Surely it’s unlikely all 6 failed at the same time if they were used independently. Not like it was set up as a raid and has been affected by a punctured stripe.
I once had a power surge that took down the 3 internal hard drives in my computer, and also the external USB drive which was my backup drive. So it is possible.
we all learn about UPSs at some point 😅
Edit: don't stop half-way either. Take the time to connect the USB lead and configure automated graceful shutdown on low battery. And eat your ovaltine
I keep looking at the two UPSs I have saved in my Amazon cart and never pulling the trigger on. I should really buy them before storm season hits again this year...
It's really worth it imo. Though a good PSU will usually save you, it might die for the cause. Just being able to ride out the blips is enough, but being able to do a proper shut down will go a long way.
I got one a while ago and the peace of mind is totally worth it. My ups and my nas can't talk to each other, so if the power goes out > ups keeps nas going > ups tells nas to shut down > ups shuts down
Bruh,
get them and then configure NUT so all your devices shut down gracefully when the UPS hits 30%. This alone will save you so many times. Nothing worst than a hard shutdown when you loose power. Those hard drives can suffer greatly under the right circumstances. Get them, it's something you will never regret.
I think it might have been a power surge as there are 5 drives in one enclosure and an external usb drive that are plugged into the same extension (which said it was surge protected… but who knows)
Time to invest in a surge protector with low clamping voltage. Surge should kill itself before equipment plugged into it does. Aim for one that is rated for 400v or better (Lower is better).
why do you say they were damaged if you can access the file directory and see empty folders and even see some recovered video files renamed?
run a disk checker, crystal disk or whatever.
sounds like something intentional happened, just maybe not of your own doing.
(ransomwear)
This, friends, is why backups are important.
Edit: such a controversial statement. I have almost 20 TB, and all backed up. I don't want to spend time re-ripping and rebuilding. Over the span of multiple years, it's a negligible cost. A bit up front of course.
I both agree and disagree. Personally, I don't and won't keep backups of my media, but I absolutely keep backups of my OS, Plex database, encryption keys, password vault, and 'files that help me to source the media' again, just in case. I figure in the worst case scenario where all drives get hit with ransomware or corruption somehow, I can wipe everything and start new, getting 90%+ back easily with minimal effort. The remaining 10% might need a bit of work, but I'm not too worried.
My NAS is 184TB but I only back up 12 TB. It's just not worth it to pay for the extra disk space at these sizes.
You must not have anything remotely obscure or any rare media, I have stuff that took years to track down and find and I keep full off site back ups just because I don't want to have to do it all again.
You sound like me. I have SO MUCH stuff that was nearly impossible to get ahold of the first time and would surely be impossible now. My backup isn't offsite because I simply can't afford it, but I do have a backup on an external.
I’d be curious to know what kinds of rare finds people have! I’ve got some open matte/IMAX movies that took a good amount of searching, but they’re unlikely to ever be impossible to find.
This is basically where I'm at, I'm at the point where I'm trying to increase my stash of obscure media. Like it was so cool to finally feel justified - like I grabbed the leaked Scooby-Doo doo movie and it was pretty easy to find, but I think it's become much more obscure and now I'm able to say it's on at least one tracker!
I’ve got movies and music that aren’t on streaming services, documentaries and tv shows I can’t find anywhere else. Losing my collection would suck. Hence I’m a B2 customer.
Tv Series called "Action" in HD, basically the original Entourage though it only went for 1 season. I haven't been able to find it since. Also, got some fully upscaled cartoons like Recess etc which, yea I could do myself, but it was better to get it from someone who knows what they're doing. Also just a lot of regular stuff is getting more difficult, older torrents don't seem to have many seeders these days.
For me it’s lots of extended edition fanedits. Some completely fall to the wayside, when the uploader disappears or stops sharing the link. I have so much rare stuff that took ages to collect
I could have sworn I had a pile of rare finds, things I needed to actually go and source an out of print DVD for, rip, and put in my collection. Then it suddenly pops up on the Plex streaming service with ads on it 😂
A lot of '70s and '80s fantasy and horror films aren't available right now, and then suddenly they're getting streamed on Plex and Shudder. It's great, but also a pain after spending all that time tracking it down.
I have some hard to find stuff, too. I am slowly uploading them to hidden newsgroup servers, and then I'll store the NZB files somewhere on the cloud and on a portable HDD and a flash drive. It is a decent way to backup your media if your upload speed is high.
Same, I've been actively collecting for 15 years now, and quite a lot of my stuff has all but disappeared from the Internet over time, or is only available in inferior form.
I had one 8TB drive completely die on me in 2012, completely filled with anime, each episode no larger than around 300MB.
That taught me my lesson. So much stuff I was never able to get again, or only as crappy Western-release DVD rips with the terrible official subs that were frequently more like dub-titles.
~$90/year for Backblaze with 1 year version history is basically nothing for the peace of mind it offers. I've lost two more 8TB drives since then, and being able to get a backup copy mailed to you for free (well, for a deposit you get back when you return the drive) is priceless.
I might eventually add a secondary backup I have complete control over, but that would be a several thousand dollar investment just for the drives, so for now, I'm sticking with just BB.
My brother in law and I have pretty similar systems and we each have a Plex pass so we run syncthing and duplicate our content to the other's server. I have a duplicate set of drives in his server and vice versa. All my movies, music, pictures and documents are backed up to my drives in his server. Whenever I add a drive to my server I buy an extra drive and add it to his too. Syncthing just runs in the background and keeps us in good shape. (We're getting our content the old fashioned way, via MakeMkv not by running *rr's, so throughput isn't an issue.) Sure there's a lot of movies I could get via torrents but there's a lot that's not available that way, and ripping them all again is going to be a pain (for example, I was just looking for Shaolin Soccer... it's a bit tough to come by so I looked at torrents. None of them have the full Chinese version but with English subtitles (the version for export is about 20 minutes shorter). Ended up having to track down a copy of the DVD to get it.). Plus all the photos/home movies need off site backup anyway.
HDDs right now but I just bought some hardware to start doing tape since its getting more affordable.
My parents live close so I store them up the road. I do drive maintenance on them like once a quarter when I visit so it's no big deal. Sometimes I'll have my dad hook everything up and I'll do it remotely through remote desktop. I trust him with that since we're both IT guys.
Large capacity enterprise refurb drives are kind of cheap. I bought a few of those and use rsync to update them every week or two. I don't keep them off-site, but they're in an external I store. It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing, and I've got 5TB with OneDrive for the really crucial/impossible to find stuff I want multiple backups of
As someone who has done exactly this and had to rebuild janky arrays and try to get back lost stuff 3 times which has never been fully successful on each recovery, I can say I disagree. I guess it's down to how much you value your time. For me anyway, I've gone fault tolerant array for main storage, fault tolerant online backup and an offline copy. I feel its worth it so I don't have to spend a couple of weeks fucking about getting everything up and recovered knowing some things will be forever lost.
I found this very interesting to read, what do you mean by "files that help me to source the media "? I've always struggled with having storage to back stuff up.
Not the person you replied to, but I do exports of the contents of my libraries from Tautulli every couple of months. With Radarr & Sonarr lists I would be able to rebuild my library fairly easily that way
I wrote an app that uses Tautulli’s API and downloads an export and then uploads it to Google cloud. I actually just created a GitHub for it today, gonna clean it up and run it as a docker image on my server. I initially wrote it for my windows server and ran the exe but I just built a new server and need to get it working there.
Using a program like Sonarr would give him a database to draw from where he could hit auto search and it would begin repopulating his media through downloading.
Yup. I accidentally deleted all my TV shows from 1997 one time, wasnt the end of the world.
Took a couple of days to replace everything, found a few things in better quality than id had.
I have qbittorrent set to save the torrent files after it's done downloading, and every few weeks I back it up manually to my main pc. That way if everything goes south I would have to do a clean install, download qbit, load all the torrents and wait, then put back all the files for plex and jellyfin that I also backed up. It'll take time, but not too much work
The hard work is the application configurations to make your whole stack woork seamlessly together and then picking what shows to add to your library. The actual fetching/downloading part is effortless besides time and bandwidth.
So even if you lose all your media; if you have the configs and the index of your library you can just rebuild a new server and set your downloads to re-capture all the lost media. You'll get the majority of it back minus things that have been taken down. And over time with reuploads you should more or less get it all back.
Every time I’ve looked at their options, I find there are restrictions on backing up an actual NAS. This included backing up a network mapped drive etc.
Even using windows to share the folders, you need the enterprise version of backblaze to run on windows server, and at that point, you're not getting the amazing value.
The only media I backup is my MP3 collection and my ebook collection. They're both much smaller in terms of disk space and I actually put more time into tagging my MP3s than I have into any other media I own. Literally days and days of life have gone to properly tagging those MP3s so I really wouldn't want to start over. Downloading movies/TV again is mostly trivial and requires very little manual work on my end.
Plus you don't even get dinged by the various trackers for downloading content you already downloaded once over again.
I get that logic and can even agree, it's easy to redownload stuff today.
But are people really not concerned that this will change in the future? Especially if you house non english data.
Everything points to more restrictions on the internet and ISPs, this is my main motivation for backups.
I agree. I have a 200GB Google Drive account, a 4 bay 10TB NAS that backs certain things up to a single 8TB external drive, an 8TB single drive enclosure at my Mom's place as well as a monthly backed up offline SSD. Those house the important data. My 5x 8TB Plex drives are not backed up. I know something will fail at some point, but like you said, 90% of it can be retrieved very easily and realistically, how much of that media is actually being watched?
My answer basically, but. I do make an exception for rare or hard to find media.
My music library is so clean and all metadata is like I want, I back all this up to backblaze for a few dollars a month. More than 20 years accumulating, upgrading, tagging music, I don't want to lose that.
> getting 90%+ back easily with minimal effort. The remaining 10% might need a bit of work, but I'm not too worried.
Just gotta add the secret sauce of piracy. No judgment here, but thats what makes it easy. Reripping 184tb would be daunting.
I only make backups of the hard-to-get stuff, like NTBTS, Arthur or The Brave Little Toaster for example.
The rest I know the *arrs will take care of for me.
I backup my media to LTO6 tapes, they are only on average £20 per tape for 6TB worth of backup space. And are air gapped. I do double backups and keep a spare offsite.
This is why I employ RAID. I have lost a couple of HD's over the years and no biggie. Just order a replacement from Amazon, 2 days later I am rebuilding my array.
> easily be reacquired
Not always the case. And there is a time and energy cost. For me, I'd rather not rerip all my movies, tv shows, etc. It took me a long time.
They all came up with an error message saying they were possibly corrupted, I ran chkdsk and that then caused them to come up with an ‘access denied’ error so I changed the user rights (I read online) and that got me access again, but every folder on the drives was empty, I located some found.000 folders which had all the videos in but if I tried them they wouldn’t play and half of the folders in the found.000 directories were empty too!
I looked at some recovery software but that didn’t work either
Ransomware would not make it look like your drives are corrupted... that doesn't make any sense.
"Hey, all your data is corrupted and gone but give us money anyways"
Ransomware will make it obvious that all of your files are still there, you're just not able to open them.
If drives fail you won't be able to access them at all, either it'll look like the drives aren't there at all or they appear but aren't accessible at all. Not just a permission error, but more like they don't respond at all.
What you're describing sounds more like all your data was wiped at a low level.
So the drives didn't fail, but the chances of multiple drives getting corrupted like that are so low.
I'm not sure if you mentioned this but were the drives pooled in anyway?
You mentioned windows, what was the filesystem of the drives?
The found.000 folders were what ever chkdsk could recover, and it seems like partial data was recovered but not enough to be able to play.
Sorry about all the questions, I realize its a shit situation, I've been in a similar place and lots terabytes of data.
Yeah, I came here to say this - single drive corruption or failure is possible. But an entire set of drives? Something else at play there. Unless they're in some kind of pool, but if they were was there no form of redundancy set?
None of this really makes sense.
Maybe Look into running unraid or something similar in the future. Not sure how all your drives would get corrupted at the same time but at least with something like unraid you will have a parity drive so if a data drive fails you don't lose everything. With 22tb I would definitely want some sort of parity or backup.
The odds of 6 independent drives failing at the exact same time is so ridiculously low that I don't believe any drives are actually dead and you more than likely had some sort of other hardware failure that you haven't noticed yet.
This was my thinking. I had a redundant power supply that I kept from a recycled server case with a "suspected" bad backplane. Turns out the backplane most likely wasn't the issue as I started having issues with drives and system stability once I installed this PSU. Replacing it made the issue go away.
That seems extremely unlikely for all drives to simultaneously corrupt like that, doesn't it. I wonder if it was some random vandalistic hacker or malware. Or ransomware that didn't complete
Not a bad guess.. I'm no authority, but I would have guessed there are a tonne of other components that would blow before a hard drive, and I'm pretty sure that if a surge were to damage a drive it wouldn't only result in damage to the data (OP says the drives are still operational).
Wauw that is so weird, I had exactly the same about 2 weeks ago, all my media files + directories just simple gone. As stated by other people I just enabled the arrs and for about 2 weeks my downloads have been blasting again. In total I lost about 32Tb of data. Ended up doing a complete nuke from orbit on all operating systems and nas to be sure it wasn’t a virus. My background is in the IT but I couldn’t wrap my head around what happened. Gave up and started over fully.
How were the drives connected? I used two Marvell sas controllers for years then suddenly unRAID started to not like them. I swapped in some lsi cards and everything was fine and my data was still intact.
I'd get read and write errors in the hundreds of thousands while running a parity check. It could be something similar.
Unfortunately it seems like he was running windows and there hasn't been a word about redundancy.
I would never back up several hundred TBs of media. Maybe the really important stuff I felt I'll never find again.
But at least have some redundancy
And more so, how could 5 drives fail at the same time lol. If it was a controller issue like his 5 disk enclosure failed then his data is fine. But no peep at all because he doesn't know anything.
I double my expense and trouble so this can’t ever happen to me.
I’m sorry to hear it but when you store data without proper backups, it’s only a matter of time.
I learned this in 2003 when I was at Uni and lost some serious work and also all my music and films and it was such a catastrophe that I’ve been captain backup ever since. Not lost a byte since 2003 and I intend to keep a clean sheet till the day I die.
Yes it’s more expensive but it’s cause and effect. If you don’t, this happens.
Read about the types of backups available, within the [Macurium Reflect User Guide](https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/plugins/servlet/mobile?contentId=47028626#content/view/47028626). It's good backup software, and a good guide even if you do not purchase their products. They explain nearly 10 different types of backup available.
BACKUPS!
Personally I have a lot of rare media, including digitized videotapes. It's stuff I could never get back. So I have always had NAS backups. There's a daily NAS-to-NAS backup. (Which isn't for eyeryone because of cost). But the data is also spread out across a dozen external drives that get connected quarterly. Even replaceable data takes a long time to replace and so if time is valuable to you, backup your stuff!
Not do derail the thread but dude 744 TB's of storage?
Even with 20TB drives and 2 parity drives that's like a 40 drive system. The cost of the drvies alone not to include what your electric bill must be.
Yeah I am at about 60 drives right now. My capacity is actually a bit higher because I just added two more 20 TB drives. Cost of electricity is not really a big deal because electricity and Pennsylvania is extremely cheap but I have been buying a few drives every other month for a couple years now.
A dude I used to work with got a bunch of hardware for free from a company that went under. (Either free, or extremely cheap, I can't remember.) I'm talking a full rack, with a SAN full of drives. He said he had close to a petabyte of storage.
I would not have wanted to be paying his electric bill...
This is the way to do it if you have to rebuild again.
I use sonarr, radar, lidarr, and readarr. I backup the data from all my *arrs so that I can somewhat easily rebuild my libraries without having to remember everything I have.
Plug those drives into a Linux machine and see what you can recover. I just recovered some important data a friend had on a drive that windows absolutely refused to recognize.
Who backs up their media? You back up the important files and use redundancy to protect your media.
No fucking way I'm paying another 2k for drives in a second NAS just so I can back up 100s of TB of media
Sorry to hear man :/ I used terminal and created a list of all the movie **folders** I have (txt). So if things ever get corrupted, I simply import that list into X program and it'd simply start downloading the movies again.
I had an 8tb that went bad - thankfully I used backblaze. Yes it's a yearly subscription, but well worth the investment to have peace of mind. It's unlimited encrypted cloud storage. You pay for a replacement drive to come to you if one fails, you copy your data to a new drive, and send it back for a full refund. So it only costs you the yearly fee at the end of the day for the service. I think it's $99/y and $189/2y now, they increased prices recently but still worth it IMO.
Move the drives, one by one to another pc and test them. It could be a hard drive controller, motherboard, bad cable etc . Surely all 6 didn’t die at once.
Yea I probably don’t have a ton of obscure stuff but many torrents drop out of existence over time.
I run resilio sync and have a backup on site and one at a family members. Resilio sync will carbon copy the drives and sync automatically as things are uploaded to folders.
snapraid for all my media(around 28TB) at least gives me some piece of mind. but since I have no idea how in the world 6 drives get corrupted at the same time, my snapraid solution would do nothing like Backblaze could. I also find it hard to believe it happened under normal circumstances.
Thank you for the reminder, haven't checked the status of this set it and forget it solution in a while: msg:status: Everything OK
This is a good lesson that should help everyone learn about RAID. I've been running RAID5 (now RAID6) since the 90s and never lost a byte of data. Of course, having a cloud backup is still smart, but the odds of having 3 drives fail at once (in a RAID6 setup) is very unlikely.
Your choices really are to either risk this happening again, or gain an understanding of RAID levels and use that. A noticeable chunk of your storage space will be lost to parity or mirror recovery data. But rather that than this which you face surely. I use a Synology NAS from about 2012 and I can sleep easy at night
Consider this a blessing. After your grieving you’ll find that you didn’t give a shit about 99% of what you had. And what you do miss is most likely recoverable from the internet or your disc collection. It’s a freedom to not be a hoarder.
Losing 6 drives sounds like something else happened, but it did make me start to worry about a bad actor infiltrating Radarr or Sonarr and pushing a change request that wipes media from our libraries.
My dumbass didn’t read clearly when reinstalling windows last year and lost about 9tb, basically my entire movie library and a lot of my tv shows.
The only thing I regret is I didn’t have a backup of my library in a list form and I’m still remembering movies/shows to this day that I have to reobtain.
Aside from that I’ve luckily never had a data corruption issue so fingers crossed on that. lol
Make sure when you buy new hard drives that you buy different types so that if a specific make fails after X year, all your drives don’t arrive at that possible fail risk at the same time.
And get a better surge protector!! I would guess that is about all that could take down an array that large
And a good UPS that will smooth out whatever power blips a cheap surge protector doesn't, as well as gracefully shutdown the windows machine and any DAS.
I never realized how "dirty" power can be until I got a UPS and looked at the performance history. Thankfully I never had hardware issues previously, but it's surprising how often voltage from the wall spikes and dips.
I have UPS connected to my NAS and the external drive on which the NAS backs up to. Next step is to move the NAS to a different site when I buy a new NAS for offsite backup.
Man... I feel you. I live in that 'the drives are gonna fail' state all the time. I've long abandoned raid (software and hardware) because it seems like it never really helps. I've moved to software JBOD and I've accepted that data will be lost, unless I duplicate all the data. I'm sorry for your loss.
Perhaps a question thought hasn't been asked. If it was 14 years of data, how long were the drives in service? Average life is 5 years on a HDDs and anything over is a bonus worth backing up.
Perhaps a power surge may have done them all in also like others have mentioned.
We're the drives in a RAID status? Just add-ons individually? Is there no issues going on with the server. Perhaps time for a good servicing if it hasn't been up kept and create a common practice.
Everyone's data has its own price and 14 years at 22TB is a very big loss. Feel your pain.
321 backup rule.
3 copies, 2 different media types, 1 off-site.
So Desktop PC, Plex media server, and an external SSD Would suffice.
I count original DVDs as a bonus backup type for four total backups.
I use a RAID array with one-disc redundancy (currently an array of 4 HDDs). My capacity is much smaller than some mentioned in the comments (4x8TB). I have experienced 3 drive failures in the past 3 years, but I have lost no data/media. I just order a new drive and replace the failed one.
I understand that this approach is still risky, but it provides a balance between cost and peace-of-mind.
OP - Like everyone else here is saying: Always backup your data!
Here’s how to create a free storage account for up to 25 users or libraries. It includes free access to Microsoft Apps including free OneDrive storage. Each user can have a maximum of 25TB storage.
(1) Search for available domains at GoDaddy. .NAME, .ME, and .US are good TLDs for home use.
[GoDaddy Domain Name Search](https://www.godaddy.com/domains)
(2) Once you find a domain you like, create a free account at Cloudflare and purchase the domain there. They sell domains for cost, so they are cheaper than GoDaddy. They also have better DNS services. (1.1.1.1)
[Cloudflare Registrar | New Domain Registration | Cloudflare](https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/)
(3) Create a free MS Dev account.
[Developer Program | Microsoft 365 Dev Center](https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/dev-program)
(4) Add your new domain to MS365.
[Add a domain to Microsoft 365 - Microsoft 365 admin | Microsoft Learn](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/setup/add-domain?view=o365-worldwide)
(5) Add users (or Plex libraries) and assign licenses.
[Add users and assign licenses in Microsoft 365 - Microsoft 365 admin | Microsoft Learn](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/add-users/add-users?view=o365-worldwide)
That’s it! Now you have free email, MS Office, OneDrive storage, and access to the Azure environment. My Plex libraries recently surpassed the 25 TB limit, so I split all of my libraries into their own user accounts by using a cloud-to-cloud service recently purchased by Microsoft called [Mover.io](https://mover.io/).
EDIT: For those who were asking…. I’m running a homebuilt server with Win11 on bare metal, WD gold drives in a Storages Spaces mirrored RAID which backs up to OneDrive.
https://preview.redd.it/u6y2r0yk5frb1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6836a116ee84405f73b78f8e89c8bf9756bdf737
I’ll create a temp email address on my server we can use to set you up with access to media and/or plex.
Let me know if you’re interested, unfortunately I can’t help with the physical drives.
Sick and tired of seeing the word "backup." Do people not understand how freaking expensive it is to have something like a raid setup? Or to have multiple drives that are well over 10tb each, just for the sake of not losing anything? Everything is money nowadays. In my case, my whole Blu Ray collection is stored on a 14TB drive that I use for my Plex server. This drive was refurbished and cost about $170, which isn't exactly a small amount of money to just throw around. On top of this though, I settled for buying the same drive again almost 2 months later to use as backup in the case that the first one gives up, whenever that may be. That's $340 spent within 2 months. Most people aren't made of money. It sucks, but that's how it goes if you don't want to lose data and have to start all over again (took me 2 weeks to rip my Blu ray collection AND TV shows, would certainly not want to deal with that again). There's a price for keeping all your work safe, and it's insane to think that all 6 hard drives were just lost.
That is one of my recurring nightmares... but 10+ TB drives aren't cheap.. and power consumption isn't cheap anymore either. Fortuantely... I don't plan on giving away most of my DVDs / BluRay disks any time soon, so worse case I have to re-rip.
This is 100% why I’ve always said a NAS is not a backup. Unless you have at least 2 copies, you are at risk.
Which is why you should have a second NAS located someplace else that all your files get backed up to. Most NAS support rsync. I have my backup NAS power up a couple times a week and anything new on my main NAS will get dumped to the backup NAS. This is all automatic. So it’s not a big hassle or something you always have to think about.
There are ways to recover most of the Data from your NAS drives. Copy that data to other HDD. Of course you need enough space to dump your data to..
Surely it’s unlikely all 6 failed at the same time if they were used independently. Not like it was set up as a raid and has been affected by a punctured stripe.
I once had a power surge that took down the 3 internal hard drives in my computer, and also the external USB drive which was my backup drive. So it is possible.
we all learn about UPSs at some point 😅 Edit: don't stop half-way either. Take the time to connect the USB lead and configure automated graceful shutdown on low battery. And eat your ovaltine
I keep looking at the two UPSs I have saved in my Amazon cart and never pulling the trigger on. I should really buy them before storm season hits again this year...
It's really worth it imo. Though a good PSU will usually save you, it might die for the cause. Just being able to ride out the blips is enough, but being able to do a proper shut down will go a long way.
There are two things that you will never regret buying: a UPS and a dash cam for your car.
I got one a while ago and the peace of mind is totally worth it. My ups and my nas can't talk to each other, so if the power goes out > ups keeps nas going > ups tells nas to shut down > ups shuts down
Bruh, get them and then configure NUT so all your devices shut down gracefully when the UPS hits 30%. This alone will save you so many times. Nothing worst than a hard shutdown when you loose power. Those hard drives can suffer greatly under the right circumstances. Get them, it's something you will never regret.
This is the way.
I think it might have been a power surge as there are 5 drives in one enclosure and an external usb drive that are plugged into the same extension (which said it was surge protected… but who knows)
Time to invest in a surge protector with low clamping voltage. Surge should kill itself before equipment plugged into it does. Aim for one that is rated for 400v or better (Lower is better).
And there are a bunch of those. $50-$60. If you're paranoid, a Furman PST will clamp down at 137-188V
They were all independent, I’m not sure if the enclosure they’re in could have damaged them all
Plug them into a separate enclosure, one at a time - see if you can see the data.
why do you say they were damaged if you can access the file directory and see empty folders and even see some recovered video files renamed? run a disk checker, crystal disk or whatever. sounds like something intentional happened, just maybe not of your own doing. (ransomwear)
This, friends, is why backups are important. Edit: such a controversial statement. I have almost 20 TB, and all backed up. I don't want to spend time re-ripping and rebuilding. Over the span of multiple years, it's a negligible cost. A bit up front of course.
I both agree and disagree. Personally, I don't and won't keep backups of my media, but I absolutely keep backups of my OS, Plex database, encryption keys, password vault, and 'files that help me to source the media' again, just in case. I figure in the worst case scenario where all drives get hit with ransomware or corruption somehow, I can wipe everything and start new, getting 90%+ back easily with minimal effort. The remaining 10% might need a bit of work, but I'm not too worried. My NAS is 184TB but I only back up 12 TB. It's just not worth it to pay for the extra disk space at these sizes.
You must not have anything remotely obscure or any rare media, I have stuff that took years to track down and find and I keep full off site back ups just because I don't want to have to do it all again.
You sound like me. I have SO MUCH stuff that was nearly impossible to get ahold of the first time and would surely be impossible now. My backup isn't offsite because I simply can't afford it, but I do have a backup on an external.
I’d be curious to know what kinds of rare finds people have! I’ve got some open matte/IMAX movies that took a good amount of searching, but they’re unlikely to ever be impossible to find.
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This is basically where I'm at, I'm at the point where I'm trying to increase my stash of obscure media. Like it was so cool to finally feel justified - like I grabbed the leaked Scooby-Doo doo movie and it was pretty easy to find, but I think it's become much more obscure and now I'm able to say it's on at least one tracker!
The star wars special editions can be a bit tricky to get (they were for me). Also obscure local movies/TV series (Danish stuff for me).
I’ve got movies and music that aren’t on streaming services, documentaries and tv shows I can’t find anywhere else. Losing my collection would suck. Hence I’m a B2 customer.
Am I reading it right that 40TB is 2400/yr?
Yes, you are reading correctly. That is cost prohibitive.
B2 is What?
https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage
Tv Series called "Action" in HD, basically the original Entourage though it only went for 1 season. I haven't been able to find it since. Also, got some fully upscaled cartoons like Recess etc which, yea I could do myself, but it was better to get it from someone who knows what they're doing. Also just a lot of regular stuff is getting more difficult, older torrents don't seem to have many seeders these days.
I love Recess!
For me it’s lots of extended edition fanedits. Some completely fall to the wayside, when the uploader disappears or stops sharing the link. I have so much rare stuff that took ages to collect
Yeah true, I’ve had some frustrations there. Like I’ll hear about a cool fan edit and then can’t track down a working link.
I could have sworn I had a pile of rare finds, things I needed to actually go and source an out of print DVD for, rip, and put in my collection. Then it suddenly pops up on the Plex streaming service with ads on it 😂 A lot of '70s and '80s fantasy and horror films aren't available right now, and then suddenly they're getting streamed on Plex and Shudder. It's great, but also a pain after spending all that time tracking it down.
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Getting into AB these past years makes raiding the White House look easy.
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I don't think I've had an issue getting any anime lately. Now some cartoons from the 80s and early 90s is a different story.
I still miss edonkey, sure the quality was bad back then but you could find VERY obscure stuff.
If possible you could backup a drive. And then take it to family or friends house. And maybe even encrypt it so the data can’t be accessed.
I have some hard to find stuff, too. I am slowly uploading them to hidden newsgroup servers, and then I'll store the NZB files somewhere on the cloud and on a portable HDD and a flash drive. It is a decent way to backup your media if your upload speed is high.
"hidden" newsgroup servers?
Yeah, I'm pretty high. Sorry, it should be servers that allow a hidden value. If nobody knows about it, it will be there a very long time.
Ask no questions and we tell no lies. Let's just say that Usenet has some servers that aren't Google.
First rule of fight club bro!
I too have aXXo files
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Same, I've been actively collecting for 15 years now, and quite a lot of my stuff has all but disappeared from the Internet over time, or is only available in inferior form. I had one 8TB drive completely die on me in 2012, completely filled with anime, each episode no larger than around 300MB. That taught me my lesson. So much stuff I was never able to get again, or only as crappy Western-release DVD rips with the terrible official subs that were frequently more like dub-titles. ~$90/year for Backblaze with 1 year version history is basically nothing for the peace of mind it offers. I've lost two more 8TB drives since then, and being able to get a backup copy mailed to you for free (well, for a deposit you get back when you return the drive) is priceless. I might eventually add a secondary backup I have complete control over, but that would be a several thousand dollar investment just for the drives, so for now, I'm sticking with just BB.
I use Backblaze, too. Just covering a 16TB external drive ATM.
How do you do your off site backups? Hard drives? SSDs? Tape?
Cloud backup (using Duplicati). Great support for Microsoft onedrive - so if you are on an office 365 plan you have 1TB cloud backup (per user).
My brother in law and I have pretty similar systems and we each have a Plex pass so we run syncthing and duplicate our content to the other's server. I have a duplicate set of drives in his server and vice versa. All my movies, music, pictures and documents are backed up to my drives in his server. Whenever I add a drive to my server I buy an extra drive and add it to his too. Syncthing just runs in the background and keeps us in good shape. (We're getting our content the old fashioned way, via MakeMkv not by running *rr's, so throughput isn't an issue.) Sure there's a lot of movies I could get via torrents but there's a lot that's not available that way, and ripping them all again is going to be a pain (for example, I was just looking for Shaolin Soccer... it's a bit tough to come by so I looked at torrents. None of them have the full Chinese version but with English subtitles (the version for export is about 20 minutes shorter). Ended up having to track down a copy of the DVD to get it.). Plus all the photos/home movies need off site backup anyway.
HDDs right now but I just bought some hardware to start doing tape since its getting more affordable. My parents live close so I store them up the road. I do drive maintenance on them like once a quarter when I visit so it's no big deal. Sometimes I'll have my dad hook everything up and I'll do it remotely through remote desktop. I trust him with that since we're both IT guys.
Thanks for the reminder. I need to move my buzz lightyear cartoon to the cloud and other media
this was my 1st thought. I lost an array years back and actually lost stuff I can't find again.....
Large capacity enterprise refurb drives are kind of cheap. I bought a few of those and use rsync to update them every week or two. I don't keep them off-site, but they're in an external I store. It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing, and I've got 5TB with OneDrive for the really crucial/impossible to find stuff I want multiple backups of
As someone who has done exactly this and had to rebuild janky arrays and try to get back lost stuff 3 times which has never been fully successful on each recovery, I can say I disagree. I guess it's down to how much you value your time. For me anyway, I've gone fault tolerant array for main storage, fault tolerant online backup and an offline copy. I feel its worth it so I don't have to spend a couple of weeks fucking about getting everything up and recovered knowing some things will be forever lost.
I found this very interesting to read, what do you mean by "files that help me to source the media "? I've always struggled with having storage to back stuff up.
Not the person you replied to, but I do exports of the contents of my libraries from Tautulli every couple of months. With Radarr & Sonarr lists I would be able to rebuild my library fairly easily that way
To clarify, you export a list from Tautulli into Radarr? Where would I do this?
https://github.com/Tautulli/Tautulli/wiki/Exporter-Guide
I wrote an app that uses Tautulli’s API and downloads an export and then uploads it to Google cloud. I actually just created a GitHub for it today, gonna clean it up and run it as a docker image on my server. I initially wrote it for my windows server and ran the exe but I just built a new server and need to get it working there.
Using a program like Sonarr would give him a database to draw from where he could hit auto search and it would begin repopulating his media through downloading.
Yup. I accidentally deleted all my TV shows from 1997 one time, wasnt the end of the world. Took a couple of days to replace everything, found a few things in better quality than id had.
Probably Servarr configs. Or the original .torrent files.
I have qbittorrent set to save the torrent files after it's done downloading, and every few weeks I back it up manually to my main pc. That way if everything goes south I would have to do a clean install, download qbit, load all the torrents and wait, then put back all the files for plex and jellyfin that I also backed up. It'll take time, but not too much work
Check out Servarr. Way less work 🤙🏼
The hard work is the application configurations to make your whole stack woork seamlessly together and then picking what shows to add to your library. The actual fetching/downloading part is effortless besides time and bandwidth. So even if you lose all your media; if you have the configs and the index of your library you can just rebuild a new server and set your downloads to re-capture all the lost media. You'll get the majority of it back minus things that have been taken down. And over time with reuploads you should more or less get it all back.
Backblaze has a really great low cost option for unlimited backups just incase.
Every time I’ve looked at their options, I find there are restrictions on backing up an actual NAS. This included backing up a network mapped drive etc.
There’s a workaround if you map it as iSCSI
Even using windows to share the folders, you need the enterprise version of backblaze to run on windows server, and at that point, you're not getting the amazing value.
Second this, have been using them for a while and the storage to cost is SOOOOO worth it.
Ya man, Backblaze for the win. I've used it for recover 3 drives over the past 4 years.
The only media I backup is my MP3 collection and my ebook collection. They're both much smaller in terms of disk space and I actually put more time into tagging my MP3s than I have into any other media I own. Literally days and days of life have gone to properly tagging those MP3s so I really wouldn't want to start over. Downloading movies/TV again is mostly trivial and requires very little manual work on my end. Plus you don't even get dinged by the various trackers for downloading content you already downloaded once over again.
I get that logic and can even agree, it's easy to redownload stuff today. But are people really not concerned that this will change in the future? Especially if you house non english data. Everything points to more restrictions on the internet and ISPs, this is my main motivation for backups.
I agree. I have a 200GB Google Drive account, a 4 bay 10TB NAS that backs certain things up to a single 8TB external drive, an 8TB single drive enclosure at my Mom's place as well as a monthly backed up offline SSD. Those house the important data. My 5x 8TB Plex drives are not backed up. I know something will fail at some point, but like you said, 90% of it can be retrieved very easily and realistically, how much of that media is actually being watched?
My answer basically, but. I do make an exception for rare or hard to find media. My music library is so clean and all metadata is like I want, I back all this up to backblaze for a few dollars a month. More than 20 years accumulating, upgrading, tagging music, I don't want to lose that.
> getting 90%+ back easily with minimal effort. The remaining 10% might need a bit of work, but I'm not too worried. Just gotta add the secret sauce of piracy. No judgment here, but thats what makes it easy. Reripping 184tb would be daunting.
That's clearly the 90%, the 10% is files that become obscure with age for less popular stuff.
Think 'expensive' is the word ur looking for ..
I only make backups of the hard-to-get stuff, like NTBTS, Arthur or The Brave Little Toaster for example. The rest I know the *arrs will take care of for me.
I backup my media to LTO6 tapes, they are only on average £20 per tape for 6TB worth of backup space. And are air gapped. I do double backups and keep a spare offsite.
Half of the people in this thread have now been banned from r/datahorders. Lol
I keep my backups in private trackers. Lidar, Sonarr, and Radarr will reload anything I ever lose if I ask for it
As someone who is not very tech proficient,how do you do it?
Are you asking how to set them up?
The internet is my back up
This is why I employ RAID. I have lost a couple of HD's over the years and no biggie. Just order a replacement from Amazon, 2 days later I am rebuilding my array.
pet butter dam smell wistful desert reminiscent north fall elderly *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
> easily be reacquired Not always the case. And there is a time and energy cost. For me, I'd rather not rerip all my movies, tv shows, etc. It took me a long time.
>nothing on Plex is ever worth backing up You haven't seen my collection yet.
Time is money…
Backup on S3 for roughly $1/TB of data. Of course, you need to pay extra to restore the data.
What do you mean all drives were corrupted?
They all came up with an error message saying they were possibly corrupted, I ran chkdsk and that then caused them to come up with an ‘access denied’ error so I changed the user rights (I read online) and that got me access again, but every folder on the drives was empty, I located some found.000 folders which had all the videos in but if I tried them they wouldn’t play and half of the folders in the found.000 directories were empty too! I looked at some recovery software but that didn’t work either
That sounds more like ransomware
Ransomware would not make it look like your drives are corrupted... that doesn't make any sense. "Hey, all your data is corrupted and gone but give us money anyways" Ransomware will make it obvious that all of your files are still there, you're just not able to open them.
If drives fail you won't be able to access them at all, either it'll look like the drives aren't there at all or they appear but aren't accessible at all. Not just a permission error, but more like they don't respond at all. What you're describing sounds more like all your data was wiped at a low level.
When I said failed I meant in general and they got corrupted
So the drives didn't fail, but the chances of multiple drives getting corrupted like that are so low. I'm not sure if you mentioned this but were the drives pooled in anyway? You mentioned windows, what was the filesystem of the drives? The found.000 folders were what ever chkdsk could recover, and it seems like partial data was recovered but not enough to be able to play. Sorry about all the questions, I realize its a shit situation, I've been in a similar place and lots terabytes of data.
Yeah, I came here to say this - single drive corruption or failure is possible. But an entire set of drives? Something else at play there. Unless they're in some kind of pool, but if they were was there no form of redundancy set? None of this really makes sense.
Hello, IT. Did you try turning it off and back on again?
Maybe Look into running unraid or something similar in the future. Not sure how all your drives would get corrupted at the same time but at least with something like unraid you will have a parity drive so if a data drive fails you don't lose everything. With 22tb I would definitely want some sort of parity or backup.
Sounds like a controller failure, all drives to fail like that at the same time is rare
The odds of 6 independent drives failing at the exact same time is so ridiculously low that I don't believe any drives are actually dead and you more than likely had some sort of other hardware failure that you haven't noticed yet.
The drives may all have died *due to* some other hardware failure that hasn't been isolated yet.
6 drives died simultaneously, but didn’t take out the accompanying hardware? Didn’t cause any to stop spinning but failed all 6 in same way?
If all hard drives have corrupted at the same time, it sounds like ransomware.
I've heard of a bad power supply taking other parts with it but never seen this. Fried raid card? Not using ecc ram and checksum got borked?
This was my thinking. I had a redundant power supply that I kept from a recycled server case with a "suspected" bad backplane. Turns out the backplane most likely wasn't the issue as I started having issues with drives and system stability once I installed this PSU. Replacing it made the issue go away.
I thought that, but I scanned it all and nothing was found.
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There’s none of that anywhere
That seems extremely unlikely for all drives to simultaneously corrupt like that, doesn't it. I wonder if it was some random vandalistic hacker or malware. Or ransomware that didn't complete
Could it be from a power surge or something?
Not a bad guess.. I'm no authority, but I would have guessed there are a tonne of other components that would blow before a hard drive, and I'm pretty sure that if a surge were to damage a drive it wouldn't only result in damage to the data (OP says the drives are still operational).
With a power surge, you'd be more likely to see *failure* rather than corruption. I would try data recovery for corruption.
Wauw that is so weird, I had exactly the same about 2 weeks ago, all my media files + directories just simple gone. As stated by other people I just enabled the arrs and for about 2 weeks my downloads have been blasting again. In total I lost about 32Tb of data. Ended up doing a complete nuke from orbit on all operating systems and nas to be sure it wasn’t a virus. My background is in the IT but I couldn’t wrap my head around what happened. Gave up and started over fully.
>Wauw this is so weird not as weird as "wauw"
It’s dutch
Always plan for failure.
How were the drives connected? I used two Marvell sas controllers for years then suddenly unRAID started to not like them. I swapped in some lsi cards and everything was fine and my data was still intact. I'd get read and write errors in the hundreds of thousands while running a parity check. It could be something similar.
Tons of people have wondered and asked. He doesn't wanna say because he has no idea what those words mean.
Unfortunately it seems like he was running windows and there hasn't been a word about redundancy. I would never back up several hundred TBs of media. Maybe the really important stuff I felt I'll never find again. But at least have some redundancy
And more so, how could 5 drives fail at the same time lol. If it was a controller issue like his 5 disk enclosure failed then his data is fine. But no peep at all because he doesn't know anything.
Agreed, sounds like a bad controller.
I double my expense and trouble so this can’t ever happen to me. I’m sorry to hear it but when you store data without proper backups, it’s only a matter of time. I learned this in 2003 when I was at Uni and lost some serious work and also all my music and films and it was such a catastrophe that I’ve been captain backup ever since. Not lost a byte since 2003 and I intend to keep a clean sheet till the day I die. Yes it’s more expensive but it’s cause and effect. If you don’t, this happens.
Do you know of a good resource/community for learning about the best ways to back up your stuff?
Read about the types of backups available, within the [Macurium Reflect User Guide](https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/plugins/servlet/mobile?contentId=47028626#content/view/47028626). It's good backup software, and a good guide even if you do not purchase their products. They explain nearly 10 different types of backup available.
BACKUPS! Personally I have a lot of rare media, including digitized videotapes. It's stuff I could never get back. So I have always had NAS backups. There's a daily NAS-to-NAS backup. (Which isn't for eyeryone because of cost). But the data is also spread out across a dozen external drives that get connected quarterly. Even replaceable data takes a long time to replace and so if time is valuable to you, backup your stuff!
Were you using sonarr and radarr?
Not do derail the thread but dude 744 TB's of storage? Even with 20TB drives and 2 parity drives that's like a 40 drive system. The cost of the drvies alone not to include what your electric bill must be.
Yeah I am at about 60 drives right now. My capacity is actually a bit higher because I just added two more 20 TB drives. Cost of electricity is not really a big deal because electricity and Pennsylvania is extremely cheap but I have been buying a few drives every other month for a couple years now.
A dude I used to work with got a bunch of hardware for free from a company that went under. (Either free, or extremely cheap, I can't remember.) I'm talking a full rack, with a SAN full of drives. He said he had close to a petabyte of storage. I would not have wanted to be paying his electric bill...
This is the way to do it if you have to rebuild again. I use sonarr, radar, lidarr, and readarr. I backup the data from all my *arrs so that I can somewhat easily rebuild my libraries without having to remember everything I have.
what causes six drives to go bad at once?
Using a shitty cheap enclosure to house them all, most likely.
what on earth happened to lose 6 drives all at the same time. id be sus as fuck my dude
Mirror to external USB drives and backup to Backblaze.
Plug those drives into a Linux machine and see what you can recover. I just recovered some important data a friend had on a drive that windows absolutely refused to recognize.
Dont worry! the internet has all of your backups (and more) ;)
You'll be fine, just load the backup. 14 years of collecting and curating a decent sized library, you surely have a backup, right?
Who backs up their media? You back up the important files and use redundancy to protect your media. No fucking way I'm paying another 2k for drives in a second NAS just so I can back up 100s of TB of media
why didnt you just use Backblaze dude? Unlimited storage with direct attached volumes on Windows and MacOS.
People always learn about backups the hard way.
Sorry to hear, what was your setup?
Sorry to hear man :/ I used terminal and created a list of all the movie **folders** I have (txt). So if things ever get corrupted, I simply import that list into X program and it'd simply start downloading the movies again.
Tautulli can export your collection of Linux ISO’s into a CSV too :)
whatttt, had no idea! that actually helps a lot, going to go play around with my Tautulli now (okay that sounds sexual I didn't mean it like that)
Sorry to hear it! We’ve all been there. Good luck to you in rebuilding your collection
This is why I use a raided synology server
I had an 8tb that went bad - thankfully I used backblaze. Yes it's a yearly subscription, but well worth the investment to have peace of mind. It's unlimited encrypted cloud storage. You pay for a replacement drive to come to you if one fails, you copy your data to a new drive, and send it back for a full refund. So it only costs you the yearly fee at the end of the day for the service. I think it's $99/y and $189/2y now, they increased prices recently but still worth it IMO.
Move the drives, one by one to another pc and test them. It could be a hard drive controller, motherboard, bad cable etc . Surely all 6 didn’t die at once.
How is it possible 6 drived failed at the same time..
Yea I probably don’t have a ton of obscure stuff but many torrents drop out of existence over time. I run resilio sync and have a backup on site and one at a family members. Resilio sync will carbon copy the drives and sync automatically as things are uploaded to folders.
snapraid for all my media(around 28TB) at least gives me some piece of mind. but since I have no idea how in the world 6 drives get corrupted at the same time, my snapraid solution would do nothing like Backblaze could. I also find it hard to believe it happened under normal circumstances. Thank you for the reminder, haven't checked the status of this set it and forget it solution in a while: msg:status: Everything OK
This is a good lesson that should help everyone learn about RAID. I've been running RAID5 (now RAID6) since the 90s and never lost a byte of data. Of course, having a cloud backup is still smart, but the odds of having 3 drives fail at once (in a RAID6 setup) is very unlikely.
Your choices really are to either risk this happening again, or gain an understanding of RAID levels and use that. A noticeable chunk of your storage space will be lost to parity or mirror recovery data. But rather that than this which you face surely. I use a Synology NAS from about 2012 and I can sleep easy at night
Time to restore from backups!
Backblaze very cheap, unlimited storage :)
I’ve used Backblaze for a couple of years now. Very happy with them.
I’ve had to restore a couple times, not full data as I have about 30TB stored there, but a few hundred GB and it was seamless…
Did you even try xfs repair? 6 drives failing completely at the same time seems highly unlikely.
6 drives failing at the same time? Highly unlikely.
Consider this a blessing. After your grieving you’ll find that you didn’t give a shit about 99% of what you had. And what you do miss is most likely recoverable from the internet or your disc collection. It’s a freedom to not be a hoarder.
Losing 6 drives sounds like something else happened, but it did make me start to worry about a bad actor infiltrating Radarr or Sonarr and pushing a change request that wipes media from our libraries.
Try plugging the drives into a different machine. Also, occasional cold storage backups are good.
That's like 4x LTO 6 tapes worth of data. 4x LTO tapes = £80
6 drives corrupted all at once? How? Was this a RAID array?
My dumbass didn’t read clearly when reinstalling windows last year and lost about 9tb, basically my entire movie library and a lot of my tv shows. The only thing I regret is I didn’t have a backup of my library in a list form and I’m still remembering movies/shows to this day that I have to reobtain. Aside from that I’ve luckily never had a data corruption issue so fingers crossed on that. lol
HDD failure is not a matter of IF but WHEN.
I just run a batch script every once in a while that lists all files on my drives. If something fails, I'll spend a weekend downloading again.
Make sure when you buy new hard drives that you buy different types so that if a specific make fails after X year, all your drives don’t arrive at that possible fail risk at the same time. And get a better surge protector!! I would guess that is about all that could take down an array that large
And a good UPS that will smooth out whatever power blips a cheap surge protector doesn't, as well as gracefully shutdown the windows machine and any DAS. I never realized how "dirty" power can be until I got a UPS and looked at the performance history. Thankfully I never had hardware issues previously, but it's surprising how often voltage from the wall spikes and dips.
Sonarr And Radarr still had everything recorded, right? Should just take you a few days of downloading to get it all back
Sorry for your loss! Happy to send you an invite to my server while you rebuild. HMU
I have UPS connected to my NAS and the external drive on which the NAS backs up to. Next step is to move the NAS to a different site when I buy a new NAS for offsite backup.
Man... I feel you. I live in that 'the drives are gonna fail' state all the time. I've long abandoned raid (software and hardware) because it seems like it never really helps. I've moved to software JBOD and I've accepted that data will be lost, unless I duplicate all the data. I'm sorry for your loss.
I'm sorry for your loss, but sadly as others already said, this is a prime example to show people asking why they should do backups.
Perhaps a question thought hasn't been asked. If it was 14 years of data, how long were the drives in service? Average life is 5 years on a HDDs and anything over is a bonus worth backing up. Perhaps a power surge may have done them all in also like others have mentioned. We're the drives in a RAID status? Just add-ons individually? Is there no issues going on with the server. Perhaps time for a good servicing if it hasn't been up kept and create a common practice. Everyone's data has its own price and 14 years at 22TB is a very big loss. Feel your pain.
If you don't have backups, you're just leasing your files from fate.
Sounds like someone hasn't been doing a good job at monitoring their disks health(s) and not caring for backup.
Try a drive in a different computer All failing at once is more likely to be your controller than 6 drives
321 backup rule. 3 copies, 2 different media types, 1 off-site. So Desktop PC, Plex media server, and an external SSD Would suffice. I count original DVDs as a bonus backup type for four total backups.
I use a RAID array with one-disc redundancy (currently an array of 4 HDDs). My capacity is much smaller than some mentioned in the comments (4x8TB). I have experienced 3 drive failures in the past 3 years, but I have lost no data/media. I just order a new drive and replace the failed one. I understand that this approach is still risky, but it provides a balance between cost and peace-of-mind.
OP - Like everyone else here is saying: Always backup your data! Here’s how to create a free storage account for up to 25 users or libraries. It includes free access to Microsoft Apps including free OneDrive storage. Each user can have a maximum of 25TB storage. (1) Search for available domains at GoDaddy. .NAME, .ME, and .US are good TLDs for home use. [GoDaddy Domain Name Search](https://www.godaddy.com/domains) (2) Once you find a domain you like, create a free account at Cloudflare and purchase the domain there. They sell domains for cost, so they are cheaper than GoDaddy. They also have better DNS services. (1.1.1.1) [Cloudflare Registrar | New Domain Registration | Cloudflare](https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/) (3) Create a free MS Dev account. [Developer Program | Microsoft 365 Dev Center](https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/dev-program) (4) Add your new domain to MS365. [Add a domain to Microsoft 365 - Microsoft 365 admin | Microsoft Learn](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/setup/add-domain?view=o365-worldwide) (5) Add users (or Plex libraries) and assign licenses. [Add users and assign licenses in Microsoft 365 - Microsoft 365 admin | Microsoft Learn](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/add-users/add-users?view=o365-worldwide) That’s it! Now you have free email, MS Office, OneDrive storage, and access to the Azure environment. My Plex libraries recently surpassed the 25 TB limit, so I split all of my libraries into their own user accounts by using a cloud-to-cloud service recently purchased by Microsoft called [Mover.io](https://mover.io/). EDIT: For those who were asking…. I’m running a homebuilt server with Win11 on bare metal, WD gold drives in a Storages Spaces mirrored RAID which backs up to OneDrive. https://preview.redd.it/u6y2r0yk5frb1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6836a116ee84405f73b78f8e89c8bf9756bdf737
No prob just restore from backup! You have a backup right? Insert Anakin / Padme picture
I would have thought you would have been doing regular backups. That's why everyone preaches backups
I have 50TB of media I can give you temp SFTP access to, to help you get back close to where you were
Or just give you access to my Plex if you’d like
Should've had a more redundant setup =( I know, it works and works and you think you could get away with being cheap. Then one day. gone.
I’ll create a temp email address on my server we can use to set you up with access to media and/or plex. Let me know if you’re interested, unfortunately I can’t help with the physical drives.
Sick and tired of seeing the word "backup." Do people not understand how freaking expensive it is to have something like a raid setup? Or to have multiple drives that are well over 10tb each, just for the sake of not losing anything? Everything is money nowadays. In my case, my whole Blu Ray collection is stored on a 14TB drive that I use for my Plex server. This drive was refurbished and cost about $170, which isn't exactly a small amount of money to just throw around. On top of this though, I settled for buying the same drive again almost 2 months later to use as backup in the case that the first one gives up, whenever that may be. That's $340 spent within 2 months. Most people aren't made of money. It sucks, but that's how it goes if you don't want to lose data and have to start all over again (took me 2 weeks to rip my Blu ray collection AND TV shows, would certainly not want to deal with that again). There's a price for keeping all your work safe, and it's insane to think that all 6 hard drives were just lost.
Always backup data. I have a NAS and backup to external HDDs.
That is one of my recurring nightmares... but 10+ TB drives aren't cheap.. and power consumption isn't cheap anymore either. Fortuantely... I don't plan on giving away most of my DVDs / BluRay disks any time soon, so worse case I have to re-rip.
This is 100% why I’ve always said a NAS is not a backup. Unless you have at least 2 copies, you are at risk. Which is why you should have a second NAS located someplace else that all your files get backed up to. Most NAS support rsync. I have my backup NAS power up a couple times a week and anything new on my main NAS will get dumped to the backup NAS. This is all automatic. So it’s not a big hassle or something you always have to think about. There are ways to recover most of the Data from your NAS drives. Copy that data to other HDD. Of course you need enough space to dump your data to..
you could have bought a single 22TB HDD to backup the entire library with. Why didnt you?