Looking to build an UnRaid server for video editing archival

[MattRobertson]

Hi all,

 

Been a lurker on here for a while but finally looking to try and build my own big boy server and looking to see if I’m heading in the right direction.

 

I’m a Video Editor by trade, I make my money freelancing and need a much better solution for archival and offloading.

 

Currently I have a bunch of WD 10tb easystores that I have used for offloading stuff from my working drive to, and I have multiple backups of important stuff and am working on getting it all backup up to backblaze which of course is taking an eternity.

 

I have solid backups of my work drive, my two 2tb Samsung 860 evo’s are in raid 0 to make a 4tb drive and backed up twice locally daily and then a third time to the cloud continually. My goal is to build a server to host all these offloads. They would be low-read so speed is not important, I just need a better solution than a million different hard drives lying around. I just wanted to post here to see if I’m on the right track. Been searching the sub and trying to read as many threads as possible but just wanted a vote of confidence before I go ahead with this.

 

By my calculations I have roughly 70tb of hard drives with data on them. Some of those are redundant duplicated but likely around that much data. Many of them are 10tb easystores. Some are 6tb my books, and other random hard drives.

My plan is next time the easy stores are on sale, buy 4-5 more of them, install them into a server I build using parts from serverbuilds.net and then migrate the data from my currently used drives to those new drives and add drives as I can. I would like to use two parity drives also for security, but really this data is not mission critical. It’s all things that I need to hold on to but if I lose it is not devastating.

 

My other option would be to buy a Synology 8 bay or something and call it a day. This is how I make a living so if you guys really think that’s just a much more elegant solution I’m open to dropping the ~1k on one of those units though I see user built servers being praised on here.

 

I know this has likely been covered before but I have searched as much as I can and just wanted to get some input from people smarter than me on this!

 

I have experience building PC's and currently edit daily off my Hackintosh which has been an absolute godsend.

 

Thanks!

[tech.guru]

so, consider a few things. lets make sure the terminology is clear

 

disaster recovery

     this is as you said offloading data to the cloud is your current solution.

     this is in case of natural disaster, hardware failure, human error.

availability

     this is your raid levels to protect you in case a drive goes down you can still working. this doesnt provide backups or disaster recovery that you are using in the cloud.

 

so what is your recovery plan if something were to happen?

are you able to copy all 70tb from the cloud back locally? costs for bandwidth from the cloud? caps in transfers?

how long would that take? is the time-frame acceptable?

 

if i were you i would look at your entire solution. obviously Synology 8 bay is going to give you a more reliable solution with an ssd drive for caching versus software raid on community hardware. you should also select drives designed for NAS with high MTBF.

 

but thats only piece map out your BCP, and ensure that the cloud provider contact allows you to be able to transfer the data from backups you expect to and figure out the time using your internet connection speed and any caps for how long that would take.

[MattRobertson]

2 minutes ago, tech.guru said:

so, consider a few things. lets make sure the terminology is clear

 

disaster recovery

     this is as you said offloading data to the cloud is your current solution.

     this is in case of natural disaster, hardware failure, human error.

availability

     this is your raid levels to protect you in case a drive goes down you can still working. this doesnt provide backups or disaster recovery that you are using in the cloud.

  

so what is your recovery plan if something were to happen?

are you able to copy all 70tb from the cloud back locally? costs for bandwidth from the cloud? caps in transfers?

how long would that take? is the time-frame acceptable?

 

if i were you i would look at your entire solution. obviously Synology 8 bay is going to give you a more reliable solution with an ssd drive for caching versus software raid on community hardware. you should also select drives designed for NAS with high MTBF.

  

but thats only piece map out your BCP, and ensure that the cloud provider contact allows you to be able to transfer the data from backups you expect to and figure out the time using your internet connection speed and any caps for how long that would take.

Totally, thanks for the thoughts. Yeah as of now I would just seek to offload fully to the cloud via Backblaze. It's a tedious process and it will take months as it's already taken months to upload what I already have. Their B2 software allows full unlimited backups of NAS systems as I understand. I just don't have the budget unfortunately to mirror that entire NAS fully on a local level, but I will have second and third backups of critical files that are on the nas. Some of this backup is for example just old raw footage that I'd like to store but have no financial ties to.

 

Backblaze is usually really good about restores too, not sure what the transfer rates are but I'm not super worried about that as I don't see myself in a situation where I would need immediate downloads of those offloaded files really.