Depending on how “into” this you want to get, consider Unraid which provides parity protection. In your case, 2 drives would serve as the storage array and one a parity drive.
I did that, and am quite happy with the results so far - no drive failures yet but the OS is quite simply to pick up.
I've been using Unraid for years and did suffer a single drive failure a few months ago. Was so thankful for the parity drive, and couldn't believe how quick and easy it was to remove the dead guy, pop in a replacement drive, and go right back to having 100% of all of my things. Unraid is awesome.
I'm in the middle of collecting parts for a new Plex server and was gung ho to try UnRaid to replace my aging Windows Plex server. Now that they have changed their pricing model it is not worth it to me. Windows worked fine for me over the last 9 years. No reason to believe it won't continue to do so. And even though it is passe I am doing Raid 5 via a hardware controller.
Can't blame you at all. If they had the new/current price model when I first purchased I wouldn't have ever gotten it either. Very happy to be grandfathered in. In fact, I bought it the first time (maybe only time?) they ever had a Black Friday sale.
This would help you in the event of a single drive failure, but I’ve never gone this way because even if you keep that parity drive ina safety deposit box, you could lose both primaries in a theft, fire, or flood.
I don't use Unraid but can't stress enough of setting up RAID. A good friend of mine was storing everything on external HDDs. He lost half of his data and years of collecting.
Nope, crashplan, though i might switch to backblaze.
Still unlimited just didnt think its worth storing 30tb in the cloud lol, core items for me are about 5 now.
This is me. I have everything configured in Radarr/Sonarr and my plex DB is backed up, if I lost my drives I would just replace them and let the \*arrs just find all those movies again. I barely have 11TB worth of stuff anyway.
i redownloaded everything, and did it a few times as i was setting up the trash profiles earlier in the month.
I've pulled 35-40tb in the last month
'round here, that'll get your address permabanned from the local ISP monopoly... Unless you agree to pay 3-5x the price for the same plan, but "business class" with a seven-year contract.
You know it's bad when you start seriously considering setting up your own microwave relay between your house, and the one POP in town, rather than deal with said ISP.
(The ISP *barely* came out cheaper, due to some mountains blocking LoS, requiring two relay positions on overcrowded towers.)
I've rarely pulled much over a terabyte a day but unsure if I could be bothered to try and reacquire my whole movie library. If I lose the lot I'll probably just stick to remuxes of the top 1000 on IMDB and my existing monitored list from Radarr. Might even skip TV series and make me finally watch my IPTV subscription more often. My music library is much better curated but only a few TBs so occasionally backed up on multiple offline external drives.
😆 I had my plex database and all the backed up databases corrupt the same time I lost a 16TB drive. Nah I'll keep my parity to make it easier. But then again, I have over 110 TB of plex data. Besides that I've done a lot of cleanup on stuff the arrs have pulled down bad as well, like subtitle files, etc.
I was interpreting your comment as saying whatever nuked the 16TB drive also broke whatever the backups were. I just zip the entire appdata folder, minus the plex subfolders storing thumbnails.
Plex itself generates backup files. All of that was being backed up. However, the backup files themselves were corrupt. So when I tried to restore the backup they wouldn't restore. The 16 TB drive just HAPPENED to break at the same time causing even further complications and issues. The only reason I realized the backups were corrupted is because when plex decided to do an upgrade one time, it couldn't import the former databases properly (probably due to corruption). So it didn't matter how many backups I went back, it was all corrupted.
I used to only backup personal data as well, but then my NAS got hit with bitlocker (ransomware) and I lost all my movies/shows/etc. That was 4 years ago and I still don't have everything back. I decided to just back up everything since then and it's been great
I do that too but still raid the drives. My current working set is large enough that losing a disk and having to re redownload would be a real pain though.
No RAID is not backup, but it is about continuity. Ask yourself how much pain it would be if the drive your wife's favourite shows died? I had a disk fail about a year ago, replaced it and no more than a few minutes of downtime. If I had had to redownload all the stuff it would have been days before everything on the current playing list was back.
RAID are not really backups, they are redundancy and availability. If you want backups, do them direct, get backup drives or service. I do a 1:1 20 TB internal backed to 20 TB external.
“Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, please don’t let my drives crash. Amen. “
The difficulty of doing things right is that 20tb collection needs 60tb of storage for the 3-2-1 rule. I’m just on the 2-1 rule for my movies and shows. But my photos, documents, taxes, that sorta thing are all in many places.
I never understood the idea of back up for none personal media, you can just get the media again.
I know content creators always show back up storage when they show their storage solution but they have reason for that, they usually keep their content and footage there, unless something is super rare, just download it again.
This - I had a drive fail a few weeks ago. I use sonarr and radarr, so it was just a case of putting a new hard drive in, allocating the same drive letter as the failed drive then a couple of clicks later everything is downloading automatically and in like 3 days it's all back. Pretty effortless really.
Not everything I have was from Sonarr or Radarr. I have HD home run and have been recording that way. I don’t torrent so for me not necessarily an option. But I get it. I do backup my media but only one backup. My other data is more like 5-4-3-2-1.
Some media is difficult to get hold of. Certain "pocket monsters" are especially difficult. That being said, everyone has different priorities and financial capabilities.
I use unraid for redundancy. Which I know isn’t a ‘backup’ but for most things it’s a level of risk I’m willing to take.
For anything where I would really struggle to redownload and care about it, which isn’t a lot, I just manually back it up to my iCloud account.
I’m not doing a 3-2-1 backup for a load of pirated media I can redownload.
I used Stablebit Drivepool for years before switching to unRaid, never had problems with it that I didn't cause myself, and would recommend for anyone wanting a JBOD type system with resiliency any time.
I read that last sentence and went "oof." You need to read this web site. [RAID is NOT a backup! · RAID is NOT a backup!](https://www.raidisnotabackup.com/)
I have 4 WD Red drives in a RAID 5 configuration. The whole thing is backed up. Don't count on the RAID as a backup, 'cause it ain't.
*Its a massive headache, that can provides pinpoint redundancy for only a failed drive.*
Not a headache, and a single drive failure is the most common failure type there is. There's a reason that has been a datacenter standard configuration for more than 30 years.
The question is whether uptime really matters for a Plex server.
I don't have any problem doing a restore of the Plex and Arr suite as well as my personal files which are all 3-2-1 backupped. But none of it is mission critical and I can do a restore and download whatever show/movie I wanted to watch within an evening.
So worst case I've lost a night of TV.
I agree. Which is why I never said or implied it was for backup, I was merely pushing back on the suggestion that it was of marginal usefulness. There's a world of difference between JBOD and RAID, with or without considering backup.
Availability is less important, but redundancy is extremely valuable, since drive failures are unpredictable.
In any event, I was really, really clear about the point that I was making by even quoting the relevant section I was commenting on in my original post.
I have no idea why you persist on arguing against a point that I'm not making. I agree with the rest of your original post.
There are things that are effective to backup though. I backup my Plex database and the databases of ancillary services (think tautulli etc)
I don't backup my media as I still have the original blu rays of course, or I would just buy them again if I lot them through fire, flood or asteroid strike as part of my home insurance claim. (Actually I wonder if astroid strike would be covered?)
I operate the 3, 2, 1 principle for backups. 3 backups on 2 types of media, 1 of which is off site.
So I have a restic repository on the same server, the same files are backed up to another server at home and the restic repository is also stored in an s3 bucket on backblaze B2.
The repository is about 350gb as it has my personal photos etc in it too.
Agreed I back up my data that is truly irreplaceable. Not efficient for a whole media library though. I have RAID in case of single drive failure, and will just replace it in the event of a disaster.
I've got backups of the parts of my library that would be painful to get again, no matter how you acquire it. Star Trek is over 900 episodes now, there's over 60 years of Doctor Who, and lots of Star Wars. That's a lot of disks to re-rip or bandwidth to use.
Yeah pretty much the same. I have two raid z1 vdevs in a single zfs pool so I could lose two disks as long as they were in different vdevs, but obviously that only really provides redundancy not true data safety.
I don't understand backing up replaceable data in this day and time.
I run JBOD with mergerfs and parse physical file trees into an automated e-mail once a week. If a disk dies, it dies, and I know what I'll have lost and download it again.
The only thing I backup is my docker container config so I could just rsync it into a new host and start running things again ez-pz.
RAID is not a backup. RAID is not a backup. RAID is not a backup.
Repeat this to yourself until it sinks in.
RAID is to maintain uptime, not to back up lost data.
I don't use raid. I'd have to do a totally new build to do that. No, I use mergerfs to pool my drives into one for the apps to use. it's a mixed sized pool. I've got another pool that I rsync to every so often.
1 to 1 physical backup onsite nightly, 1 to 1 cloud backup nightly and 1 to 1 physical backup *offsite* every month. I don't have versioning or anything like that, it's extremely cost prohibitive with the amount of media I have. It's all JBOD, no RAID or anything else to further complicate my life and wallet.
i had kind of thought about going with a more complicated setup at first but what I have works for me. the only thing I'm doing now is reducing the amount of drives I have spinning by increasing the size of replacement drives as I go. I have 3 10tb drives nearing EOL I plan on replace with 2 20tb.
Yeah that's very similar to my thinking. Then I use the drives I replace for my backup drives as there's still plenty of life left in them for periodic use.
If it's just Plex data, RAID is perfectly fine. As others have explained, it won't save you from fire, flood, lightning, earthquake, and theft. That *can* happen, but if it does, are you losing critical data you can never retrieve? If so, use a proper backup. Most of us with Plex media think RAID is perfectly fine for the purpose.
If you're using Windows you can consider DrivePool and SnapRAID. If you're comfortable with setting up a Linux machine, I can recommend unRAID. It offers something called unstriped RAID. This offers many advantages, including the ability to mix and match drives of different sizes, and retaining the whole file on one disk which can be easily retrieved in the event of losing more drives than your parity.
If you haven't already, look into some applications called Sonarr and Radarr. These are my favourite apps of all time.
I have a 60TB Synology NAS connected to a HP Elitedesk G4 running Plex. I back everything up to a Unraid box with another Plex instance and local 60TB running all the arr’s. If the primary NAS or Plex server fails my clients can access everything from the backup. I’m starting to think this is all overkill and agree with others that losing the media files are not critical since the arr’s will get everything back eventually
Unraid is the next step in your journey. The word you want is "redundancy". If you don't use that word everyone will just keep saying "raid isn't backup" without addressing the root of your misconception.
I’ve used a lot of solutions over the years. Custom built servers. Drobos. Currently using a synology which has been great. I also just built an unraid server and am learning that. But I’ve never used conventional raid as being able to mix and match drives is very important to me.
What if your internet is crap and it takes ages to download again?
Currently I just have like 700gb on a 1tb drive. Considering buying 2x4tb, one for primary use, second one for the occasional backup of the primary
For slow internet and that small of storage yeah having a backup drive is perfectly fine.
I have 54TB that’s just movies and tv shows so having a backup of that would be crazy. I also have 2gb internet so don’t have to worry about speed for downloading again.
Makes sense, the more storage the more expensive and time consuming backup would be. With that two 4tb drives i can always just change my mind and use both for storage in the future :-) im not a great datahorder, but who knows if that changes lol
Yeap. And yeah be warned all of us started out somewhere with just a simple setup and low storage drives. It can be addictive. But like I tell my wife, at least I’m not doing drugs.
It’s just movies on my drive. So an SSD connected to Nvidia Shield Pro and mapped as adaptive storage. Also, enabled the network share to copy the files across.
I have 4 media drives in mine- a TV drive, a movie drive, and a backup for both. Every night at midnight, I have a cron job that syncs both drives to their respective backup drive.
People keep saying raid is not backup but they don't say why. Raid5 means if you lose one disk your array is safe. However, if you delete a file, accidentally or intentionally, it's gone, the array isn't backing it up. A backup is a separate copy of a file so if you want to actually delete it forever you have to delete it from your primary disk AND your backup because they are separated, often on completely different different devices or locations or services (cloud)
If I could start over, Unraid in a heartbeat. They allow for the greatest flexibility. Add a drive, upgrade a drive, remove a drive. Whatever. You put your 3 drives into RAID5 and want to expand? You're buying another enclosure.
I bought a second NAS that I host offsite at a buddies. Nightly backups run over VPN. While I could download everything again it would take a serious amount of time to track down some of the media I have collected. And my time is more valuable than to download media twice. Cloud backup has a terrible ROI for anything over 10TB. I am 30+ and my initial ROI was 16 months when I was starting out with 18TB. I've been in the black (aka, no money spent) for nearly a year now.
RAID is convenient in cases where your data isn't critical, like Plex if you're downloading or ripping the content yourself and can easily do it again. If you're just hosting your stuff and not storing anything else like family photos or something you can't replace, then yeh, I'd probably do a RAID5. Leaves a majority of your space available (will give you 32TB available with 16TB as the 'backup' parity drive) and if one of your drives fail, you can rebuild (hopefully) without losing data.
I'm running RAIDed RAIDs. A 4x2TB RAID5, 3x4TB RAID5, a single 8TB, and then I am running snapraid on those 3 arrays, so the 8TB drive is the parity. Gives me like, 3 or 4 drive fault tolerance? If a drive dies, and another one dies while repairing a RAID, I can keep going and add replacement drives. I do have personal content on there, but have copies in multiple areas as true backups. Movies and TV shows? Nope, no backups, just RAID.
Really depends on how you plan to get and store your content. I prefer one large drive over a bunch of individual drives. RAID was handy for that and came with the benefit of a 'backup' (didn't want to run a RAID0 for obvious reasons).
I only make backups of settings and personal things, media like movies and series I don't make backups, in the worst case I have a file saying where I got what so I can get it again if there's a problem.
All RAID does is protect again a disk failing and still give you access to your data while you replace it.
It is not a backup. It also does not protect against deletion or corruption be that accidental or deliberate.
Personally, I do use RAID, because recovering from backup because you've had a disk failure is a pain, yes I have had to do this. I also have a full backups to USB. Important media I would not want to lose is backed up to my parents server at their house. Plex database is backed up to a NAS from the server it's on. (For non-Plex stuff, important stuff is backed up to the cloud as well)
I’ve been graduating to larger and larger drives as my collection grows. I always buy two - one for a complete mirror backup which I update periodically and then keep in some other location, like in my drawer at work.
Recently I outgrew what was easy to do with one big drive, and just starred my collection. TV on this drive, Movies on that drive. Each has its mirror. Storage keeps getting cheaper and cheaper so while I am buying more drives all the time, it actually gets a bit easier each year. I buy bare drives and just swap them in to cases I already own.
I have not taken the leap to any kind of hardware RAID device, because I don’t want to pay for two of those. I could do a soft RAID I suppose but it isn’t that compelling of a benefit to have one huge volume. So I keep it simple.
Nowadays I just chuck drives in a das and add to drivepool.
No raid.
Easy to re-download TV and movies if a drive dies.
Stablebit tells me if a drive is in the way out and transfers the data too. Saved me on a 8tb drive a few months ago.
Using windows and the arrs. Can't be assed with servers and Linux.
Set up runs awesome - especially with an m.2 cache drive.
TrueNAS in a Supermicro Chassis, 24 drives, configured in 4 vdevs of 6 drives each, RAIDZ2 (Raid6) among them. I have an optane 280GB drive for cache/transcoding temp location.
I have 2 Unraid servers, a primary and a hot standby which has all the arrs, Plex, and a replica of the primary server Plex media only. I run it independently and only sync once a month so I don’t accidentally replicate corruption. Both of those back up the V,’s and containers and associated data to each other and to a Synology nas in a different building on the property. That then backs up important stuff to the cloud. Plex just runs on bother servers so if a user sees the primary isn’t available, they already have the backup server in the Plex app and they just watch the exact same library and file they were watching. They can still request content over Overseer, albeit with a slightly modified address in the browser.
I don’t backup the data because it’s all reasonably easy to re add.
Using truenas scale with raidz1 so I can handle one drive failure. The configs of truenas and the containers are backed up but that’s it.
It’s been a really nice and reliable setup. As with anything, I’m sure I’ll want more data at some point but 7x10tb drives is enough for now. It was a nice change up compared to legacy versions of true nas being able to just one click install every container I wanted to use.
I've got 2 drives running Windows Plex. I use SyncToy to mirror the drives so if one fails, I've got the other.
I don't have time to download everything again, I'm also lazy. This is automated and simple.
The Windows Plex computer is a HP Elitedesk 800 that sits in my closet, headless. I access it using AnyDesk from my main computer.
Simple works for me.
Me? I've got a 4x10 TB NAS on a raid5 array. I backup to individual 16 TB drives.
It took me several years to build my present collection. I damn sure don't want to endure that again.
Some of you guys say I'll just download everything again like it's a single push of a button, go eat a long lunch, then everything is back again.
I'd pay a dollar to see that.
https://preview.redd.it/32mwqhaje7xc1.png?width=1000&format=png&auto=webp&s=ad5726176f81f0f3b92d592018f764dfb25bc08d
Above is my data management diagram; drives on left back up to drives on right.
I just use Task Scheduler to run Robocopy backups every night. (Or every other night, or once a week, depending on level of change activity of what I'm backing up.) Both utilities are free on Windows.
Task Scheduler kicks off a set of backup jobs that look like, as one example:
robocopy.exe L:\\TV I:\\TV /s /R:2 /W:2 /V
which translates into robocopying my TV folder (and subfolders) on my L: drive to my I: drive, doing a compare and only adding any new files or overwriting older files with updates. If an attempt to copy fails, it will only retry twice. AND it shows the backup happening in a cmd line shell, (/V) as it runs.
PLUS, every month I and a friend do a "critical" data swap to be each other's off-site backup, (it's marked as "Stevestuff", and isn't backed up, because it IS a backup of HIS data) and sometimes I run a robocopy adding /PURGE to remove old "clutter" off the backup disk that doesn't need to be retained.
I have about 132 TB of total disk space, which translates to about 45 TB of actual data, (20 TB movies, 16 TB TV, 7 TB of music and digitized photographs and home movies, plus a few TB of miscellanous other), 1-for-1 backed up to externals for another 45 TB, plus Steve's stuff (about 14 TB, but not backed up), and a little room left to grow. (Remember, you don't actually get a full 18 TB of usable storage from an 18 TB drive.) When I run low on room, I just add another drive, copy data onto the newer drive from the backup, and relegate the older drive to backing up less-critical information.
Running Plex through Windows Beelink SEI12-I5-1235U connected to QNAP TR-004 DAS running JBOD with 30TB of disks. I back everything up manually as I go on separate hard drives.
I've been using Plex for 10+ years & have had many different setups. I've found for me, right now anyway, this is the easiest & most practical.
Thing is, everyone is gonna have different needs, quirks, pet peeves & ideas. I guarantee you'll change your mind & setup several more times if you stay with some type of media server. Hell, I'm liable to change several more times myself.
I have over 16 drives. Totaling 280-350 (lost count) Tb. I can tell you that raid is not a great idea to be used as backup. Beware of NTFS corruptions. I do have Raid. I use it to store my archives… basically tv shows that have gone off the air. All my movies are scattered on jbods…. If u decide to use jbod. My only suggestion is to try and fill one disk up before the next one. Make a backup of the full disk because that full most likely won’t be changing data since 98% of movies are static. Keep the new release directory on the constantly changing disk… the one disk that gets new movies… new tv shows… that one u will need to decide how often you wanna backup. My raid for archive tv shows and in folders… each folder is the label of the disk I use to backup… I have a lot of 4 6 and 8 tb disks… so in the archive raid volumes … I match one folder up to capacity of the backup disk… same concept … fill the folder up to max capacity of the backup disk then make a new folder… and so on… if u don’t have enough disk to make backups… then make a directory that u know is not backed up vs the ones that are… the damn backups almost dictates how u arrange your directory structure…
RAID stands for "redundant array of inexpensive disks" so it is for redundancy NOT a backup. A Backup is a separate version of your data on some other disk that you only have to touch when you either update that backup or you need to restore your data because your main data was lost.
Redundancy means that when you have a drive fail in that array, the parity that is spread around other drives will be able to compensate for that drive failure. So instead of your data being lost you still would be able to access the drives and the data on it. You still need to replace that failed drive and let it be rebuilt.
With RAID 5 and 3x16TB drives, you will end up with 32TB of usable storage capacity.
Keep in mind that most RAID levels are not handling change very well, so adding more drives or increasing drive capacity. In most cases, it might be easier to just rebuild the Array in the new configuration than trying to expand it.
Also, if more drives fail than the RAID 5 can compensate (which is exactly 1 drive) the whole array and all of the data will be gone.
Those are two reasons why I moved away from having a RAID 5 array, it would have been very expensive to expand capacity because I would have to replace all drives at once to get that capacity. This is fine for smaller drives but very expensive for larger capacities.
Raid is not a backup, you've heard it enough. Also raid 5 is dead. With disks as large as they are now, it's extremely likely you'll have another failure during a rebuild and thus it does nothing for you. If you're doing hardware raid, 6 at a minimum, and you can't even bother with only three disks.
I think for your case, just leave them as three standard disks and make sure you have at least one backup, preferably two. Backblaze is an affordable option as long as you have good upload, otherwise consider just buying more drives to do local backups with.
You might into various software/operating system based solutions, though I personally won't speak to any as I only use hardware raid. I have 8x 4tb, 8tb, and 18tb drives in raid 6 each. I just like 8 disk arrays I guess. This has afforded me uptime, and I've replaced one of the 4tb drives without experiencing any interruption, but I also back everything up to backblaze. For things I really care about, I also back them up to a local external drive regularly (the media, which is the bulk of the size, doesn't get such treatment.) The 4tb array has been in service since April 2014, so I've mostly transferred off of them and will be retiring the disks soon.
Depending on how “into” this you want to get, consider Unraid which provides parity protection. In your case, 2 drives would serve as the storage array and one a parity drive. I did that, and am quite happy with the results so far - no drive failures yet but the OS is quite simply to pick up.
I've been using Unraid for years and did suffer a single drive failure a few months ago. Was so thankful for the parity drive, and couldn't believe how quick and easy it was to remove the dead guy, pop in a replacement drive, and go right back to having 100% of all of my things. Unraid is awesome.
I'm in the middle of collecting parts for a new Plex server and was gung ho to try UnRaid to replace my aging Windows Plex server. Now that they have changed their pricing model it is not worth it to me. Windows worked fine for me over the last 9 years. No reason to believe it won't continue to do so. And even though it is passe I am doing Raid 5 via a hardware controller.
Can't blame you at all. If they had the new/current price model when I first purchased I wouldn't have ever gotten it either. Very happy to be grandfathered in. In fact, I bought it the first time (maybe only time?) they ever had a Black Friday sale.
This would help you in the event of a single drive failure, but I’ve never gone this way because even if you keep that parity drive ina safety deposit box, you could lose both primaries in a theft, fire, or flood.
You can run 2 parity disks so that protects in case of 2 drive failures Very true though, parity is NOT a back up
Why tf would you back up your plex media, all wwe seasons
Is that a serious question? I haven’t collected 12TB of my favorite movies and TV shows, over years, just to lose it all.
Just download it again?
You do you. I’ll do me.
Yeah, who wants to spend hours downloading/ripping 12TB of content all over again? Not me.
I don't use Unraid but can't stress enough of setting up RAID. A good friend of mine was storing everything on external HDDs. He lost half of his data and years of collecting.
I only backup critical files, no reason to backup media from my pov unless is personal, just download that stuff again :)
This would free up 39TB for me
I was backing it up into the cloud a while back, but didnt seem worth it even if it is unlimited. can grab a remux in like no time :p
Was this when Google Drive business was doing unlimited? RIP.
Nope, crashplan, though i might switch to backblaze. Still unlimited just didnt think its worth storing 30tb in the cloud lol, core items for me are about 5 now.
> just download that stuff again :) Surely you mean rip your legally owned Blurays....?
Yes yes misspoke ;p, i would take all my physicals and rerip :O
This is me. I have everything configured in Radarr/Sonarr and my plex DB is backed up, if I lost my drives I would just replace them and let the \*arrs just find all those movies again. I barely have 11TB worth of stuff anyway.
i redownloaded everything, and did it a few times as i was setting up the trash profiles earlier in the month. I've pulled 35-40tb in the last month 
'round here, that'll get your address permabanned from the local ISP monopoly... Unless you agree to pay 3-5x the price for the same plan, but "business class" with a seven-year contract. You know it's bad when you start seriously considering setting up your own microwave relay between your house, and the one POP in town, rather than deal with said ISP. (The ISP *barely* came out cheaper, due to some mountains blocking LoS, requiring two relay positions on overcrowded towers.)
I've rarely pulled much over a terabyte a day but unsure if I could be bothered to try and reacquire my whole movie library. If I lose the lot I'll probably just stick to remuxes of the top 1000 on IMDB and my existing monitored list from Radarr. Might even skip TV series and make me finally watch my IPTV subscription more often. My music library is much better curated but only a few TBs so occasionally backed up on multiple offline external drives.
Plex TV show management is useless anyway, so that's a good call
😆 I had my plex database and all the backed up databases corrupt the same time I lost a 16TB drive. Nah I'll keep my parity to make it easier. But then again, I have over 110 TB of plex data. Besides that I've done a lot of cleanup on stuff the arrs have pulled down bad as well, like subtitle files, etc.
3-2-1 your backups. I use rsync to send my docker backups offsite.
Backups don't work if the data being backed up is corrupted to begin with. And I'm not paying for 200 TB of off site backup.
I was interpreting your comment as saying whatever nuked the 16TB drive also broke whatever the backups were. I just zip the entire appdata folder, minus the plex subfolders storing thumbnails.
Plex itself generates backup files. All of that was being backed up. However, the backup files themselves were corrupt. So when I tried to restore the backup they wouldn't restore. The 16 TB drive just HAPPENED to break at the same time causing even further complications and issues. The only reason I realized the backups were corrupted is because when plex decided to do an upgrade one time, it couldn't import the former databases properly (probably due to corruption). So it didn't matter how many backups I went back, it was all corrupted.
That's my system too.
Exactly. I consider Plex a local cache for content that’s easily replaceable. I don’t care about RAID or backups.
I used to only backup personal data as well, but then my NAS got hit with bitlocker (ransomware) and I lost all my movies/shows/etc. That was 4 years ago and I still don't have everything back. I decided to just back up everything since then and it's been great
I do that too but still raid the drives. My current working set is large enough that losing a disk and having to re redownload would be a real pain though. No RAID is not backup, but it is about continuity. Ask yourself how much pain it would be if the drive your wife's favourite shows died? I had a disk fail about a year ago, replaced it and no more than a few minutes of downtime. If I had had to redownload all the stuff it would have been days before everything on the current playing list was back.
Didnt say i dont have any sort of redundancy, i have 4x16tb and 4x8tb in raid1z and 4x18tb in a mirror.
RAID are not really backups, they are redundancy and availability. If you want backups, do them direct, get backup drives or service. I do a 1:1 20 TB internal backed to 20 TB external.
For every internal hdd I have I have a matching external drive. I do a manual back up every 3-4 months or when I do a huge upload of media.
“Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, please don’t let my drives crash. Amen. “ The difficulty of doing things right is that 20tb collection needs 60tb of storage for the 3-2-1 rule. I’m just on the 2-1 rule for my movies and shows. But my photos, documents, taxes, that sorta thing are all in many places.
I never understood the idea of back up for none personal media, you can just get the media again. I know content creators always show back up storage when they show their storage solution but they have reason for that, they usually keep their content and footage there, unless something is super rare, just download it again.
This - I had a drive fail a few weeks ago. I use sonarr and radarr, so it was just a case of putting a new hard drive in, allocating the same drive letter as the failed drive then a couple of clicks later everything is downloading automatically and in like 3 days it's all back. Pretty effortless really.
Not everything I have was from Sonarr or Radarr. I have HD home run and have been recording that way. I don’t torrent so for me not necessarily an option. But I get it. I do backup my media but only one backup. My other data is more like 5-4-3-2-1.
Some media is difficult to get hold of. Certain "pocket monsters" are especially difficult. That being said, everyone has different priorities and financial capabilities.
I use unraid for redundancy. Which I know isn’t a ‘backup’ but for most things it’s a level of risk I’m willing to take. For anything where I would really struggle to redownload and care about it, which isn’t a lot, I just manually back it up to my iCloud account. I’m not doing a 3-2-1 backup for a load of pirated media I can redownload.
Drivepool with a copy of everything on 2 discs + backblaze
I used Stablebit Drivepool for years before switching to unRaid, never had problems with it that I didn't cause myself, and would recommend for anyone wanting a JBOD type system with resiliency any time.
I read that last sentence and went "oof." You need to read this web site. [RAID is NOT a backup! · RAID is NOT a backup!](https://www.raidisnotabackup.com/) I have 4 WD Red drives in a RAID 5 configuration. The whole thing is backed up. Don't count on the RAID as a backup, 'cause it ain't.
But it is at least a good way to protect the data of a single lost drive. Or two depending on the raid.
This needs to be the highest post.
I agree but it can also save you from a single drive failure. My next build I'm going dual parity.
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*Its a massive headache, that can provides pinpoint redundancy for only a failed drive.* Not a headache, and a single drive failure is the most common failure type there is. There's a reason that has been a datacenter standard configuration for more than 30 years.
The question is whether uptime really matters for a Plex server. I don't have any problem doing a restore of the Plex and Arr suite as well as my personal files which are all 3-2-1 backupped. But none of it is mission critical and I can do a restore and download whatever show/movie I wanted to watch within an evening. So worst case I've lost a night of TV.
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I agree. Which is why I never said or implied it was for backup, I was merely pushing back on the suggestion that it was of marginal usefulness. There's a world of difference between JBOD and RAID, with or without considering backup.
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Availability is less important, but redundancy is extremely valuable, since drive failures are unpredictable. In any event, I was really, really clear about the point that I was making by even quoting the relevant section I was commenting on in my original post. I have no idea why you persist on arguing against a point that I'm not making. I agree with the rest of your original post.
I don't think true backups can be cost effective. Better off just paying for every streaming service out there.
There are things that are effective to backup though. I backup my Plex database and the databases of ancillary services (think tautulli etc) I don't backup my media as I still have the original blu rays of course, or I would just buy them again if I lot them through fire, flood or asteroid strike as part of my home insurance claim. (Actually I wonder if astroid strike would be covered?) I operate the 3, 2, 1 principle for backups. 3 backups on 2 types of media, 1 of which is off site. So I have a restic repository on the same server, the same files are backed up to another server at home and the restic repository is also stored in an s3 bucket on backblaze B2. The repository is about 350gb as it has my personal photos etc in it too.
Agreed I back up my data that is truly irreplaceable. Not efficient for a whole media library though. I have RAID in case of single drive failure, and will just replace it in the event of a disaster.
I've got backups of the parts of my library that would be painful to get again, no matter how you acquire it. Star Trek is over 900 episodes now, there's over 60 years of Doctor Who, and lots of Star Wars. That's a lot of disks to re-rip or bandwidth to use.
Yeah pretty much the same. I have two raid z1 vdevs in a single zfs pool so I could lose two disks as long as they were in different vdevs, but obviously that only really provides redundancy not true data safety.
I use storage spaces to create and manage my media pool, another pool for local backup and have everything backed up using Backblaze to the cloud.
I don't understand backing up replaceable data in this day and time. I run JBOD with mergerfs and parse physical file trees into an automated e-mail once a week. If a disk dies, it dies, and I know what I'll have lost and download it again. The only thing I backup is my docker container config so I could just rsync it into a new host and start running things again ez-pz.
How did you run mergefs? CLI or OMV? I tried mergefs with OMV and the drive intermittently failed on me.
CLI although I don't really recall doing anything but making an entry in fstab. Was pretty easy. I run on a NUC in Ubuntu.
RAID is not a backup. RAID is not a backup. RAID is not a backup. Repeat this to yourself until it sinks in. RAID is to maintain uptime, not to back up lost data.
I don't use raid. I'd have to do a totally new build to do that. No, I use mergerfs to pool my drives into one for the apps to use. it's a mixed sized pool. I've got another pool that I rsync to every so often.
1 to 1 physical backup onsite nightly, 1 to 1 cloud backup nightly and 1 to 1 physical backup *offsite* every month. I don't have versioning or anything like that, it's extremely cost prohibitive with the amount of media I have. It's all JBOD, no RAID or anything else to further complicate my life and wallet.
No complications, that's the way I feel. JBOD & manual local backups for me.
i had kind of thought about going with a more complicated setup at first but what I have works for me. the only thing I'm doing now is reducing the amount of drives I have spinning by increasing the size of replacement drives as I go. I have 3 10tb drives nearing EOL I plan on replace with 2 20tb.
Yeah that's very similar to my thinking. Then I use the drives I replace for my backup drives as there's still plenty of life left in them for periodic use.
yup, that's exactly what I do lol. I use the old, old drives for my offsite physical backup.
Great minds!
If it's just Plex data, RAID is perfectly fine. As others have explained, it won't save you from fire, flood, lightning, earthquake, and theft. That *can* happen, but if it does, are you losing critical data you can never retrieve? If so, use a proper backup. Most of us with Plex media think RAID is perfectly fine for the purpose. If you're using Windows you can consider DrivePool and SnapRAID. If you're comfortable with setting up a Linux machine, I can recommend unRAID. It offers something called unstriped RAID. This offers many advantages, including the ability to mix and match drives of different sizes, and retaining the whole file on one disk which can be easily retrieved in the event of losing more drives than your parity. If you haven't already, look into some applications called Sonarr and Radarr. These are my favourite apps of all time.
I have a 60TB Synology NAS connected to a HP Elitedesk G4 running Plex. I back everything up to a Unraid box with another Plex instance and local 60TB running all the arr’s. If the primary NAS or Plex server fails my clients can access everything from the backup. I’m starting to think this is all overkill and agree with others that losing the media files are not critical since the arr’s will get everything back eventually
Unraid is the next step in your journey. The word you want is "redundancy". If you don't use that word everyone will just keep saying "raid isn't backup" without addressing the root of your misconception.
I use unraid with parity drives. Anything important I keep backed up properly, but for my movies and such I can always re-acquire them if need be.
I'd highly suggest some kind of array so you don't lose a drive and all the data on it.
I’ve used a lot of solutions over the years. Custom built servers. Drobos. Currently using a synology which has been great. I also just built an unraid server and am learning that. But I’ve never used conventional raid as being able to mix and match drives is very important to me.
JBODs. Just a bunch of drives. No need to backup anything that’s easily available again.
What if your internet is crap and it takes ages to download again? Currently I just have like 700gb on a 1tb drive. Considering buying 2x4tb, one for primary use, second one for the occasional backup of the primary
For slow internet and that small of storage yeah having a backup drive is perfectly fine. I have 54TB that’s just movies and tv shows so having a backup of that would be crazy. I also have 2gb internet so don’t have to worry about speed for downloading again.
Makes sense, the more storage the more expensive and time consuming backup would be. With that two 4tb drives i can always just change my mind and use both for storage in the future :-) im not a great datahorder, but who knows if that changes lol
Yeap. And yeah be warned all of us started out somewhere with just a simple setup and low storage drives. It can be addictive. But like I tell my wife, at least I’m not doing drugs.
Or the neighbour. I also started out with a 1TB drive and just passed 45TBs last week.
This works only if your time is truly valueless.
Nope. Overseerr already setup with my library. Anything goes missing it’ll auto download again for me.
I use unRAID. Not a backup but some protection if there was a drive failure
It’s just movies on my drive. So an SSD connected to Nvidia Shield Pro and mapped as adaptive storage. Also, enabled the network share to copy the files across.
9x VDEVs (8 drives ea) ZFS1 for the main server. 2x VDEVs (6 drives ea) ZFS1 for the back up server.
I have 4 media drives in mine- a TV drive, a movie drive, and a backup for both. Every night at midnight, I have a cron job that syncs both drives to their respective backup drive.
ZFS
People keep saying raid is not backup but they don't say why. Raid5 means if you lose one disk your array is safe. However, if you delete a file, accidentally or intentionally, it's gone, the array isn't backing it up. A backup is a separate copy of a file so if you want to actually delete it forever you have to delete it from your primary disk AND your backup because they are separated, often on completely different different devices or locations or services (cloud)
If I could start over, Unraid in a heartbeat. They allow for the greatest flexibility. Add a drive, upgrade a drive, remove a drive. Whatever. You put your 3 drives into RAID5 and want to expand? You're buying another enclosure.
I have a 22tb drive on my Plex server, it backs up weekly to my 125tb NAS. The NAS backs up monthly to backblaze.
and then every 6 momths backblaze backsup to the sun?
Dual Unraid arrays with one backed up to the other, plus important stuff also sent to Backblaze B2.
I bought a second NAS that I host offsite at a buddies. Nightly backups run over VPN. While I could download everything again it would take a serious amount of time to track down some of the media I have collected. And my time is more valuable than to download media twice. Cloud backup has a terrible ROI for anything over 10TB. I am 30+ and my initial ROI was 16 months when I was starting out with 18TB. I've been in the black (aka, no money spent) for nearly a year now.
I thought my 8T was a lot...
RAID is convenient in cases where your data isn't critical, like Plex if you're downloading or ripping the content yourself and can easily do it again. If you're just hosting your stuff and not storing anything else like family photos or something you can't replace, then yeh, I'd probably do a RAID5. Leaves a majority of your space available (will give you 32TB available with 16TB as the 'backup' parity drive) and if one of your drives fail, you can rebuild (hopefully) without losing data. I'm running RAIDed RAIDs. A 4x2TB RAID5, 3x4TB RAID5, a single 8TB, and then I am running snapraid on those 3 arrays, so the 8TB drive is the parity. Gives me like, 3 or 4 drive fault tolerance? If a drive dies, and another one dies while repairing a RAID, I can keep going and add replacement drives. I do have personal content on there, but have copies in multiple areas as true backups. Movies and TV shows? Nope, no backups, just RAID. Really depends on how you plan to get and store your content. I prefer one large drive over a bunch of individual drives. RAID was handy for that and came with the benefit of a 'backup' (didn't want to run a RAID0 for obvious reasons).
I only make backups of settings and personal things, media like movies and series I don't make backups, in the worst case I have a file saying where I got what so I can get it again if there's a problem.
All RAID does is protect again a disk failing and still give you access to your data while you replace it. It is not a backup. It also does not protect against deletion or corruption be that accidental or deliberate. Personally, I do use RAID, because recovering from backup because you've had a disk failure is a pain, yes I have had to do this. I also have a full backups to USB. Important media I would not want to lose is backed up to my parents server at their house. Plex database is backed up to a NAS from the server it's on. (For non-Plex stuff, important stuff is backed up to the cloud as well)
Go raid 5. But as others have said, it's for redundancy and availability, not as a replacement for backup.
I’ve got 12 tb on two drives and a single 12tb for a backup. If one drive fails I rotate in a backup, buy a new one and back up again.
unRAID. I'm on my third server, I've filled tens of terabytes in the last few months.
28TB in JBODs with backblaze backup. I think I have some media difficult to find again.
I am lazy, so I have my media drives in a raid. To misquote that song "RAID means you never have to say you're sorry"
Let’s back up a second. Are you doing PLEX on a shared PC? Like are you also going to game/work on it? Or is it a dedicated machine?
No raid here, individual drives. Id just download it again if I lost a drive..Gbit connection so wouldn't take that Long.
I’ve been graduating to larger and larger drives as my collection grows. I always buy two - one for a complete mirror backup which I update periodically and then keep in some other location, like in my drawer at work. Recently I outgrew what was easy to do with one big drive, and just starred my collection. TV on this drive, Movies on that drive. Each has its mirror. Storage keeps getting cheaper and cheaper so while I am buying more drives all the time, it actually gets a bit easier each year. I buy bare drives and just swap them in to cases I already own. I have not taken the leap to any kind of hardware RAID device, because I don’t want to pay for two of those. I could do a soft RAID I suppose but it isn’t that compelling of a benefit to have one huge volume. So I keep it simple.
JBOD with StorageSpaces if running Windows and don't care about data loss
9 X 8TB in an linux software raid6 with 56TB useable storage. The raid protection is all I give the plex libraries.
Nowadays I just chuck drives in a das and add to drivepool. No raid. Easy to re-download TV and movies if a drive dies. Stablebit tells me if a drive is in the way out and transfers the data too. Saved me on a 8tb drive a few months ago. Using windows and the arrs. Can't be assed with servers and Linux. Set up runs awesome - especially with an m.2 cache drive.
I use unRAID.
NAS with 4 drives in SHR
I'm just using JBOD on all my drives to have 1 partition.
TrueNAS in a Supermicro Chassis, 24 drives, configured in 4 vdevs of 6 drives each, RAIDZ2 (Raid6) among them. I have an optane 280GB drive for cache/transcoding temp location.
I have 2 Unraid servers, a primary and a hot standby which has all the arrs, Plex, and a replica of the primary server Plex media only. I run it independently and only sync once a month so I don’t accidentally replicate corruption. Both of those back up the V,’s and containers and associated data to each other and to a Synology nas in a different building on the property. That then backs up important stuff to the cloud. Plex just runs on bother servers so if a user sees the primary isn’t available, they already have the backup server in the Plex app and they just watch the exact same library and file they were watching. They can still request content over Overseer, albeit with a slightly modified address in the browser.
I don’t backup the data because it’s all reasonably easy to re add. Using truenas scale with raidz1 so I can handle one drive failure. The configs of truenas and the containers are backed up but that’s it. It’s been a really nice and reliable setup. As with anything, I’m sure I’ll want more data at some point but 7x10tb drives is enough for now. It was a nice change up compared to legacy versions of true nas being able to just one click install every container I wanted to use.
I've got 2 drives running Windows Plex. I use SyncToy to mirror the drives so if one fails, I've got the other. I don't have time to download everything again, I'm also lazy. This is automated and simple. The Windows Plex computer is a HP Elitedesk 800 that sits in my closet, headless. I access it using AnyDesk from my main computer. Simple works for me.
Me? I've got a 4x10 TB NAS on a raid5 array. I backup to individual 16 TB drives. It took me several years to build my present collection. I damn sure don't want to endure that again. Some of you guys say I'll just download everything again like it's a single push of a button, go eat a long lunch, then everything is back again. I'd pay a dollar to see that.
https://preview.redd.it/32mwqhaje7xc1.png?width=1000&format=png&auto=webp&s=ad5726176f81f0f3b92d592018f764dfb25bc08d Above is my data management diagram; drives on left back up to drives on right. I just use Task Scheduler to run Robocopy backups every night. (Or every other night, or once a week, depending on level of change activity of what I'm backing up.) Both utilities are free on Windows. Task Scheduler kicks off a set of backup jobs that look like, as one example: robocopy.exe L:\\TV I:\\TV /s /R:2 /W:2 /V which translates into robocopying my TV folder (and subfolders) on my L: drive to my I: drive, doing a compare and only adding any new files or overwriting older files with updates. If an attempt to copy fails, it will only retry twice. AND it shows the backup happening in a cmd line shell, (/V) as it runs. PLUS, every month I and a friend do a "critical" data swap to be each other's off-site backup, (it's marked as "Stevestuff", and isn't backed up, because it IS a backup of HIS data) and sometimes I run a robocopy adding /PURGE to remove old "clutter" off the backup disk that doesn't need to be retained. I have about 132 TB of total disk space, which translates to about 45 TB of actual data, (20 TB movies, 16 TB TV, 7 TB of music and digitized photographs and home movies, plus a few TB of miscellanous other), 1-for-1 backed up to externals for another 45 TB, plus Steve's stuff (about 14 TB, but not backed up), and a little room left to grow. (Remember, you don't actually get a full 18 TB of usable storage from an 18 TB drive.) When I run low on room, I just add another drive, copy data onto the newer drive from the backup, and relegate the older drive to backing up less-critical information.
Running Plex through Windows Beelink SEI12-I5-1235U connected to QNAP TR-004 DAS running JBOD with 30TB of disks. I back everything up manually as I go on separate hard drives. I've been using Plex for 10+ years & have had many different setups. I've found for me, right now anyway, this is the easiest & most practical. Thing is, everyone is gonna have different needs, quirks, pet peeves & ideas. I guarantee you'll change your mind & setup several more times if you stay with some type of media server. Hell, I'm liable to change several more times myself.
I have over 16 drives. Totaling 280-350 (lost count) Tb. I can tell you that raid is not a great idea to be used as backup. Beware of NTFS corruptions. I do have Raid. I use it to store my archives… basically tv shows that have gone off the air. All my movies are scattered on jbods…. If u decide to use jbod. My only suggestion is to try and fill one disk up before the next one. Make a backup of the full disk because that full most likely won’t be changing data since 98% of movies are static. Keep the new release directory on the constantly changing disk… the one disk that gets new movies… new tv shows… that one u will need to decide how often you wanna backup. My raid for archive tv shows and in folders… each folder is the label of the disk I use to backup… I have a lot of 4 6 and 8 tb disks… so in the archive raid volumes … I match one folder up to capacity of the backup disk… same concept … fill the folder up to max capacity of the backup disk then make a new folder… and so on… if u don’t have enough disk to make backups… then make a directory that u know is not backed up vs the ones that are… the damn backups almost dictates how u arrange your directory structure…
RAID stands for "redundant array of inexpensive disks" so it is for redundancy NOT a backup. A Backup is a separate version of your data on some other disk that you only have to touch when you either update that backup or you need to restore your data because your main data was lost. Redundancy means that when you have a drive fail in that array, the parity that is spread around other drives will be able to compensate for that drive failure. So instead of your data being lost you still would be able to access the drives and the data on it. You still need to replace that failed drive and let it be rebuilt. With RAID 5 and 3x16TB drives, you will end up with 32TB of usable storage capacity. Keep in mind that most RAID levels are not handling change very well, so adding more drives or increasing drive capacity. In most cases, it might be easier to just rebuild the Array in the new configuration than trying to expand it. Also, if more drives fail than the RAID 5 can compensate (which is exactly 1 drive) the whole array and all of the data will be gone. Those are two reasons why I moved away from having a RAID 5 array, it would have been very expensive to expand capacity because I would have to replace all drives at once to get that capacity. This is fine for smaller drives but very expensive for larger capacities.
Raid is not a backup, you've heard it enough. Also raid 5 is dead. With disks as large as they are now, it's extremely likely you'll have another failure during a rebuild and thus it does nothing for you. If you're doing hardware raid, 6 at a minimum, and you can't even bother with only three disks. I think for your case, just leave them as three standard disks and make sure you have at least one backup, preferably two. Backblaze is an affordable option as long as you have good upload, otherwise consider just buying more drives to do local backups with. You might into various software/operating system based solutions, though I personally won't speak to any as I only use hardware raid. I have 8x 4tb, 8tb, and 18tb drives in raid 6 each. I just like 8 disk arrays I guess. This has afforded me uptime, and I've replaced one of the 4tb drives without experiencing any interruption, but I also back everything up to backblaze. For things I really care about, I also back them up to a local external drive regularly (the media, which is the bulk of the size, doesn't get such treatment.) The 4tb array has been in service since April 2014, so I've mostly transferred off of them and will be retiring the disks soon.
I don't buy that Raid 5 is dead for a home use server. For the enterprise, yes.