Comment on Adding storage - Best options? (External USB drives, automatic decryption, media, etc.)
seaQueue@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Buy external drives. Don’t run them in RAID, use one to store backups and plug it in once or twice a week to copy data to it.
The secret to RAID is that it doesn’t buy you data protection, it buys you uptime to access data while a device in the array is failed. This is most valuable to businesses that can’t afford the downtime that recovery from a backup incurs. The most paranoid RAID will still fail sooner or later, due to hardware or software failure, and as a home user with a limited budget you’re far better off having one offline backup that you can use to recover data from once that happens.
Backup only data you can’t afford to lose (eg: don’t backup downloaded data that can be replaced easily, like a game or movie collection) and your backups will be much more manageably sized and you won’t need to spend as much on your backup drive. If a backup disk is too much for your budget you can always exploit cloud backup plans, backblaze PC backup has no limit on the size of your backups and only charges something like ~$60/yr.
radau@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
This is pretty great advice to get into it. I previously ran 3 poweredge 2950s but have since switched to nothing self hosted and back to everything self hosted but on a much leaner setup with a NUC and 14tb WD my book drive with a dual Noctua 4020 fan shroud I 3d printed that it absolutely needed as I killed the original drive in two weeks.
My replica is just a 14tb in my desktop I run rsync to pull the data occasionally after checking SMART status on the primary. It’s not versioned or perfect but it works great to give me a chance to backup my jellyfin media. Everything I care about also gets backed up via restic.
Eventually plan to run a build with the Modcase MASS with multiple drives but for now this setup has been working fantastic.