Selfhosted

i have ~24tb (6x4) unraided x3 on separate nas, one of which is only plugged in and turned on every few months. if i lose a drive, i can clone the whole thing quickly from one of the other 2 backups.. i dont have to worry about failed raid arrays and i get a bit more useful storage..

in the ~5 years i've had this setup going i think ive only lost one drive, and it started throwin smart errors long before it died

i guess im using a 'redundant array of inexpensive nas' = RAIN! is that a thing? can i make it a thing?

I just want to add, you may not need to backup what you think you can redownload easily.

There are cases of series or movies being really difficult to find or it takes you a long time to find a working torrent. For those it definitely should make sense to back them up, but its a bit subjective feeling which ones those might be.

Another thing in my case, I got movies and seriea for my child on the server. He expects that is accessible, always, and is too young to understand that data can get lost. So I am also backing that up, it could be easily replaced but it would take me time and this would result in my child being unhappy. Not worth it!

I backup my music, photos, docker settings and that's about it. Daily backups to one external HDD, but recently setup a second backup that's runs weekly juuuuust in case. The music is only because it's taken me a long time to build upy library, and that would be painful to lose. TV, movies, meh.

I have 3x 14 TB in a raidz1 setup on TrueNAS. Would take awhile to redownload but isn't critical in any way, so I feel like that's a good compromise.

Mine is fully backed up.

I back up everything. I use Stablebit Drivepool with duplication for all of my source code, media, photos, documents, music, books, laptop backups, etc. I back that up periodically to a Drobo DAS and 8 Bay USB enclosure setup under Drivepool. I also have off site backup (working on a new NAS which will be accessed over a VPN). I don't want to spend the time worrying about loosing anything I have put time and effort into. Been there and done that. Drives are relatively inexpensive but can fail without warning.

I have a similar setup.

I have a 16tb USB HDD that syncs to my NAS whenever my workstation is idle for 20 mins.

I have some rare media that I know would be extremely difficult to replace, so I back that up, but the general stuff is less important.

However, with rights holders constantly trying to move away from the idea of permanent physical ownership, some media will become harder and harder to find in their best or purest forms, disks will go out of print and the used market will start to slowly die as media ages and rots.

Yeah. I only have 6TB. Most of it is just movies and shows for plex. I don’t have backup at all. I could always redownload what i want to watch. I noticed that i rarely rewatch what i download. It’s pointless to backup it.

I have all my spare drives pooled together into a frankenNAS system in a spare Fractal R5 case. Whatever media fits gets a backup on there (in order of personal importance). Otherwise I will reacquire all my ISO's should disaster strike.

I have it replicated to a backup server then to one in the dc