MediaCenter - How are People Doing Their Backups?

[Chopmeister]

I can't find anything recent on this, so I thought I would start a new thread.

My PCs and media players have now all been networked, and tied back to an 8-bay NAS where I store my content. Through ripping my DVD collection and capping off my set-top box, I am now starting to amass quite a decent collection (heading towards 12TB and growing). Which I realise is pitiful by the standards of some here, but still a decent size.

I know that a RAID NAS isn't a backup, and it would be a major annoyance if I lost then collection - re-ripping/encoding and replacing lost caps would be a huge amount of work. And, as I have learned over the years, hard drives and hardware can die.

So my question is, how are people with large media collections managing their backups?

Obvious options are:
- optical disks (50GB BD-Rs, as I'm not copying 12TB+ to 4.3GB DVDs, it would take nearly 3,000 disks!)
- USB hard drives
- LTO tape
- Something else

My instinct is against hard drives, despite their cheapness, as they may not spin up after being on a shelf for a long time etc. I'm not that keen on a replica NAS for the same reasons, as well as cost.

Optical disks are expensive in this country ($NZ 5-6 each for 25GB, $NZ 9-10 for 50GB, $1NZ is approx 70 cents US) so I would have to import several hundred. Refurbed LTO-4 tape drives don't seem that unreasonably priced, nor do tapes, but I would presumably need an appropriately sized SSD to feed them the data fast enough (?).

So, how are people in similar circumstances managing their backups, and have I overlooked anything obvious?

[lingyi]

The general consensus of this recent thread is the same as it has always been. Backup, backup, backup to different medium stored in different locations: https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/373692-Backup-Archiving-Video-Files?p=2406492 .

Edit: With large (4TB+) HDDs so cheap <$35 / TB (~.04 / GB) in the U.S., I personally follow the strategy of the "Big Boys" (i.e. Data Centers) and continually replace my HDDs every 2-3 years depending on the warranty. I offset part of the cost by selling off the old drives on Ebay or Craigslist.

[Chopmeister]

Yes, I get that. I thought it was clear from my post. In fact, it was the whole point of my post.

The question I asked was not about whether it was a good idea to back up data, but about about what media and strategies people are using to make/store their backups. I was hoping for a discussion on the pros and cons of options (cost, convenience, reliability etc) - Tape/optical/hard drive or something else etc, and some good ideas on how I might proceed.

I didn't chime in to the related thread you linked to, because it seemed a bit acrimonious and more devoted to people arguing about who did or didn't say what, and I didn't want to stoke the flames.

[jagabo]

I back up to a second set of hard drives. I check the drives about once a month. It's not likely two drives with the same content will die simultaneously.

[Krispy Kritter]

I agree with jagabo. The only real option with a large amount of data, are HDD's. If you have a 16TB NAS storing your collection, then you need a 16TB NAS for backup. How often you backup will depend on how often you add/change data. HDD's will be the fastest, and when you start talking TB's of data, writing to any other format is just out of the question. It would take you days to burn 50 discs.