This is a PSMA!
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Here to plug SpinRite for the health of your backups
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A RAID is essentially a way to have multiple "hard drives" connected in a way that looks as if it's one drive so you can have a ton of storage.
A NAS is a sort of like a remote storage device. Not quite a PC, but more than just a storage drive.
Not sure how you'd go about doing any of that with a MacBook.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Adding to that, depending on your RAID configuration you can have one or more drives fail and not lose any data.
Also you can install things like Plex media server or Immich and set up basically your own equivalent of Netflix server or google photos and look at your media from pretty much anywhere.
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What's a good medium to back up to, assuming I don't want to pay for a RAID setup?
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To be fair, RAID is not backup for itself but if they have their stuff on a computer and then sync it to a NAS RAID then that's backup.
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So glad that I don't have much important data, a very simple bash script backs up stuff that kinda matters (do I need that 8 year old minecraft save?) and it totals about 30GB currently.
The actually important bit is a 57kB Keepass database. Plus 50MB of compressed/encrypted data of questionable importance - literally never decrypted them other than to test it was readable, but I have been told these documents are "important" so whatever. They are there and the originals burned because I don't want to keep a shitload of paperwork around that looks worthless to me. Got a small folder for stuff that probably should be kept like birth certificates, when that folder gets full I sort and the least important stuff is recorded digitally and physical copies destroyed.
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To be fair, RAID is not backup for itself but if they have their stuff on a computer and then sync it to a NAS RAID then that's backup.
Yeah, the idea is that you should have another copy that is disconnected from the main one, if you have that then you do have a backup.
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This post did not contain any content.wrote on last edited by [email protected]
I have 5-1/4" floppies from the mid 80's that still work.
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ZFS has bit rot protection.
I am currently buying hardware for building my first NAS.
For inspiration, this is what I am building:
Case: White Jonsbo N4
CPU: Ryzen 4600G
RAM: Corsair Vengence 32GB DDR4 3600mhz
Boot drive: Crucial T500 500GB nvme drive.
Storage drives: Seagate Ironwolf Pro NT (I have not yet decided of what capacity I will use).
PSU: Corsair SF750 (overkill, I know)A piece of advice with ZFS, get the largest drives you can afford.
Expanding ZFS is painful and it's wayyyyy easier to just start big then to grow big.
ZFS is also a RAM hog, max out your ram cause that.
If you want to add meta data caches, do it when you first build the array.
The L2-arc cache and SLOG don't do what you think they will. Make sure you really understand them before you throw them on. They're easy to take off though.
Last but certainly not least, ZFS is a money sink. It was made for enterprise solutions, meaning it benefits from more money being thrown at it than say XFS. Figure out what's good enough and live with it.
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ZFS has bit rot protection.
I am currently buying hardware for building my first NAS.
For inspiration, this is what I am building:
Case: White Jonsbo N4
CPU: Ryzen 4600G
RAM: Corsair Vengence 32GB DDR4 3600mhz
Boot drive: Crucial T500 500GB nvme drive.
Storage drives: Seagate Ironwolf Pro NT (I have not yet decided of what capacity I will use).
PSU: Corsair SF750 (overkill, I know)wrote on last edited by [email protected]I switched to raid z2 from a 6 drive mirror and what an ordeal that was. It's because I had to grow into it and buy drives over time but eventually the mirror was too inefficient.
I moved data around like 5 times all because I still didn't have enough disks to build my new array and keep my data on the system at the same time. And expanding raidz expands parity on all disks but not the data so you have to recopy all your data so it stripes fully.
I had a backup on a DAS but USB is slow and I didn't want to have it be the only copy.
Edit: clarifying my point. I have no regrets. ZFS is awesome. But make the important decisions up front and yes start with the right amount of drives that you need. My whole issue was growing into it and having to make changes after the fact.
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I switched to raid z2 from a 6 drive mirror and what an ordeal that was. It's because I had to grow into it and buy drives over time but eventually the mirror was too inefficient.
I moved data around like 5 times all because I still didn't have enough disks to build my new array and keep my data on the system at the same time. And expanding raidz expands parity on all disks but not the data so you have to recopy all your data so it stripes fully.
I had a backup on a DAS but USB is slow and I didn't want to have it be the only copy.
Edit: clarifying my point. I have no regrets. ZFS is awesome. But make the important decisions up front and yes start with the right amount of drives that you need. My whole issue was growing into it and having to make changes after the fact.
I plan on having a raid of 5 drives and a hot spare, with a cold spare next to the NAS.
I am considering 8/10 TB drives, I currently have less than 10 TB of data in my archive.
What are the advantages of the different raid z leves?
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Media store is a 12TB and an 8TB that dump into a 20TB that sits cold all but once a month.
My more immediate data that I need day to day is in a synced Documents folder across four different devices. I don't back it up, per se, I just make it impossible to lose.
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A piece of advice with ZFS, get the largest drives you can afford.
Expanding ZFS is painful and it's wayyyyy easier to just start big then to grow big.
ZFS is also a RAM hog, max out your ram cause that.
If you want to add meta data caches, do it when you first build the array.
The L2-arc cache and SLOG don't do what you think they will. Make sure you really understand them before you throw them on. They're easy to take off though.
Last but certainly not least, ZFS is a money sink. It was made for enterprise solutions, meaning it benefits from more money being thrown at it than say XFS. Figure out what's good enough and live with it.
That is a fair point, earlier I considered OpenMediaVault with a softraid and an LVM on top if it, but I take a lot of photos and have already seen bitrot in them, so I'd rather have some insurance for that.
I will in general avoid expanding filesystems, and simply decide that when I need more space to start building a new NAS, copy the data to it and repurpose the old NAS with larger drives or as a test machine.
Though this depends on how financially stable I am, I tend to buy parts over time...
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Genuine question, do people actually care about backing up media that much? I don't get it. Everything I actually care about personally I can fit on a thumbdrive and a box of notebooks.
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Genuine question, do people actually care about backing up media that much? I don't get it. Everything I actually care about personally I can fit on a thumbdrive and a box of notebooks.
I consider most data on my devices as replaceable, I would only back any of it up if the effort to replace it was much harder than the effort to back it up.
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Also, Start with backing up all the stuff you never backed up in the first place
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Genuine question, do people actually care about backing up media that much? I don't get it. Everything I actually care about personally I can fit on a thumbdrive and a box of notebooks.
Tbf that's the matter of taste/preference. I'm have the completely opposite view to yours - I'm really attached to old vids, drawings, texts (that I made myself when I was younger). So I store and backup everything, even things most people would think of as unserious/unnecessary. It feels like a part of myself, a part of my story, you know, so I would be very upset if I lost it. And I can understand if someone have attachment to old films, books etc. I would say archiving old stuff is kind of a hobby in itself.
Although that being said, I can see advantages of your style - mainly less spending money on harddrives and time of setting them up and backing up stuff
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Just stared backing up my 500+ vhs movies
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You need three copies of your data: the working copy, the nightly backup, and the offsite backup in case of natural disaster. I physically mailed a drive to my father in another state in case my building catches fire. You can also use a safe deposit box or give a drive to a friend who is geologically separated from your location.
Notice: recent info suggests that SSDs suffer bit-rot when not powered. Not enough confirmed info at this time for me to go into it further, but please rewrite important data from time to time.
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Genuine question, do people actually care about backing up media that much? I don't get it. Everything I actually care about personally I can fit on a thumbdrive and a box of notebooks.
If you don't want to keep it that's fine, but if you have any recordings of commercial media (like say VHS tape recordings of broadcast TV) it would be of major help and contribution if you at least go through what you have and see if any of it is [email protected]
https://lostmediawiki.com/Home
You'd be surprised at the things people are looking for, from old TV ads to TV channel interstitials and Bumpers to TV show episodes that aired once and was pulled, lost and never shown again
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That is a fair point, earlier I considered OpenMediaVault with a softraid and an LVM on top if it, but I take a lot of photos and have already seen bitrot in them, so I'd rather have some insurance for that.
I will in general avoid expanding filesystems, and simply decide that when I need more space to start building a new NAS, copy the data to it and repurpose the old NAS with larger drives or as a test machine.
Though this depends on how financially stable I am, I tend to buy parts over time...
What I've done is set up an UnRAID server with an XFS pool for my media pool and a ZFS pool for my photos, family videos and documents. The biggest advantage I see with UnRAID is that it's designed from the ground up for buying parts over time. When my media pool gets full, buy a bigger disk, slam it in, let it rebuild. When my documents (ZFS) pool is full I move it to my media array, break the ZFS pool and rebuild it bigger.
As opposed to say a TrueNAS scale deployment with pure ZFS, where I would highly suggest that you spend the money upfront and buy the system your going to want tomorrow, not today.
Sure UnRAID's ZFS is not as mature as almost every other NAS OS out there but it's good enough. Plus I have my pictures and stuff in a proper 3-2-1 backup so I'm not too worried about bitrot.
