How do you Backup your ~10TB rigs?

Using the internet as a backup for TBs of data is a real bad idea. How long does it take to download even 1GB of data? Longer than I am willing to wait. Especially if a hard drive fails and takes 2000GB of data with it. Certainly one could pay for overnight shipment of 2TB of data on a hard drive. I expect the hard drive will cost $200+, the labor for the site to move your data to the hard drive and mail it off another $100.

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Someone mentioned that ripping a DVD should only take 1 minute. That is 500 minutes for a 2TB hard drive - at least the way I rip movies. My billing rate is over $1/minute ($60/hr). If you can do all the ripping at the best speed, $500 seems a bit much to spend because you are not willing to spend $100 for a backup hard drive.

Time has a value. More than most think.I cannot imagine ripping all my DVDs again.
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All of your business records are duplicated. An original and 3 copies in house. A copy in a detached building. A copy in an employee's car/house. 5 copies under $600 in hardware - hard drives and cases.
 
This is what I do:

I've got maybe 16TB of data on file server (RAID6 array w/2TB drives). I also have a pile of 'old' hard drives, 500GB to 1.5TB, actually a few 2TB as well, 20 some drives, I forget.

I use this pile of old drives for backups. These are individual drives, each with their own file system, they are simply labeled from backup01 to backupXX.

I then have my backup script that handles backing up the array to these individual disks.

The script knows the size of all the backup drives (eg backup01 is 500GB, backup02 is 1TB...).

So I run 'backup update' and this takes a snapshot of the array (btrfs's snapshot), it then creates a list of files to be put on each of the backup drives.

So after I've run 'backup update' I start putting the backup drives in a usb hdd dock on my desk. I put a drive in, and then run 'backup sync'. It then figures out what drive is attached and copies over correct files (really rsync). It syncs that drive and when its done I swap out the drive and put the next in the usb dock and run 'backup sync'... repeat this.

Works pretty well. I could automate it a bit better I guess, it should probably detect when I put in a backupXX drive and automatically start copying files, I should need to run 'backup sync'.... but whatever.

Anyways this setup should keep working in the future with really no additional cost. One day when I want up upgrade, I'll likely start replacing my 2TB drives currently in the array with new 3TB drives... the old 2TB drives will then just get moved to the backup pile.
 
GeorgeHR said:
Someone mentioned that ripping a DVD should only take 1 minute. That is 500 minutes for a 2TB hard drive - at least the way I rip movies.
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But your usage is not necessarily the same as the OP's. Do you have 2500 DVDs on 10+ TB? The subject of this thread is 10 TB.

Some people prefer the higher quality of blurays, and if you do a lossless rip, that will be 20 to 40 GB each. So 50 to 100 movies on a 2TB HDD.

If I lost an HDD full of movies, I'd not replace the full set immediately. Over time, as I wanted to watch each movie, I'd rip it again. So I'd be looking at an hour or two spread out over many months. Not a big deal to me.

If my house burned down and I lost all the HDDs with movies, that would be a pain. But not enough of a pain for it to be worth it to me to keep an offsite backup of TBs of movie data. They are just movie rips, I can deal with losing them if I have to. You are right that the rips represent many hours of my time. But you are wrong to value it at full cost. I think the probability of my house burning down (or other total destruction, or file server being taken) is probably less than 1%. So even if I value my time at $100/hr, I need to take 1% of that, so $1/hr. If it took 40 hours of my attention to redo all the rips, that is only $40 in expected value. Not worth it if the backup costs more than $40.
 
GeorgeHR said:
Using the internet as a backup for TBs of data is a real bad idea. How long does it take to download even 1GB of data? Longer than I am willing to wait. Especially if a hard drive fails and takes 2000GB of data with it. Certainly one could pay for overnight shipment of 2TB of data on a hard drive. I expect the hard drive will cost $200+, the labor for the site to move your data to the hard drive and mail it off another $100.

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Someone mentioned that ripping a DVD should only take 1 minute. That is 500 minutes for a 2TB hard drive - at least the way I rip movies. My billing rate is over $1/minute ($60/hr). If you can do all the ripping at the best speed, $500 seems a bit much to spend because you are not willing to spend $100 for a backup hard drive.

Time has a value. More than most think.I cannot imagine ripping all my DVDs again.
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All of your business records are duplicated. An original and 3 copies in house. A copy in a detached building. A copy in an employee's car/house. 5 copies under $600 in hardware - hard drives and cases.
Click to expand...


Yeah that's a good point. For example I uploaded a 1GB file to my internet server the other day. It took 2 days to upload. Internet backups are basically for the very worse case scenario (like a house fire) so I only run mine once a week. In fact since I moved to a new server I've been having to halt the job when I get home from work since I can't use my internet. Then I start the job again before bed. once the first backup is done then it just has to update the changes so it's not that bad. Using rsync.
 
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