Backup

[FOSFOS]

Hi
How do you backup your shows these days?
usb, harddrives bluray ? it is not sustainable to burn dvd,s backup anymore

[mr breeze]

just use an ext hd.

[Dreamer Theat]

Multiple hard drives. Copy/paste.

[joujoujou]

All data stored on few external hard drives in at least 2 copies (one on each drive). Not identical drives - preferrably each from different manufacturer, and at least 50% of them being CMR drives.

[mr breeze]

doing a monthly torrents backup this morning to a Seagate Backup Plus 4tb. Got a message of a problem copying a file and then it just went down.
i can feel it still spinning but its got some vibrations going on.
it was made in Thailand. haven't had it that long, maybe a few years. its the first ext hd i've had crash.

[joujoujou]

Seagate you said? Why it does not surprise me?

[FOSFOS]

Originally Posted by mr breeze

doing a monthly torrents backup this morning to a Seagate Backup Plus 4tb. Got a message of a problem copying a file and then it just went down.
i can feel it still spinning but its got some vibrations going on.
it was made in Thailand. haven't had it that long, maybe a few years. its the first ext hd i've had crash.

one crash, then you're in luck. I once had seven of these thinking they were good hard drives, all of them have crashed. When I opened them, it was seagate and western digital, idot buy but I didn't know any better then

[mr breeze]

both brands? maybe they were factory seconds? (guessing because they all crashed)
i've got 2 WDs and 3 Seagates, now since i lost the seagate yesterday.
i think i lost a bunch of pictures.

[WilliamFruntz]

Have you taken out the drive from the case and tried connecting it to a dock? In my experience, 50% of the time it's the case that's fucked and not the actual hard drive.

[FOSFOS]

Originally Posted by WilliamFruntz

Have you taken out the drive from the case and tried connecting it to a dock? In my experience, 50% of the time it's the case that's fucked and not the actual hard drive.

yes I did, it wasn't just the hard drive that was bad. The box was too small, poor circulation and the power cable started to loosen on some. not the best buy. But they also took a lot of effort 24/7

[mr breeze]

i might try that too, i haven't looked real close at the box. maybe some little screws there? was wondering about the cable, but it seems tight.

[StarslayerJo]

this is exactly why I have backup drives with everything synced every other day... everyone makes the mistake once of trusting a HD

[ehodgson]

I have been slowly moving all my long term storage data over to SSD, hopefully I won't have to worry about hard drive failure. The failure rate of Solid State memory is usage I suspect if your only storing a drive will last indefinitely. Its been a slow process as I have more data then money to purchase drives so i have started with my oldest drives first hoping for no failures, my most current and seeded torrents are on a raid system so its protected fairly well but my 100 tb or so of old stuff is a failure waiting.

[brentter]

Here's the latest dataset from backblaze on their HD failure rates for Q3 2024 -
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backb...s-for-q3-2024/
Honestly at this point there are 3-4 main brands and they're all pretty much the same as far as quality (assuming you're not going consumer but rather datacenter/black/raid/server models) - Seagate, HGST, WD, Toshiba are the ones who survived the last 8 years of floods, shitty market trends, etc..

I'm a bit anal about my backup workflow.. it's all automated though. The important stuff (i.e. tax info, family photos, my local git instance that has all my personal projects/etc..) all gets backed up to a local backup server with a raid 50 setup (6 drives) at 4am and then also sent off to backblaze via rsync in the form of an encrypted file. That only happens though if there's been a change or addition to the folders/files. That's pretty small though (I pay 6/month on their cheapest plan and can have up to 1TB before it bumps me up to $12/month).

Anything on my media server that's live music (which is flac/shn shows from places like here as well as flac rips from all my old cd sets from back when i'd trade via snail mail) gets backed up recursively as I add stuff once a week on sundays.. that also goes to the same backup server on my home network. Raid 50 is great because it can allow for up to two drives to fail without data loss and rebuilding the drives after being replaced is faster than a Raid 5 setup. Downside - you need a min of 6 drives. It also gets sent out to a minipc running a smaller raid 5 setup (which only needs 3) that's hosted at a friend's house on his home network. In return I have a similar backup server of his on mine that he sends his stuff to on tuesdays at midnight according to my traffic logs. That way if one of our houses burns down we're still good. I don't backup any of the movies/tv shows I have as I know where I can get all those again but some live shows are just straight up hard to find. I have a pretty fast connection here and he's got a fiber connection up at his place in vancouver. We both are former sysadmins and have similar security setups as far as authentication/encryption is concerned so he's got his own little secure line to his box and I have the same to mine (so we can only see that there's been traffic to that vlan but not what the traffic is). Good fences = good neighbors and also it goes without saying he's a good friend who I trust to not be storing anything shady on his box here.

I have a co-worker who has pretty much the same type of setup going but he has an external HD that he manually plugs in once every two weeks to add anything that needs to be backed up and then unplugs it when it's done and pops it in his fireproof safe. He doesn't backup any media though so it's probably a quick process. He follows the old method where you have 3 sets of your backups with one being either cold storage or off-site storage.

Really just if you're going to backup your stuff make sure it's NOT on the same computer or HD array as your main computer...other components can fail too and it defeats the purpose of backing anything up if it's all located on the same motherboard/raid controller/power-source because one big fail = you have nothing.

Like i said, i'm anal about it but already had the hardware/network setup due to accumulating/re-purposing old equipment. The most common backups I hear about that are just fine are an ext HD or cheap synology NAS connected to their router. All the pre-built consumer NAS systems have built-in apps you can use to automate as well as one click turn them into a shared drive. Just make sure to enable auto-updates for security patches. If your collection isn't over 1-2TB you could also just use the first tier of google drive storage or microsoft onedrive (if you have any of the office 365 subscriptions). The options for online storage at 1TB or less are dirt cheap, just scaling anything over 3tb is where online storage gets pricey.

Here's one of the industry standard apps (it's free) to see the health of any of your drives - Crystal Disk Info - https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/

It'll give you a nice percentage that's color coded as well as show you all the data on # of writes/reads, power on count, etc.. Works well as an early warning indicator that your drives are getting close to the danger zone. Works with all drives, including SSD/NVME. Once it get's down to under 35% it's time to start looking for a replacement. I have hard drives that are over 9 years old and just fine, i've also gotten new hard drives that died after 6 months. It's just a dice-roll.

[brentter]

So yes and no.. writing to the SSD is what diminishes & shortens the efficiency and lifespan however just being powered up the memory cells still degrade over time. I think they're still at an average of 25-30% less failure rate than spinning disk HD's though (as far as premature failure is concerned) but man does that get expensive to run a SSD raid esp ones that are ranked with higher write cycles than the ones you typically find on black friday sales. At this stage I buy new drives for my media center but use recycled ex-datacenter or enterprise drives that have been refurbished by the manufacturer to keep it cheap for my backup raid (if it's refurbished by the manufacturer you can get 5 year warranty's on it even if it has a high power-on #). Just gotta keep up with ebay to find barely used ones sold in bulk to get the good deals because they're dumping 100+ at a time.
https://serverpartdeals.com/ is also another good source for factory refurbished datacenter/enterprise drives as well. Those can sometimes come with an even longer warranty but out of every 10 drives i'll get factory refurbished, 1 will usually be an RMA after running the S.M.A.R.T tests on em.

https://github.com/AnalogJ/scrutiny is a project that looks promising, it runs your basic S.M.A.R.T tests (and demon in the background afterwards) in addition to integrating real world failure rates to determine if you got a dud or not and can alert you when it suspects a drive is starting to go south on you.