Topic of NAS, backups, storage and data loss paranoia

[Shuri]

Anyone here with a NAS at home? I've had mine since 2012 or so, a Synology DS411j with 4x3tb drives in it. It has served me well, the hard drives are still in good shape, according to the SMART tests, but they have over 25k hours of usages. Which is a lot! I'm dreading having to replace them 

The world of OS and apps available for this kind of product has greatly changed since, now you can run PLEX, torrent clients, vpn clients and stuff. My old NAS only has 128mb of ram in it, so it's kinda hard on it. This does not accept file transfers speed/ hard drive access, it's only slow for all those cool new apps.

Still, I bought myself an external bluray drive, and i'm going to start dumping all my bluray to the NAS. I only have 3TB left on it, and considering I have about 250 blurays. Back when I first got the NAS, I had a started a similar process with my dvds, but it turned out to be a lot of work, and frankly, my old self made dvd rips are kinda crap to look at. I mean; they're alright but they all look like netflix movies.

So basically I'm going to start dumping my blurays to mkv and don't do any kind of compression. I want my shit to be future proof. These days, they have NAS with hardware transcoding.. I might just get one, and use it to store the movies. The other stuff is gonna go on the old one. It's kind a pretty damn expensive investment to make  , I'm aiming for a 4 bays one with perhaps 6tb drives. we'll see

I also got one of those Western Digital Ultra Passport the other day, the 4TB model. I remember when usb drives started, my first drive being 32MB  I bought it to make a backup of the most important data on the NAS, I mean, it's on raid5 and everything, but like I said, the drives are getting old so it wont hurt to have an external backup.

So what do you guys have?

[Joe Molotov]

NAS lost

[archie4208]

Life's a bitch and then you die

[T-Short]

I have a Synology DS215j. Mirrored 3TB. I use it for backup for my Macs and some media storage. Also using a dynDNS service for external access.

[zomgee]

I have a Netgear 516 with 24tb. I use it mostly for media and Plex. I love the thing and I'd like to put some 8tb drives in it.

Go ahead and do raw rips and get Plex. It's awesome.

[Phoenix Dark]

[Shuri]

I have a Netgear 516 with 24tb. I use it mostly for media and Plex. I love the thing and I'd like to put some 8tb drives in it.

Go ahead and do raw rips and get Plex. It's awesome.

I just did raw rips of a few flicks, and it works fine with my PS4, but for some reasons they randomly crash the xbox one player. I also tried them on my sony bluray player, and they streamed fine from the WIFI, which was a surprise, but that needs more resting. I only let it play for a few minutes, I assume that fast forwarding will be problematic.

So far, 3 movies are taking 85b!    The few tb I have let on my nas won't last long!

[G The Resurrected]

I just built a NAS this year and it was a pain in the ass to setup. Software wasn't working well with my motherboard manufacture for months till it was updated. I went with FreeNas, but might have to move over to something else before too long.

Ended up with:
I5 7600K (stable underclock for power consumption)
32gb of DDR4 3200mhz
6x 8tb Helium drives running at 8k rpm effectively through firmware mod. Reads are about equal to a 10K drive due to the helium. Running them in a ZFS raid with two drives set available for fail. Made sure all of them weren't from the same batch as well. Which decreases the likelihood of mass drive failures within a short time. Temps on the drives are also pretty low considering how fast they spool up, I ran a stress test and none of them got over 45c which is great.
512gb NVME for cache writing, great for a day's writes then it populates over the raid at night.
10GBE over Cat6 to my rendering machine. Got the huge fucking packets going so I can reach the limit of bandwidth saturation. Couple that with the NVME drives on both machines and things move very quickly.

It's been a bumpy experience, but I don't think I would have learned nearly as much as I have if it weren't for that. Now I feel more confident when issues arise and what I can do to solve them. I am going to be moving my library over to Emby as soon as they release a proper docker, which might complicate a few things with regards to my media.

As for backups I live close to Backblaze so I signed up for that and got a workaround for them to see the NAS as a giant pool of data to backup. It's been really good at backing up stuff just in case.

[Shuri]

That's a sick setup. Building your own setup is always a great learning experience, especially with stuff like this. I'm gonna go for this later as my "movies" NAS. https://www.synology.com/en-us/products/DS416play. I'm gonna get it later this year, there is no rush, as dumping all my bluray is gonna take a long time. 15-30 minutes per bluray, and I have around 250-300 disks, I'm in for a marathon. It's all stuff I bought for 5$ a piece during amazon sales,  I never buy new releases.

WD announced today some 20tb backup solution, but it turns out it only supports raid 0?  .. Potentially losing 20tb of data is way too much stress

Also I have discovered that the ps4 doesnt not support DTS audio playback when streaming from MKV  So now i'm using this program called "Popcorn MKV Audio Converter" that will rip the DTS track, convert it to AC3 (other formats are available) and remux the mkv with it. it's all automated and so far it has done a stellar job, I can't see I have noticed much difference but I don't have a pro level home theater system.

edit: i'm talking about when streaming raw mkvs without doing any service transcoding,I assume it works when the server is running plex or whatever.

[Tasty]

Just a 1 TB Google Drive plan.

[Rufus]

Just Dropbox. Outside of some documents, I don't actually have anything that's irreplaceable. Living an unburdenend life.

For media, I just print a tree diagram of those folders to textfiles on Dropbox. That way, I can at least know what I've 'lost', then download it again or just stream it. It would be a pain for some things, but not enough to invest in a proper solution.