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.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

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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 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.

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 :)

I have a similar setup.

I have a 16tb USB HDD that syncs to my NAS whenever my workstation is idle for 20 mins.

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.

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.

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

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 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 have all my spare drives pooled together into a frankenNAS system in a spare Fractal R5 case. Whatever media fits gets a backup on there (in order of personal importance). Otherwise I will reacquire all my ISO’s should disaster strike.

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.

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 have it replicated to a backup server then to one in the dc