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.
What would you do?
I only backup data that I either can’t replace or would have to spend significant effort to replace. Most of what’s on a media server doesn’t fall into that category.
Media Server? No content backup at all.
If you lose everything, just download new stuff you want to watch, or redownload a few TV series/movies.
Music? There are streaming services.
Only backup configurations and maybe application data, so that the reinstall will be easy. Those few kB/MB could sit anywhere. I’m using GitLab for this purpose.
Edit: Images! If you have your photos on there, back them up! They can’t be replaced!
The streaming services wont work if you have no access to interner lol.
At my last job I had to travel to my work dailly for over an hour in one way, for almost the whole travel I didn’t have any network or phone reception.
Will much rather just have music on a media server and a client that allows me to locally download some of my favouritr music for such situations like navidrome and synfonium than pay for spotify premium to allow me to do that.
Streaming services let you just mark playlists for offline use, I have my whole spotify library offline.
Most streaming services have that under a paywall, which in that case I will much rather just make my own if I have a system to do it.
We’re talking about replacing lost content here though. And as such you can use the streaming services as a “backup” by re-ripping your whole collection if you lose it.
I’m actually doing this now as part of a library cleanup. Zotify + beets are a great combo to pull down vast quantities of music and properly sort and tag it.
Then I stream it to my phone in my truck using ampache and ultrasonic, which does have a local buffering option.
However if you have some exotics that you ripped from rare discs, demos or prerelease, live recordings with sentimental value etc. I would suggest keeping those properly backed up. I don’t have many of these, but the ones I do have are backed up both cloud and offsite.
Do people really have so much music that it’s get’s hard to just keep it backed up?
I personally never went over 1gb in size of my music library,
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’m probably an outlier, but I have a full 3-2-1 backup. Over 100Tb myself, with it all backed up. I have a safe off-site I back everything up to weekly and then annually I do a full backup to LTO tapes.
I lost my media once. I don’t want to go through that again.
Wow!
Given your previous experience, your approach is understandable.
I have an old raid setup on which the card died, and Crashplan deleted my Backups when the array went offline (yea, I was pissed)l.
One of these days I’ll find a card on ebay, recover everything, and back it up again.
If I’d had a second backup…
Tapes aren’t bad, I can get few dozen TB off eBay for a couple hundred. Drive was crazy though. Dropped 2 grand on it and it still isn’t that good of a drive.
If you woke up and all of that data was gone tomorrow but you didn’t care, then there is no reason to back it up IMO.
Hell, I download things multiple times sometimes just to spite Comcast.
