Article: Reevaluating My Music Storage

[jrobbins50]

Chris, your tail scares the bejeebers out of me.  I have the same Synology 1812+ NAS, and it's now got but 516Gb of storage left, out of 43.2Tb!  The series of MKV, MKA and MLP files generated just to get to a single lossless 5.1.2 Atmos format album truly eats up a chunk of storage.  And I don't have any of it properly backed up, except for having the Synology set to have two of the eight 8Tb drives go bad simultaneously and still be able to hot swap replacement spinners.  Our power went out three times alone the week before last.  My UPS only holds out for about an hour and in each case, the outage was for several hours.  We do plan to install a whole house backup generator system in the spring, as have our neighbors on either side, but that still doesn't mean that my NAS couldn't nosedive at any point.

 

Backing up to the cloud is not cheap and would probably take weeks to complete, during which any power outage or other internet disruption could screw up.  I can imagine that I need to just buy 20Tb (or other size) drives and get underway to back up my entire NAS content for storage of the backup disks offsite at my wife's office, only five minutes from home.  Sounds like a good New Year's resolution.  If your research suggests a good drive to use for this, I'd appreciate the input.

 

This said, I'll take any good ideas that you've got on this one.  I feel your pain!  JCR

[jrobbins50]

17 hours ago, Jud said:

 

As you know, RAID is not a backup plan. (Neither is ZFS, but it is more robust than RAID at avoiding errors.) I would not wait to implement an actual backup.  Have a look at Backblaze's drive reliability data, which is thorough and nicely presented, and get some reliable drives on which to back up your NAS. 

Jud, thank you for the reference to Backblaze. I was not familiar with it. Very helpful. I ordered up three 16Tb drives — WUH721816ALE6L4 — which seem to be highly rated. New for $888 from ServerSupply.com.  I will use them to do a full backup of my NAS for offsite storage. Cheers. JCR