I only backup data that I either can't replace or would have to spend significant effort to replace. Most of what's on a media server doesn't fall into that category.

Media Server? No content backup at all.

If you lose everything, just download new stuff you want to watch, or redownload a few TV series/movies.

Music? There are streaming services.

Only backup configurations and maybe application data, so that the reinstall will be easy. Those few kB/MB could sit anywhere. I'm using GitLab for this purpose.

Edit: Images! If you have your photos on there, back them up! They can't be replaced!

I'm probably an outlier, but I have a full 3-2-1 backup. Over 100Tb myself, with it all backed up. I have a safe off-site I back everything up to weekly and then annually I do a full backup to LTO tapes.

I lost my media once. I don't want to go through that again.

You think you can get the media again if need be.

Depending on how large your collection is, would you remember every item in it? How much effort did you put into organizing it?

IME it's far more of an inconvenience and expense rebuilding data from scratch than properly backing it up. And the peace of mind from a robust, tried and true DR process is golden.

I only backup data I've generated myself, nothing that was autogenerated or downloaded from somewhere else.

This goes far beyond backing up since not a long ago I had to deal with emptying the house of a deceased person that had been locked for a while and got to the conclusion the only things worth keeping are original ones (photos, handwritten letters and so...). Anything that could have been bought somewhere else, no matter the antique it was resulted to be almost worthless, not just to me but also to pawn shops, as it seems to be easy to find the exact same thing somewhere else.

So I took that as a life learning and apply the same concept to my data :)

If you woke up and all of that data was gone tomorrow but you didn’t care, then there is no reason to back it up IMO.

Hell, I download things multiple times sometimes just to spite Comcast.

I can always get the media again if need be.

Doesn't that mean you already have backup? It may not be the easiest to restore, but it is a backup nevertheless.

I only back up my music collection because I put extra effort into organising and tagging everything, plus some of it is rips of CDs not available anywhere. As for movies and TV shows, I only back up configurations and catalogues of the relevant apps, the contents themselves are 1) too big to be feasible to back up and 2) 99% of the time available to re-download.

My brother also has his own NAS at his house. We sync our media between both of our servers to both share it and to serve as an off-site backup.

Everything else on my nas gets backed up to a cloud provider.

Like you said, it could be replaced it'd just be inconvenient, and media is kinda bulky so cloud storage for all of it would get a little pricy.

The key concept here is how valuable your time is to rebuild your collection. I have a ~92TB (8x16 radiz2) array with about 33TB of downloaded data that has never been backed up as it migrated from my original cluster of 250GB drives through to today. I think part of the key is to have a spare drive on hand and ready to go when you do lose a drive, to be swapped in as soon as a problem shows up, plus having email alerts when a drive goes down so you're aware right away.

To add a little more perspective to my setup (and nightmare fuel for some people), I have always made my clusters from used drives, generally off ebay but the current batch comes from Amazon's refurbished shop. Plus these drives all sit externally with cables from SAS cards. The good news is this year I finally built a 3D-printed rack to organize the drives, matched to some cheap backplane cards, so I have less chance of power issues. And power is key here, my own experience has shown that if you use a cheap desktop power supply for external drives, you WILL lose data. I now run a redundant PS from a server that puts out a lot more power than I need, and I haven't lost anything since those original 250GB drives, nor have I had any concerns while rebuilding a failed drive or two. At one point during my last upgrade I had 27 HDDs spun up at once so I have a lot of confidence in this setup with the now-reduced drive count.

"RAID is not a backup" just means that the entire RAID disk counts as one copy of the files.

Non original media doesn't matter unless you think you have old obscure things that aren't even on Internet archive or private torrent groups, or it has some sentimental value like a VTR recording of something you watched as a kid. Most you can download again and likely in better definition.

Focus first on getting at least 2 separate backups of the most important stuff: your family photos and videos. Then records, then work stuff.

Living life on the edge currently, but thats because I dont have a means to backup my media at the moment

I'm currently running mine on Windows and use SnapRAID and DrivePool as my defense against drive failures. I think I have 7 data drives and 2 parity at this point (totalling around 90TB). Beyond that I copy the Snapraid whatchamacallit to a separate backup drive along with my OS drive. This isn't really a 'backup' but in the scenario where I have several failures and no way to restore, I still have radarr/sonarr keeping track of my library and a membership to several private trackers.

I wouldn't worry too much about losing media files as most can just be downloaded again. I find it more beneficial to make use of all the storage space you can rather than trying to do a 1:1 backup, which gets pretty absurd once you start getting up there in movie/TV count.

I do n+2 of my media. It's overkill but I have the space. You might want local n+1 for convenience of restoring, but it's not necessary. You could absolutely consider the ability to torrent something as one of your backups.

So technically I have n+3. If my house burns down (n+1), and my off-site storage (+1) explodes, I can always still torrent (+1).

I only backup what I can’t redownload, ie personal media. Everything else would be annoying but probably also a “great filter” if it all got lost and I’d have to make choices about what I really wanted in the first place.

I mirror it 1:1
If you can't afford to mirror it, backup the files that were and are currently the most difficult to get atm.

Very specific media like rare or modified Rips gave an extra copy on an archive folder. All my cloud storage and personal backups also go to the archive folder. That folder then gets backed up to local raid 6 NAS, and then the qnap software syncs that up to backblaze once a week.

I just need my config files. The media I'm ok with losing it. I've been losing it for years.

I was just thinking about this recently. For my original data I already have multiple copies: 2 desktop PCs, home and office, synced with a home NAS, adding a server in the office soon too, laptop has everything but photos (which is a lot since I am into photography and timelapses). My non original media has only one copy, but will soon have a second copy in the server at my office.

But I can't count on using my office at my job as a long term thing. For my original data, I have been planning on getting something like Backblaze for a full professional off-site copy. For all my non original media, well... It would be ok to lose it I suppose, but I would rather not. Would this be a good use case for some sort of other stable media? I forgot what it was called, but I recently saw a post about some high density disk (like some sort of multi TB blu ray disk thing?) That seems like a decent solution, better to lose 1 year of piracy instead of 20 years of piracy haha. I have lots of obscure stuff that would be hard to get again, curated by and copied from cinephile and audiophile friends, rare movies I ripped from university library DVD discs and even VHS tapes!

Maybe I need to start learning about some alternative storage media for that stuff. Anyone have suggestions? Some sort of tape or disc for this kind of large but immutable media?

I’ve lost my music collection twice. Once when I gave away all my cds in a fit of minimalism, once when our house got broken into and they took all our cds.

It’s farking annoying and takes forever to get all your music again. At the very least make sure you have a list of albums so you can remember what you had.

I use Linode object storage for backups using Restic. 500gb of storage for 5eur/month.

I don't backup logs, backups made by an app, cache, thumbnails and other stuff. I backup actual container data, so I can reatore it, restart docker and it works like nothing happened.

I only back up things that would make me sad if I lost it or cause me a lot of time-sensitive work. Personal data files and configuration files. Media? I wouldn't sweat it if my media drive got corrupted by malware or a hack or a lightning strike. I'd just live with a smaller library until I get things re-download again. And I'd be ok if I can't find a handful of the rarer things. Pictures of my family? Backed up locally and on a remote server with immutable backups. Configuration files? Synced with a remote git repository.

I just want to add, you may not need to backup what you think you can redownload easily.

There are cases of series or movies being really difficult to find or it takes you a long time to find a working torrent. For those it definitely should make sense to back them up, but its a bit subjective feeling which ones those might be.

Another thing in my case, I got movies and seriea for my child on the server. He expects that is accessible, always, and is too young to understand that data can get lost. So I am also backing that up, it could be easily replaced but it would take me time and this would result in my child being unhappy. Not worth it!

i have ~24tb (6x4) unraided x3 on separate nas, one of which is only plugged in and turned on every few months. if i lose a drive, i can clone the whole thing quickly from one of the other 2 backups.. i dont have to worry about failed raid arrays and i get a bit more useful storage..

in the ~5 years i've had this setup going i think ive only lost one drive, and it started throwin smart errors long before it died

i guess im using a 'redundant array of inexpensive nas' = RAIN! is that a thing? can i make it a thing?

I backup my music, photos, docker settings and that's about it. Daily backups to one external HDD, but recently setup a second backup that's runs weekly juuuuust in case. The music is only because it's taken me a long time to build upy library, and that would be painful to lose. TV, movies, meh.