Oh yeah, I backup all configs 4*day. The good thing about torrenting is even if I had catastrophic loss, as long as I have the list of torrents it should repopulate (assuming someone’s seeding).
Of course I also want to self host my personal photos/videos, and I can’t afford to lose those. I’ll have to look into seeing if any solutions support local storage plus maybe object storage as a backup.
This would be my recommendation as well. Either a shuckable external drive or a standard 3.5" drive with a USB 3.0 enclosure so you have the option to slot the drives into a NAS or server in the future.
ZFS and BTRFS could update their codebase to account for these (if they haven’t already), but I agree that their extra mechanical parts worry me. I really don’t care about speed - if you run enough HDDs in your RAID then you get enough speed by proxy. If you need better speeds then you should start looking into RAM/SSD-caching etc. I’d rather have better reliability than speed, because I hate spinning rust’s short lifespan as-is.
I worked at a place which was still using a 20.04 version (for products they were selling) because updating it would require spending any amount of time updating software. Path of least resistance is using the old os forever.
10 years ago I was working at a place that still used an Apple ][e
It controlled a ROM burner that was vital to the manufacturing process. In a back room was a stack of backup ][e s just in case the production one should ever fail. In the years I worked there it never did.
I’m sure plenty will disagree with me, but unless you have specific needs, I’d suggest spending more time sourcing your media rather than rely on transcoding. Most formats of popular stuff are available and Jellyfin will happily play it natively.
Also be aware that transcoding is VERY cpu intensive, unless you have a compatible gpu/transcoder. I run a ML110 with a 6-core Xeon (12 threads) and if Jellyfin needs to transcode something, it uses all of that and still stutters badly when seeking.
If you do need to transcode because you can’t source the media in a compatible way - you may want to use something like Tdarr to transcode it before you try to play it, so it’s ready when you are.
Interesting, from that data it seems SSD reliability so far isn’t too far off from HDDs (at least for Backblaze’s intensive cloud storage workload) despite having no moving parts…
Will be interesting to see how the reliability plays out as they build up their SSD inventory over the coming years
I agree. Consumer use cases of SSDs sees a tremendous benefit if only for accidental damage reasons, but for enterprise data center use I would not have expected the same overall rates of failure.
No, it’s nothing to worry about, it’ll be just a handful of super cheap parts in the power supply. Essentially when the power supply converts ac to dc, it has a bunch of standard parts, and if you cheap out on them, sometimes they make high pitched noises. The noises can vary in pitch too.
Can you record the sound? I’ve never heard of a power supply having any kind of noisemaker. It’s probably just electrical interference or coil whine or something, where the waveform happens to produce that periodic sound. (You might even look around and find a nearby device changing its power draw with the same periodicity.)
Haven’t been able to record it yet, but the sound only happens when the power supply is plugged into the HDD and the outlet (not one or the other), and the HDD is NOT plugged into the computer.
Plugging the HDD into the computer stops the sound. I was unplugging it from the PC to keep it offline when I didn’t need it. (After safely ejecting and waiting etc. of course)
I guess I’ll just need to unplug the power when I’m not using it, too.
I’d like to second the large flash drive idea. You can get a couple of them and a case to keep them in for less than $50 total and have multiple layers of redundancy
If I where you I would just buy a regular case that can fit a decent amount of HDDs like a fractal define 7 or one of its older versions and transplant your current computer into that with some new drives. 100tb is 5 20tb drives so you don’t need that many.
USB enclosures are not a great way to handle storage as USB tends to be unreliable.
Take a look at hosting your own Nextcloud instance. It’ll replace Google drive, photos, docs, everything–there’s phone apps for iPhone and android. If you want to store your PC backups on it, that’s probably fine too. It might even work ok on the Pi 4 (though some parts it has integrations with may have trouble, like Nextcloud Office, since they may not have ARM binaries in their distribution).
It should work great on your local network and still be acceptable when uploading out and about (photos can auto sync if you turn that on on your Nextcloud phone app).
If 4TB is enough for your needs, I’d suggest getting another 4TB and making them a RAID1 pair using mdadm, and then probably also another 4TB to make backups of Nextcloud and Nextcloud data onto to keep offsite. You can never have too many copies of your data.
I’m not sure what to do about the variety of smaller drives. I can say I wouldn’t recommend consolidating them onto a single drive, because I did that once (many drives ranging from 60 gigglebytes to 300, onto one 1.5 TB drive) and then formatted or got rid of the smaller ones…and then dropped the 1.5 TB drive on the floor while it was running. Rip. But just like the above, a RAID1 array composed of two big drives would probably be fine.
Just make sure to set up some alerts for when a drive fails.
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