Planning Media library backup and restore from SMB shares

[JuJuJurassic 49]

Hi All,

Here's what i'm planning, Yep, in advance for a change

I have an emby server with 2x smb shares it acesses for it's media. The SMB stores need deleting and recreating, no rush though, plenty of time to plan.

I have 2x windows 2012 servers, with SMB shares, totally isolated from everything, and only powered up during backups. Once a month,  I copy the files over to them using a delta copy (Karen's replicator) so it only copies over the new files. So on each SMB backup there is  an exact copy of the main SMB shares used by emby.

So when I delete the source/ main SMB stores, I can copy over the SMB backups back to them. That's easy, if a bit time consuming.

So my Question would be, how do I do this in a way that the most recent files correctly and appear as if nothing had happened? Previously the files appeared in the order they were copied, not by date/most recent

I thought I should do backups every day, so the copied time stamps on the backup shares are incremental, rather than just once a month.

If I set the library to 

Date added behaviour for new content: Use file creation date

it shoud do it. I didn't do this previously.

It then usually takes 4 days to bring down the metadata, even though it's copied too."save

What advice can you give me to make this go smoothly?

Thanks

Edited March 16, 2023 by JuJuJurassic

[rbjtech 5284]

It could be a long answer - So #1 question is why delete the original shares if you just plan on restoring them from a backup ?

To add - File Creation Date is not the same as File Modified Date.  So you can copy the file whenever you like, emby will still use the 'Created' date in the emby library order.

These are all different attributes - 

So if I copied this file again today - only the 'Modified' date would change - the 'Created' date would remain as 11 Jan 2021.

Edited March 16, 2023 by rbjtech

[JuJuJurassic 49]

Thanks for replying. The SMB shares are Raid 0, I now have the disks to make it raid 5

So it Emby uses the creation date, I should be okay ?

Thanks

[rbjtech 5284]

19 hours ago, JuJuJurassic said:

Thanks for replying. The SMB shares are Raid 0, I now have the disks to make it raid 5

So it Emby uses the creation date, I should be okay ?

Thanks

ok - any reason to use RAID 5 on a media collection if you have a solid backup solution ?

There are huge disadvantages to RAID 5 for this type of mass storage - RAID 5 was good in it's day but rebuilding a failed disk from parity, will not only take a LONG time, but degrade the performance of the storage until it's complete.   As you have a solid backup solution, it will far more effective to just restore the failed disk from that imo.   If you are concerned with loss since the last backup, then just run a daily 'online' backup of changes since the last backup - a delta, which gets scrubbed once the main backup has run.  Increase/decrease the frequency of this 'incremental backup' to whatever you seem an acceptable loss amount.    For 'critical' files, then by all means setup a RAID1 block - but keep this separate from the 'media'.

Something like disk pooling (not Storage Spaces though..) or even JBOD will probably server you better and give you full control but understanding the use case, needs are very important.

If you need more read performance for example, then RAID has it's place but its highly unlikely you need even close to what a single disk can sustain in a typical emby environment.

Edited March 18, 2023 by rbjtech