3x16tb in raidz1 here, so 30ish tb useful. Drives are over 5 years old now. Raid is my backup for media, and if i lose it all, who cares, I can download it again.
The craziest thing is that I could sell these drives now, for the same price I bought them new!
Bro, there is absolutely zero chance that if I lost my almost 30tb of content id go back and redo everything. Thats more or less 2.5 years of work finding, downloading, and tweaking things.
If you back up the important things, like your configs, set ups, lists of media and settings. You can get it all back easily. Just back up the media you cant get via arrs on another 3-2-1 system.
I have an external 1Tb hard drive I monthly back up important files/media, and then use BackBlaze for continuous back up of the same stuff + some extra folders cause its cheap enough for me to use as a back up.
Selling 5 year old media drives is just cruel man, some poor sap that doesn't understand the 3-2-1 rule is going to be devastated when he loses his hentai folder.
Just buy 2nd hand from a company. I got 24tb from my buddy for free a few years back bevuase he purchased 400tb+ for less than a grand from a place with sells off old shit.
A 4tb ssd runs you around $600. Regular hard drive is $200. So 32tb worth is anywhere from $1200 to $3600. Not to mention all that time downloading that much media, most of which you will never watch.
I just have a 4tb ssd and download what I want to watch and then delete it. Maybe half of that space is movies and shows I wanna keep to watch casually, but most stuff is watch and delete
Also, Plex just recently jacked up with price a lot. The free version has always been glitchy for me. Jellyfin is so much better
I use newsgroups, with dockers for radarr, sonarr, and sabnzb. I also have an overseer website for people to request content that then pulls from the newsgroups.
Access to the newsgroups does cost, though it’s cheaper than streaming subs and gets me access to every service.
I don’t know if it’s cost efficient now though. I used an old pc for the mobo and cpu, and I bought refurbished server drives before the tariffs and AI. I have about 60TB usable with dual parity and 2 tb of ssd for cache.
I run 64TB Plex and don’t bother backing it up. With a 1GB connection I can just download my files if something goes wrong. Probably faster than restoring from backup or repairing RAID
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u/Conscious-Record2655 1d ago
What's your HDD backup system like? Sounds expensive.