Home Media Storage

[kage207]

What do you think of CrashPlan? I've roughly the same amount of data that I'd like to get off-site, and have been looking for recommendations, but very few people appear to have experience of companies of saving multiple TB's of data off-site.... I thought I was I going to end up with Glacier....

FWIW, I have a Mac Mini server attached to a Drobo 5D with 3TB drives. It's primary used for feeding several ATV's ( and tablet's / phones with Plex ), but the caching server has become damn useful in speeding up updates....

I have been using the 1 year free trial and have 68 days remaining on it. It has backed up 6.2TB and has 1.4TB left to backup. So it's pretty good I think. I let it us my whole upload connection and 80% of the CPU when the server is idle (upload is ~800KB/s). Then I throttle it to 20% of the CPU and about 1Mbps when someone is using the server.

It's been worth it as I it would be terrible to lose 7.6TB of data.

 

[Primejimbo]

What do you think of CrashPlan? I've roughly the same amount of data that I'd like to get off-site, and have been looking for recommendations, but very few people appear to have experience of companies of saving multiple TB's of data off-site.... I thought I was I going to end up with Glacier....

FWIW, I have a Mac Mini server attached to a Drobo 5D with 3TB drives. It's primary used for feeding several ATV's ( and tablet's / phones with Plex ), but the caching server has become damn useful in speeding up updates....

Another one for CrashPlan. I only have just over 1TB and I just renewed it too.

I have been using the 1 year free trial and have 68 days remaining on it. It has backed up 6.2TB and has 1.4TB left to backup. So it's pretty good I think. I let it us my whole upload connection and 80% of the CPU when the server is idle (upload is ~800KB/s). Then I throttle it to 20% of the CPU and about 1Mbps when someone is using the server.

It's been worth it as I it would be terrible to lose 7.6TB of data.

I did the same thing, and I just renewed my plan for 4 years too. 4 years for $190 I think is a great deal.

 

[IscariotJ]

Cheers, guys, looks like it's worth giving CrashPlan a whirl.... Didn't occur to me to check them out before....

 

[famous600]

What do you think of CrashPlan? I've roughly the same amount of data that I'd like to get off-site, and have been looking for recommendations, but very few people appear to have experience of companies of saving multiple TB's of data off-site.... I thought I was I going to end up with Glacier....

FWIW, I have a Mac Mini server attached to a Drobo 5D with 3TB drives. It's primary used for feeding several ATV's ( and tablet's / phones with Plex ), but the caching server has become damn useful in speeding up updates....

Seems like we have the exact same set up! I have yet to have a single issue with my 5D. I can honestly say I feel very safe. The likely hood of one drive failing can happen. The likelihood of 2 drive failing at the exact same time...... I have yet to see it. You also have the option on the 5D for dual disk redundancy if need be! I have also looked into ALL of the off site options. They are great...... In theory. However upload speeds are ridiculous. Ain't no one got time for that!

 

[Uofmtiger]

Cheers, guys, looks like it's worth giving CrashPlan a whirl.... Didn't occur to me to check them out before....

If I had several terabytes I wanted to backup and did not want to pay for the seed kit, I would make a copy of my data and leave it off site until everything was backed up.

 

[twitch31]

Yeah, it depends on the manufacturer. There is no "formal" definition of what RAID 6 is... some call it RAID 5+1 for the config you refer to. I have seen RAID 6 as a JBOD config of two RAID 3 sets. Personally, I stick with either 1 or 5.

That's a strange claim, the definition of RAID 6 is that it extends RAID 5 by adding double parity. RAID 5+1 is single parity plus hot spare, this is not the same as RAID 6. RAID 6 + 1 is double parity plus hot spare. I would definitely use RAID 6 for an array of 5 or more HDD's, perhaps even for 4.

Maybe you are thinking of RAID 7? There is no formal definition of that.

 

[Macman45]

For my media storage I actually use a home built server. That is based on ubuntu that runs a samba share.

Its comprised of the following components:

M5A78L-M LX PLUS Socket AM3+ 760G mATX AMD Motherboard
AMD FX-4130 Quad-Core
8GB DDR3 Ballistic Ram
50GB OCZ Vertex SSD (OS DISK)
NZXT Series 210 Case
NZXT Fan Controller
Corsiar 600W Modular PS

7 x 3TB WD Green Drives in RAID 6

Here is a picture of it.

Image

Those WD greens are much underestimated....I have one in a custom enclosure ( bought as an external 2TB with that cheap black plastic enclosure) and I use it for a lot of stuff...It's perfectly capable of streaming media to my ATV's, and is the perfect partner for my rMBP...The best part is the price though...I paid £54 for the "Windows" version....Just format it to Mac and away you go. They also have a very low fail rate....I can't see your entire setup there, but I;m guessing you have an SSD or two for boot/OS purposes?


Oops...Just saw it!

 

[kage207]

Ya. My 6x3TB are Western Digital Green Drives as well. I also have one that was an external for 5 years, it is a 500GB (which is now the root drive for my server). I just use RAID 5. Works good enough for me.

 

[westrock2000]

thanks for shedding some light on this. i was wondering why raid as a backup isnt a great idea.

RAID is not a backup in the definition that you have a duplication of your data.

RAID is only for 1 purpose only*. It is to protect you against a hard drive failure. The reason is that the hard drive is the most likely thing to fail in a computer, it also the component that has the highest chance of data loss in the even of a failure.

*RAID0 is for performance, but RAID0 is generally a separate entity from all the others.

If your hard drive fails, you are probably looking at something like 95% chance of data loss (full or partial). Where as if you power supply or CPU or memory fails, there is a chance of data loss, but it's a very very low percentage. And probably at worst just a partial data loss.

Though with RAID you need to be carefull that the particular implementation has a good safety against sudden power loss. Because if there is data in the onboard memory waiting to be written to the drives, then it needs to have just enough power to do a emergency flush and write to disk. Solid State Drives also suffer to a lesser degree to this. Some RAID cards have a BBU (Battery Backup Unit) that lets the card keep it's memory energized until the system comes back up, at which point it can flush the onboard memory. This is mostly only a concern when the hardware is using write cacheing in which it tells the operating system that it made a write and then does it in the later. If the system physically writes the data then reports it wrote the data, you are usually ok during power loss.