worst day ever...

[Deathsquirrel 741]

Yeah, I've learned my lesson. I've ordered a second case and will be mirroring the data to it. Not sure what I'll be running on it yet. There are lot's of compelling solutions offered here.

 

The only thing that really made me sad was the loss of my music. Ripping my discs is a pita and the RIAA has done a good job of terrifying users who get media from other sources. Then I remembered all my music was on my iPod and no longer felt sad

I just ripped our music again, for the last time I hope.  Everything to flac, flacs to blu-ray, blu-ray to safe deposit box.  As with everything else there I'll replace the discs every 5 years or so, just in case.

[mranim8or 3]

Though I've never lost anything from my movie or music collection, a nasty laptop hard drive failure killed multiple gigabytes of pictures, including many of the baby pictures of my kids. It was awful and even when sent to a clean room, the data was unrecoverable.  We said 'never again' and my wife signed up for crashplan.....

 

....and then two years later a hard drive died again. We said 'no big deal, its on crashplan'.  Then I found out my wife had improperly configured crashplan...the whole time she had it backing up the wrong directory! She now refers to it as the 'dumbest thing I've ever done in my life'.  The data was recoverable, though we spent around $800 to do so.  After, it took me 5 minutes to configure crashplan correctly, then I copied all our irreplaceable stuff to multiple hard drives in different rooms and even one in a fireproof box. Unless crashplan's servers die at the same time as our house explodes, we should be good now. And, uh, if that happens then I have bigger problems than lost data. 

 

As for my movie collection, I keep offline copies of everything. I only have like 3TB though.  Because we only have DSL crashplan would take years to upload all that data, its pretty slow. Important stuff like home videos and pictures get uploaded.

[DeeMac 17]

Techs, No mention of WIndow Storage spaces? or Nas4Free/FreeNas?  I recommend anything that does NOT encode your data to a proprietary format.  While I do dislike running an OS underneath a storage solution like flexraid, If it works, then awesome.

 

I have an all-in-1 Server because I also have virtual Linux machines hosted on the same box.  This kept my storage drives local and not running over the network (No SAN/NAS).  The easiest solution to me was to use Windows 7 Raid 1 for my large data drives.

[gthrift 57]

That sucks.  I've lost a single hard drive and that was bad enough.  It was mostly TV shows that I ended up replacing with downloads.  Most of my media is rencoded to high quality MKVs so having to recopy a lot of stuff not only meant having to rerip, but then reencode.  

 

I don't believe in RAID or pooling due to the difficulty in finding what's missing if you do lose a drive.  I keep my drives separated into Media 1, Media 2, etc and let Media Browser do all the work.  I then have a backup of everything that would be difficult or time consuming to replace at my office on two 3tb drives.  

 

I'll be having my 1st child in November, so at that time I'll be looking into something like crashplan to backup videos and pictures so we don't ever lose those.  

[Tharnax 49]

3 WHS servers in 3 completely separate locations. Bitsync keeps all important data from each server redundantly backed up across all three servers. Drive Bender running on all three servers which all critical data set for drive duplication.

 

Hard drive failures = 5 across all three servers over the past 3 years.  

 

Data loss = 0, recovery time in minutes.

 

It really sucks to lose data, especially critical data.  You never realize how important it is until you can no longer get it back.  Sorry to hear about your troubles Redshirt, hope you find a viable solution soon.

[FlyGuyAZ 5]

I recommend anything that does NOT encode your data to a proprietary format. 

 

Agree 100%! You may have a RAID 1 mirror or something in a NAS but if that box dies and you can't just grab a disk and throw into something else to read it, that's a potential issue.