray up to 100GB

And of course store it in a different location.

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)).

Have you considered only backing up the data you can’t replace relatively easily? I would look into a strategy of periodically backing up the list of media in a format that can easily be imported into Radarr or whichever system you used to acquire them. Sure, if the worst happens it’ll take forever to redownload, but you can just prioritise the things you want to watch right now while everything’s rebuilding in the background.

Definitely do back up photos, documents and your home directory (excluding stuff like a steam library), but hopefully you should be able to fit all that on a NAS or external HD.

I have a shrine to the Omnissiah next to my server closet if that helps you

Add a disk and migrate to raid 6.

I switched to catch and release 5 or 6 years ago and never looked back.