Media storage

Verb

I've set up a home network to run my Media Centre off. My main worry now is that the media that I have is only safe for as long as the hard drives are safe.

I understand that I can back everything up but this means have twice as much data round the house.

What alternatives are there for storing my media whilst not having to worry about losing it??

googler

Copy data to portable drive(s).

Store portables at friend or family home, or get a safe deposit box at your bank.

fenlander_uk

Question is: just how valuable is your data and what are you protecting it against?

Businesses whose existence depends on their data must store multiple backups off-site. Are your mp3s and TV shows that vital?

I'd be sad to lose my media files, but it wouldn't wreck my life. What is likely to happen - indeed, it's almost certain to happen at some time - is that a hard drive will fail. I can protect against that by syncing to a second drive. If the house burns down or the North sea makes it all the way to Cambridge, I'll lose both, but quite honestly if that happens I'll have bigger worries than the latest episode of 'Elementary'.

I use 2x2TB drives. I sync about once a week using SyncBack (excellent!). I never have less than 2 copies of anything and generally delete video files when watched. My drives sit side by side next to the media PC and neither will survive a falling meteorite or crashing jumbo jet. Neither will I.

EDIT: If I lived in a house that had been flooded or burgled a couple of times in the last year, I'd probably move the whole thing upstairs...

Verb

That is my only concern - A failing drive

I just wasn't sure what is available for the growing area of media centres for protecting our data.

Yes it is all my music and TV collection that I want to protect.

Since we are now into digital TV / music storage, I still don't want to lose all that I've paid for should my drive (eventually) fail. We would be upset if we came home from work and our CD's and DVD's where gone.

I just want to look to protect against it happening digitally.

Does anyone know of anything that is aimed at this??

Lucero_2

Welcome to the world of backup! You could cloud store your stuff, but what guarantees do you have that that won't fail. Do you have a redundant backup with twice the storage to backup the backup? There will come a point when something somewhere fails down that line.

If it's not critically important, don't go nuts over it.

fenlander_uk

Verb wrote: »

That is my only concern - A failing drive

Does anyone know of anything that is aimed at this??

As I said, a second hard drive and a file sync program like SyncBack. Plus a bit of organisation.

Backing up a video collection to the cloud is a non-starter due to the sheer volumes of data involved. Even if you have a 120Mb cable connection, at best you'll only have 10Mb upstream. An mkv movie is usually 4-6MB: do the math. Also, free cloud accounts are nowhere near big enough, so you might as well spend your cash on another USB drive.

I do, however, keep an extra copy of my music files - currently about 130GB - on a portable drive. That way they can travel with me.

A while ago, before I bought the second 2TB drive I had a disk failure of my media drive due to a corrupt file allocation table. Fortunately, I was able to get everything back using file recovery software, but it took 3 days of solid copying. I guess nearly everyone needs to have a disaster, or near disaster, before they get organised properly. Now I even have an extra drive plugged into my PVR, so that's backed up, too. I feel much more secure these days.