# Best back-up protection for movies on my PC



## ZZZZZ (Oct 1, 2014)

I'd go with an external hard drive. A 2 TB minimum for starters.


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## El Buey (Jul 31, 2007)

After further investigation I find I shouldn't have even mentioned memory stick/SD cards...they simply can't store enough information for it to be cost effective. And I imagine "clouds" don't get into the terabyte range either.
Hard drive it is then.


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## Bob Sanders (Nov 10, 2013)

Make sure your system is expandable! I started with 2 TB and I'm now up to 20TB. I've given up the idea of backing it all up. There is just too much. I back up the movies, videos, and pics that are important to me (probably about 3TB) but the rest... if I lose it... oh well. A lot of it has been ripped from blu ray anyway so it won;'t be hard to replace it if it comes to that..... just time consuming. I do replace my drives every 4 years or so at any rate just to play it safe.

I don't have NAS. It never made much sense to me. I simply treat my main computer as my local server and have streaming devices at each television. If your main computer is always on like mine is then it makes no sense to have a NAS device on all the time too.

Forget cloud for back up. It's too slow for larger movies. Either go with RAID, or just direct copy a drive like I do when it gets full.


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## El Buey (Jul 31, 2007)

Thanks Bob. My existing NAS storage has 2X 2TB, which at first, thinking only in terms of music, I figured was way more than I could ever use. But when I started adding DVD movies I saw I was going to need more at some point. The NAS was set up as part of my Home Entertainment system which includes a Control4 interface and remote control that I use to control everything from the sat TV, DVD/bluray, internet music, and to select movies I added to the menu after ripping them in my PC. Brief but frequent power outages are not uncommon here, internet service decent but not near up to North American standards, (my internet speed is 2MB). Streaming stuff is spotty at best so at the moment I don't even try. All this installation was done by "professionals", so it's not like I understand everything that has been installed, I just know pretty much how to use it. I did make the mistake of purchasing the NAS and unfortunately it's not expandable. I'm going to have to go for a larger expandable disc station (4 or 5 bay) and then start adding 5 or 6 TB drives. I sort of shutter at the initial expense and none of this stuff ever seems to go on sale. At some point here I will bite the bullet. 
I am curious...why to you replace your hard drives every 4 years? Do they degrade over time? I sort of thought that as long as you didn't drop them off a building or something that the data on them was good forever...???


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## Bob Sanders (Nov 10, 2013)

Sorry... misunderstanding there. I don't stream from the net, but rather from my server through my home network to the different tv's in the house.

It's much the same as NAS but I'm simply using a computer as a server, but each tv has its own streaming box. Unlike NAS, each of the streaming boxes have their own menu and cataloging systems so the server simply supplies the movie while the streamer boxes supply the libraries, movie covers, movie descriptions... etc.

Hard drives definitely wear out over time. Maybe they'll last 5 years.... maybe they'll last 10... who knows, but in an effort to avoid the possibility of a hard drive crash and the loss of a lot of data, I simply replace them every 4 years or so.


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## poppameth (Oct 2, 2008)

If it were me, I'd drop the cash on server class storage and setup your NAS up with a proper RAID configuration so if you ever lose one disk you can replace it and the other will repopulate the one that was lost. Most NAS software supports such functionality these days. I haven't done this yet but as soon as I get the cash together for it I have it on the agenda. If you don't want to put that kind of money in the setup then an external drive is still the best and cheapest option. Cloud storage would kill you bandwidth and cost a fortune for the amount of storage you need.


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## El Buey (Jul 31, 2007)

Thanks poppa...
I'm looking at maybe a 4 bay NAS, introduce 5TB or 6TB hard drives, one or two at a time. I'll have someone qualified set it up for me.
Just so I'm clear on this, with the proper configuration, are you saying that if I had two hard drives in the NAS, configured properly, and one the drives failed, that I wouldn't lose any data because the 2nd hard drive would have saved the data? What if I already had 2 1/2 TB of data? The 2nd drive (2TB) wouldn't be able to store it all.

Just wondering.....


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## Bob Sanders (Nov 10, 2013)

El Buey said:


> What if I already had 2 1/2 TB of data? The 2nd drive (2TB) wouldn't be able to store it all.


You need the same sized drive. RAID is about mirroring drives (writing the same thing to 2 drives instead of one so you always have a second drive as back up)


This explains RAID... and why I have chosen not to use it. Of course it's a personal choice for every one

http://www.petemarovichimages.com/2013/11/24/never-use-a-raid-as-your-backup-system/


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## poppameth (Oct 2, 2008)

Yeah RAID has its drawbacks. The biggest being you don't get to use all the storage you pay for. Depending on configuration you are using a good chunk of it as a backup. It sounds like you will need several high capacity drives too so it gets costly.


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## El Buey (Jul 31, 2007)

Thanks again for the input...my education continues. I read the link about RAID configurations (3 times) and I pretty much get it. Not sure which configuration I have ( I'm sending this link to the guys that installed it because I'm curious what they have to say). I'm looking at a Toshiba Canvio 2TB portable hard drive on Amazon to backup the videos I have on my PC. Since my two disc Synology NAS is not expandable I'm going to have to replace it with something at some point. This thread has sure given me food for thought although I'm beginning to feel full.


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## jimn (Nov 13, 2010)

RAID configurations are used all the time in commercial datacenters. There are multiple types. RAID 1 is mirrored, two identical disks with The same data. The disks should be identical not just the same size. RAID 5 is a parity set up with three or more disks. One disk is used as parity which can rebuild data if one of the data disks is corrupted or fails. you get more of your capacity because you only lose one disk to the parity and the rest contain your data. Raid5 is slower in writes but fast on reads. However any raid configuration should still be backed up. If bothe mirrors fail you have lost your data.


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## RHeat (Nov 14, 2014)

working with HQ movies requires alot of storage. Luckily storage prices have come down. You can get a 4TB for pretty cheap these days


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## PD_Lape (Nov 19, 2014)

If you are looking into a NAS than can accommodate more than 2 HDDs, I highly recommend building a NAS yourself. That way you can get as much expandability as you like plus more reliability for less the cost. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcvU6EoKbaM

-Paul

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## andrewjs18 (Dec 14, 2011)

get yourself a raspberry pi (like $35 for the pi itself, maybe around $50-60 if you get a charger, sd card and case for it), 2 external hard drive enclosures and then 2 large hard drives, probably 4TB each. I'd go with hitachi drives as they tend to be very reliable.

anyway, you can set up the raspberry pi as a media center, hook it up to your tv via hdmi and then attach the two external enclosures to the raspberry pi via its usb ports. what you can do is set up rsync so that anything on disk 1 will get copied over to disk 2, automatically, per a schedule you set up.

that's the way I'd probably go if you want to do it on the cheap, and it's a very popular thing to do.

oh, and the raspberry pi uses very little power - it runs off of a cell phone charger...


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