Media Back Up Solution

[Diagonal]

Hello,

 

Last year I started planning on creating a new Plex Server for my digital media. Right now I'm lost on what solution I should use for backing up and protecting my media. My plan was to originally set everything up with Raid5 (Someone also mentioned to me RaidZ2, not sure what that is).  But it was also pointed out to me that Raid is NOT a backup and that it only protects data from a hardware(HDD) failure and not against accidental deletion, corrupted files, or viruses/malware. I'm not worried about accidental deletion, my main concern was if my HDD failed or files became corrupted. Is Raid 5 still the option I should go? Or is there a different route I should be looking at? Should I be looking at a way to back up the hard-drives on top of a Raid configuration? I've just spent a lot of time digitizing my media, and do not want to loss it and have to start from scratch. 

 

Thanks in advance for any advice that may help

[Electronics Wizardy]

You want backups aswell.

 

So if you have a NAS with your media, you want someother box to back that up to, like external hdds, a cloud service like aws or b2, or Lutheran nas. Snap shots are also nice to have .

 

21 minutes ago, Diagonal said:

I'm not worried about accidental deletion

You should be, user error is very common.

[WereCatf]

23 minutes ago, Diagonal said:

Is Raid 5 still the option I should go?

Raid 5 or 6 is still a good choice on the primary server, you just have to ask yourself the question: "how important is to me that I will never lose most of my video-collection?"

 

I, for example, have a machine with a big collection of movies and whatnot, several servers, all sorts of personal files, including books, programming-code etc., and I've come to the decision that if shit were to hit the fan, I could still tolerate losing all the video-content; I've set up a secondary machine elsewhere, where I back up weekly everything aside from the video-content, but on the primary machine everything resides on a RAID5, so all the video-content is still protected at least against corruption and drive-failure. I just can't afford to set up a secondary machine with as much storage as the primary one, so something had to give, and I could always get most of the video-content back -- it's just a lot work.

[Windows7ge]

24 minutes ago, Diagonal said:

RaidZ2

Without going into too many complicated details raidz2 is RAID6. It lets you lose up to 2 disks while maintaining all the arrays data. If an option it is preferred over RAID5 for better array integrity.

 

How you back up all your data is dependent on what method you're interested in. Ideally you would have 3 copies of your data. One on a local or NAS/Server, 1 on a backup NAS/server, then one in cold storage (not connected).

 

Do you want to keep your data on your local system? Do you want to stream all of it off a server? Having a second network device to hold a copy would be a good step in the right direction.

[jde3]

RAID 5 is depreciated in industry. (for good reason). You can use what you want in your home tho.

 

I question the necessity of backing up media from Plex/Emby to any serious degree as as it's super large and expensive to do and if it's downloaded you can re-download it and if it's encoded from physical media you can re-encode it. Suit yourself though.. people value data differently.

[Diagonal]

On 8/5/2018 at 4:32 PM, Windows7ge said:

Do you want to keep your data on your local system? Do you want to stream all of it off a server? Having a second network device to hold a copy would be a good step in the right direction.

I currently stream everything from the server (which currently is just a laptop with External HardDrives attached). That  is currently set up at a friends house who has better internet speeds than I do. He uses it locally, but I have to stream to my house. I guess in my budget to build a proper system to stream my content I should also include a budget for a second back up of everything. Thanks for everyone's advice.