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?
“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.