Article: Reevaluating My Music Storage

[Jud]

6 hours ago, jrobbins50 said:

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

 

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]

2 hours ago, botrytis said:

I have lost documents (like my Ph.D. thesis) to HD errors, and dead HD's. So, I am very anal about backups, etc.

 

Ouch! Wow, the Ph.D thesis being lost is the stuff of nightmares. Were you able to recover/reconstruct it in some way? (Sorry for the OT, but I'm just hoping this has a reasonably happy ending.)

[Jud]

1 minute ago, Dan Gravell said:

Have you considered cloud storage at all? I don't mean as the "gold" source of data (i realise you'll want to play from within your network), but for things like external streaming, sync etc?

 

Do you know of inexpensive cloud storage for large volumes of data in motion rather than data at rest? The cloud storage I'm familiar with (my knowledge is by no means comprehensive) is much less expensive as backup where it can be at rest.  So sync, yeah, external streaming, not that I know of, but maybe you know of something?

[Jud]

@The Computer Audiophile - Poking around the interwebs the last day or two I've seen some *very* inexpensive DIY TrueNAS builds (around $1000 exclusive of large storage drives), though with your need for speed in moving data, something up to your specs might be a bit more. The majority of these have been TrueNAS Core, as that's a much more mature OS at this point than TrueNAS Scale.

[Jud]

4 hours ago, Dan Gravell said:

 

Egress cost is something you need to check for, I agree. But it depends what you mean by inexpensive!

 

Wasabi, pCloud and Hetzner all offer what I'd say is reasonably inexpensive - about $60/year or in that ballpark. Is that inexpensive?

Just checked out the 3 you mentioned, and for the scale of what @The Computer Audiophile would be using, pricing is nowhere near that. Maybe I’m not researching the right thing.

 

Backblaze personal unlimited storage is near that price point for pure backup (data at rest), but not suitable for external streaming and lacks the tools of something like Backblaze’s B2 product, which is suitable for external streaming but where cost escalates with size of storage (and with data egress).

[Jud]

32 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

 

I've been thinking about this post more and going over the options endlessly. 

 

I wonder how I can speed up my existing QNAP to max out its performance, for a reasonable amount of money using spinning drives for the main storage. Then add a couple large USB drives to the QNAP and schedule backups to those. 

 

Analysis paralysis to the max :~)

Low tech/low cost seems like a great idea to me. Only question is whether the QNAP will take the additional volume of music you’ll be trying to cram in there.

[Jud]

34 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

I have four open drive bays and an open NVMe slot for caching if needed. 

Throughput OK?

[Jud]

2 hours ago, bobflood said:

Strange things can and do happen. Houses burn down, get hit by lightning, get broken into, utilities have massive failures and the list goes on. All of which can result in the total or partial loss of data.

 

It's precisely because of these contingencies that I have a cloud backup.  My cloud provider has better provision for such eventualities than I could ever manage with an offsite backup that I owned.

[Jud]

7 minutes ago, bobflood said:

I know cloud backup is far better today but I would still keep a hard drive(s) in a bank safety deposit box and update it periodically if I had a home library. I got tired of all this and switched to streaming only when it got good enough with advent of Qobuz. Plus I am not sure a cloud backup would work well with the size of a library like the one Chris and some others here have. The other thing I found is that like Chris mentioned in the body of the article, I no longer wanted to listen to a lot of what I was storing and that Qobuz( and Tidal to some extent) really suited my current musical tastes. 

 

The other problem with home storage is the legal one. If something is ripped from a CD, you really should keep the CDs to be within the letter of the law. If something is downloaded, you really don't own it. You have only purchased the right to listen to it and delete it if you no longer want it. You can't really even give it away or bequeath it. I admit that I have not researched this stuff in years so it may have changed.

 

My point is that for me it was way more work, worry and hassle than it was worth but I do realize that others have vastly different opinions and I certainly respect their choices. 

 

Well, I was only a lawyer for 42 years, so there are things I may have missed, but I think I'm pretty safe. 😉

 

Yes, I have all my CDs (and all my old vinyl, come to that, but I don't record that, I play it on my turntable).  There's no one waiting for me to give away or bequeath my downloads - it's purely my musical taste. (Though there are companies that will allow you to bequeath now.  Don't know if Qobuz is one of them, but as I said, I'm not going to be trying to will my downloads to anyone anyway.)

 

I pay ~$60-$70 annually for unlimited backup with a company (Backblaze) that has so far proved to be no hassle and extremely reliable.

 

To this point I haven't felt purchased/ripped music is different than streaming in terms of ease of listening and any associated preparations.  Of course, as always, YMMV. 🙂