Backup Strategies

[MalibuDave42]

I see that many you have a great deal of storage - 10TB+! My system is heading that direction. As I read through the backup related posts, I see some interesting ideas, but no real backup strategies.

Currently, my strategy is as follows:
1. Daily SageTV\SageTV properties, win.bin etc. to a separate hdd in my HTPC
2. Monthly snapshot of the full SageTV directory to a separate HDD
3. Periodic manual backup of Movies and content to a separate system's HDDs

But, I only have 3.5T in my HTPC and it's time to add more space. I can't imagine the right thing to do is to add a new drive to my other system evertime I add drive to the HTPC.

What are you folks doing to back up your content?

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by MalibuDave42

What are you folks doing to back up your content?

Nothing. DVDs can be re-ripped. And if I lose 100 hours or so of recorded TV, there's always Hulu and Netflix.

Home videos of school plays and ballet recitals are obviously a different story. Those I mirror periodically to an external drive and from there to an offsite server at my mother-in-law's house (who wants copies of them anyway). But I don't have terabytes of those.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

Nothing. DVDs can be re-ripped. And if I lose 100 hours or so of recorded TV, there's always Hulu and Netflix.

Home videos of school plays and ballet recitals are obviously a different story. Those I mirror periodically to an external drive and from there to an offsite server at my mother-in-law's house (who wants copies of them anyway). But I don't have terabytes of those.

Yup, dito basically, the largest space taker I have are my DVDs and BDs and I have all the originals (as we all should). Only thing I do with those is have them on redundant storage to protect me from having to re-rip them if a drive dies.

[gplasky]

Yepper. Triptto basically. DVDs can be reripped. TV recordings can be had from elsewhere. (Hulu, Netflix, etc.) Home videos, photos, etc. are copied from another PC on the network which is backed up by WHS which is where all the media and recordings are kept for SageTV. I backup the SageTV directory to another location.

Gerry

[MalibuDave42]

Thanks for your insights.. I suppose that makes a lot of sense. Though, I am in the process of ripping down my DVD and BD collection. Very time consuming, but not very labor intensive. I was just thinking, to repeat the 800hours to accomplish this task again.. ugh...

Thanks everyone

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by MalibuDave42

Thanks for your insights.. I suppose that makes a lot of sense. Though, I am in the process of ripping down my DVD and BD collection. Very time consuming, but not very labor intensive. I was just thinking, to repeat the 800hours to accomplish this task again.. ugh...

That's why I have all my "mass storage" on either a RAID-5 array in my SageTV server of my NAS (with "X-RAID"). It's not backup and I wouldn't trust that alone for protecting my unrecoverable data, but it's nice added security for the data that is otherwise recoverable.

As far as my unrecoverable data (my digital photos), I burn that to DVDs.