Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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Need help developing an actual consolidation and backup system (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hello,

I'm looking for the most cost-effective solution to consolidate all my data and create an actual backup system. Everything is spread out across three WD external HDDs:

1x 10TB MyBook
2x 4TB Passport

Currently, I am at 99% capacity (16.2/16.35 TB available space) - I can no longer keep playing Tetris with the contents to make them all fit. There are no duplicates or unnecessary files - every week, I routinely trim the fat by deleting anything I don't plan to keep, moving them into a specific folder. After a month, if they are still in that folder, they get moved to their permanent location.

I thought about buying two new 20TB MyBooks (one for backup, one for consolidation), but then I wouldn't know what to do with all the old drives when I free up space.

I've been thinking about getting a NAS but have no experience hosting a home server. I haven't really needed one since these drives are always just hooked to my machine.

If you were in my position, what approach would you take to find a solution to this?

Thanks for reading, happy hoarding.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

What I did was to install two SSDs in my PC. One is only used for backups of the other, every boot. (Hardlinked rsync snapshots.)

In addition I got two multibay usb DAS. I use one DAS for media storage and backups of the PC, and one DAS for backups of the other.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

sounds like you forgot the offsite backup?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Nope. I just didn't mention it. Before I got double SSDs and double DAS, I already had a remote NAS, cloud, a laptop, various external drives and storage on my phone and tablet. It started with the laptop, when it was new. I installed a NVMe SSD and a SATA SSD in the laptop and setup automatic backup of the NVMe SSD to the SATA SSD. And that worked so well that I then I did the same with my PC. At one point I had two NAS. One Synology and one DIY RPi4 based with a RAID enclosure. I reused the drives in the 4 bay RPi4 based NAS for a DAS. Worked so well that I got a second DAS. Still have the Synology NAS, but at a remote location.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

While SSDs are awesome, there aren't any cheap options for the amount of storage I need. I don't mind the speed differential as long as I can store all of this

What are the advantages/disadvantages between a DAS and a NAS? When do you choose one over the other?