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What offsite storage service do you all use?


Bingie

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Hi all,

My collection has grown to the point that I now worry about losing it all to theft, fire or just plain bad luck.  I've noticed some cloud services offer unlimited storage for about $15/month.  That's sounds like a good deal, to be honest.  My Internet is fast enough to handle it, after the first upload of course.

My only concern is encryption.  I don't want some punk kid at a company copying all of my movies.  I'd like either an encrypted VPN connection into an encrypted volume, or something like that.  Or at a minimum, encrypt each file before uploading.  I could see writing a batch file to zip up each directory.  Sounds painful though.  Prefer simpler.

What service do you guys use?  You happy with it?  I'd love to hear what other people here do for offsite storage.

Edited by Bingie
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Gilgamesh_48

I worked it out and found that offsite storage is too slow and too expensive.

My solution is to keep a pool of drives big enough for all my movies that I connect about weekly or monthly to a computer and duplicate all my video and audio files to that pool.

Then, after the copying is complete, the backups are placed in a fireproof cabinet. I use StableBits Drivepool for my regular storage and for the backup. I have never, in the last four years since I started using a pool for backup and even for a few years before needed to resurrect the backup. I use DrivePool's redundancy (folder duplication) for all my videos and audios and I have had three disk failures (One at a time) and all I needed to do was remove the bad drive and put a new one in its place and then DrivePool took over and the duplicate files that were lost were all replaced in a few days. It should also be noted that I never lost any viewing ability at all as Drivepool switched, as needed, to the duplicates in the pool. In fact in two of the instances I only knew there had been a failure because DrivePool emailed me informing me that a disk was not accessible.

I tested several offsite systems but not one came close to the convenience and reliability of using DrivePool the way I do.

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That is an interesting point.  I too have never had to resort to restoring from a backup.  I don't have a fire proof cabinet.  Maybe I should.  I'll ponder that.

Thanks

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Gilgamesh_48
11 minutes ago, Bingie said:

That is an interesting point.  I too have never had to resort to restoring from a backup.  I don't have a fire proof cabinet.  Maybe I should.  I'll ponder that.

Thanks

I believe everyone should have a place to store things that is fireproof. This is even more true for people that live in a multi-family structure, In a free standing one family structure you are 100% dependent on yourself for fire prevention but in a multi-family structure you can have a fire there is in no way your fault or under your control to prevent.

Personally, if I have a fire, I want to be able to get my TV system back in operation as soon and easy as I can. At my age I am unwilling to expend the kind of energy needed to restart from scratch.

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It really depends on how much storage you currently have in use. 

How much space do you currently have in use for media?

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Spaceboy

if you really want to do this the best way is rclone encrypted up to a unlimited Gdrive business account. people will tell you that this is not within the TOS of GDrive and you are at risk of google unilaterally closing your account but these people have been saying this for the last 5 years + and its still fine.

other than this there is no cost effective online backup and you are better taking local backups and moving them to a different location

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rbjtech

Agree with @Gilgamesh_48 and this is effectively what I do.  I utilise all my 'upgraded' HDD's to form a 'backup' storage system in my outbuilding (encrypted disks) - and then periodically power it up and replicate my on-line storage.  You should never keep your 'backup' on-line (and it shouldn't have internet access either), as any form of Ransomware, virus or human error could wipe it.  Also always set your backup method to backup - not 'Mirror'.

Edited by rbjtech
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pwhodges
3 hours ago, rbjtech said:

You should never keep your 'backup' on-line (and it shouldn't have internet access either), as any form of Ransomware, virus or human error could wipe it.  Also always set your backup method to backup - not 'Mirror'.

My backup system is read-only from the main.  The backup software runs there and pulls changes; also old files are not overwritten but accumulated.  I figure this should help in the unlikely event of anyone trying to get a ransom out of me...

Paul

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6 hours ago, cayars said:

It really depends on how much storage you currently have in use. 

How much space do you currently have in use for media?

I have 4TB of data so far (10TB drive almost half full), but it's basically done at this point.  All my movies and tv shows saved.  I'm sure I'll add more over time, but for now, I haven't added anything in weeks.

I cancelled all cable, just get high speed Internet, so I have no channels to grab from.  As new movies and shows come out, I'm sure I'll grab some.

My existing 2x 10TB drives will probably last me for years before filling.  I'm not into grabbing stuff just because it's there.  If I'm not going to watch it, I don't want it.

I like the idea of periodically BACKING UP to maybe an external drive, and tucking it away in a fireproof cabinet.  Probably all I'll likely ever need.

Thanks everyone, the plan is coming together.

Edited by Bingie
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With that amount of data if you have a fast upload Internet connection you could use something like Google Drive with rclone.

But as your local storage increase the online backup usefulness decreases due to the time it would take to do a restore (if no other reason).

IMHO, it's best to "double purchase" HDDs so that one is part of your main storage used for Emby and the other is used strictly for backup and then moved off site.  This could be a detached garage, relative house, bank vault, etc.  Ideally you want the data outside the house in case of fire/flood or theft.

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Sadly I have no relatives within 1000 miles, and going to the bank twice a month to fetch backup media then put it back sounds too painful.

I do have fast Internet, which is why I was thinking of online remote backup.  The first upload of 4TB will probably take all day or longer, but after that, uploads shouldn't be too bad, especially done at night.  The problem becomes a full restore would take all day.  That's fine.  If I do lose everything, what's one more day?

I'll read up on Google Drive.  I don't trust Google, they monitor everything you do, then sell that information to governments, corporations, etc.  Damn spies.  I'd rather pay somebody that doesn't like Google :P  

Another option is to have a friend or relative backup what I have, and I backup what they have, sort of a mutual "you watch my back I watch yours" over a secure VPN.  If I built a small backup box, and mailed it to them, that could smooth the way.  Something to think about.  More money though DOH!

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rbjtech

With the small data quantities you are using - online backup is likely the easiest to setup. 

Just encrypt both the data AND the filename at source - as the cloud providers 'reserve the right' to know what is on their servers - ie it is scanned for content - and 4Tb worth of MKV's is likely to get unwanted 'attention' and is almost certainly in breech of their T&C's as @Spaceboy mentions above.

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Deathsquirrel

Like most others posting, I found that no online service was suitable.  My NAS is getting upgraded to 120TB as I type this.  The amount of time that would take to restore from any online backup service is beyond belief.  My MIL tried to restore a few TB from such a service and it was going to take a month.  When I replace an old drive the old drive moves into my backup pool.  I have the vast majority of my rips backed up to offline drives in a fire safe.  That's the best I can easily do and since the original discs and all the NAS gear is covered under my homeowners insurance, I'm pretty comfortable with that level of backup.

Important things like family photos are backed up to a safe deposit box at my bank.  Rebuilding my movie collection would just a take a couple of months between re-buying things, building the server, and re-ripping all the discs.

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With that low of a storage size, I am running a QNAP NAS with 2 discs in mirror mode which means if 1 drive fails, just chuck in a new drive and let them sync. Usenet and P2P online sites for rebuilding if all else fails. Usenet storage approaches 10 years soon. Family photos are a different story they are online.

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24 minutes ago, One2Go said:

With that low of a storage size, I am running a QNAP NAS with 2 discs in mirror mode which means if 1 drive fails, just chuck in a new drive and let them sync. Usenet and P2P online sites for rebuilding if all else fails. Usenet storage approaches 10 years soon. Family photos are a different story they are online.

Similar here.  I have a second drive too, same kind/size, but for now, I have it set to run "freefilesync" every night, it sync's my main drive to the backup drive.  I don't want active mirroring, it's a performance overhead.  Backing up at 3am is less overhead.  They both have a 3 year warranty, so I'll probably write a script to monitor the drives for errors.  The first sign of trouble, RMA that bad boy and get a new drive.  Both freefilesync and crystaldiskinfo have built-in email capabilities, can set triggers to email me the first sign of trouble.  That's the direction I think I'm going to go.

After warranty, maybe rotate the drives out to backup role, and buy new drives under warranty.  I have 3 years to figure that part out :)

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Since all three of my NASs are 24/7 online I don't think a lot about performance for me the disc mirroring was more important. I bought 4TB HGST drives and the oldest has been running close to 10 years and the drives in the other ones close to 4 years never a problem. All of them are on UPSs so no spikes and glitches.

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