Some friends were over visiting the other night and we were talking about my shared media server they use, and one of them piped up and said “Oh hey, I’d been meaning to ask you: would you have any interest in having your server backed up in another location? I was thinking I could keep a backup at my house so you could recover if something happened to your system and I saw recently that 20TB drives have gotten pretty cheap.”
“Oh man, that’s a really nice offer, but that’s a ton of money to spend for you to back up my media. I’ve got it pretty well protected right now and wouldn’t want to put you out like that.”
“Oh, it’s not that much. I saw that new 20TB drives were only like $300.”
“well yeah, but… wait, you do realize you’d have to buy at least seven of those drives to hold that library, right?”
“…wait… what?”
My sweet summer child, the problem is much bigger than you thought.
Yeah, I once invited a coworker to my Plex server in the middle of the workday and from across the floor I heard him scream “holy shit” and I knew that was when he had logged in for the first time.
Upon hearing that I store 3+ months run time of media on a MicroSD card, for my Steam Deck, for traveling, someone on Reddit suggest I get a shouldn’t store all of my data like that and I should look at a NAS instead.
…I then explained that I had 184TB of data across two UnRAID machines with a total run time of 3.16 years. The 3+months re-encoded for the SD card was just ‘travelin’ data’.
Man, my video library that I’ve been consistently building-up since 2012, is at 18TB. And I feel like it’s getting pretty damn massive at this point. But I don’t have anything over 1080p resolution, (nothing 4K) so that may be part why it could be bigger.
If you have upwards of 140TB, you must either have a ton of 4K content, or just an insane amount of obscure stuff that you could never possibly hope to watch.
And this is why i don’t have the “proper” 3-2-1 backup strategy. Because having even a single copy of 100TB of data is going to cost me more that i can possibly afford (not even counting the server to plug them into)