Backing up digital movie collection

NYSpeed Automotive NYSpeed Off Topic
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What are you movie pirates doing to backup your collections?

I’m quickly approaching 1.5 TB and can see my collection passing 3TB before the end of the year. How do you backup 3TB of data?

I could mirror the drives but then for every 1TB of data I’d need another 1 TB to mirror the data to. That seems horribly inefficient.

Briefly looked into raid 5 arrays but don’t really know how many drives I’d need to get enough striping and parity to ensure a drive failure wouldn’t result in data loss. A friend says five 750GB drives would be about 2.8TB in a raid 5 configuration.

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I am in the same boat… not backing anything up

I would be devistated and probably just give up pirating for netflix if I lost my collection

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I’ll give you 25 bucks if you burn all those movies to a HD for me.

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Since all of this stuff is readily available on the internet and will probably only be easier to access in the future, I’m not too concerned about backing-up.

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http://www.ibeast.com/content/tools/RaidCalc/RaidCalc.asp

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I guess since its your home setup you won’t need a hot spare…in the real world I wouldn’t suggest running a setup like that with out a hotspare.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822154339

or just find a case that can hold enough drives and buy a hardware RAID card…

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The more I look into this the more I think a simple mirror is the solution. I’ve got a ton of old hardware kicking around to toss together a real simple server. pick up a two pack of 1.5tb drives for $200 and run a nightly or weekly sync between the two servers.

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Online backup was mentioned but can you imagine how long that first 3tb backup would take with a 1 or 2 mb up connection?

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storing pirated media on the cloud?

lol

I don’t know the legalities, but I would NOT do that.

Build a cheap linux box and rsync the bitch

That is all LZ’s link is showing. Just a massive HDD case with a Linux box and a few Sata Cards. Then, what you really should do is just store everything there, and have it run an SMB share. Mount the SMB, and play all your shit from there.

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Yah I’m also down for you coping them onto a HD for $$. Pm me :slight_smile:

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yeah i was def serious

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edit:

pm me for list, payment info, address

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I plan on doing a RAID5 setup in my new PC when I put it together this fall. I’m doing 3 2TB drives. You may want to try that. Or if you need more space go with 4 2TB drives.

EDIT - Oh, and the 3 drive setup will land you at 4TB of space. The 4 drive setup will land you around 6TB of space.

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I have never built a raid 5 on a home PC…Do the drivers/software do a good job alerting of drive failure?

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there seem to be some cards that have pretty good raid management software that come with them

if not, use custom nagios alerts to send you an email when a failure occurs :slight_smile: As I am sure the failure would appear in logs somewhere

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Alerts really depend on the card that you’re using. Most of the RAID controllers that are built onto motherboards don’t have the greatest monitoring/alerting features but dedicated cards seem to come with good monitoring/alerting features as mentioned above.

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