Ask HN: What's your home media storage/backup strategy? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's your home media storage/backup strategy?

6 pointschristiangenco7 comments

My resolution for the new year is to wrangle in my family's >1 TB digital home photo/video collection. We have 5 computers (all Macs) being inundated with a stream of media from 4 iPhones and 5 digital cameras.

My solution needs to:

1. Securely store the media in the long term

2. Be easy enough for my technologically-challenged parents to add media

3. Be accessible (web interface, playback on the TV, automatic syncing?, etc.)

I have at my disposal:

* a server with two 2 TB hard drives

* a $30/month budget

After about six months of searching, I've yet to find a pre-packaged solution. So where's the startup that can do this? I can't be the only person drowning in media. Ideally I'd like some kind of iPhoto-syncing/flickr-uploading/Apple TV-streaming widget, but I'm willing to do a fair bit of coding myself to tie everything together.

What's your strategy for dealing with your exponentially-increasing home movie collection?

> What's your strategy for dealing with your exponentially-increasing home movie collection?

I have a small low-power server running Debian Squeeze: - ZFS-fuse filesystem (packaged with squeeze) - disks in ZFS pool are arranged in mirror vdevs to protect against single drive failure - separate ZFS file systems for archive and less important bulk storage - weekly cron job: ZFS scrub to verify pool data integrity (and report the result) - daily cron job: ZFS snapshot archive to protect against user errors - SAMBA shares so the family can easily use the server.

This still doesn't protect against catastrophes which wipe out both disks at the same time, so I also make copies of my archive on USB disks for off-line storage in another location. That's the annoying part which is the most work.

I will probably move to the BTRFS file system in the future, because it is likely faster than ZFS-fuse and it seems to have support for mixing disk sizes, which makes it easier to grow the storage organically.

I also have a lot of video media (love my Sony EX1!) so backup is a nuisance.

For programming work and writing, I use git (my own servers, periodically backing up my repos to S3; some github and some bitbucket).

For backing up my MacBookPro (which I use for work and video and photo editing/production) I use two large USB external drives with Time Machine, switching from one to the other every few days. My laptop and backup drives are encrypted with File Vault. When external drives are full, I store them and buy new ones (trying to be careful to plug in old drives and leave them on overnight occasionally so that they can check for damaged sectors, self repair, etc.

I still burn DVDs occasionally for backups also.

My wife uses a single Time Machine external drive and burns backup DVDs.

For your particular needs: I would keep one Mac always on with video on a shared drive. Even with wifi bandwidth it should be no problems accessing your video materials.

Is this your slick way to see if your startup idea is worth something? :)

Problem: I do care about my home media which is wiped out if my HDD crashes and of course I'm not able to access them in all my devices.

Proposed solutions: 1) I'm willing to pay a monthly fee only if it is a cloud storage which can be accessed on all devices. I'm not going to pay a monthly fee if am going to store my media in my own HDD and all you provide is a service to access them.

2) One time payment for an app that lets me access my media across all platforms iPhone, android, iPad (esp), mac, windows, PS3, Xbox etc.

There 2 problems here, reliable storage and cross platform accessibility. I think you are suggesting 2 HDDs raided for reliability, which is probably the cheapest solution.

Hah, I need to figure out my own working solution before I claim to solve others'.

1) yes

2) yes

Now where's the company that does that for me?

2 2 TB HDD RAID is probably what I'm looking at right now, with some kind of unlimited cloud backup service just backing up the whole thing, and some way to transfer media easily to the hard drives

I'm looking at getting a Synology or QNAP server and using that for backups with a Samba based file sharing system. I have a server lying around, but a dedicated device would save on power consumption so I'm going to go with that.

I believe you can also backup your whole server to S3 periodically using their built in tools.

Ahh, but S3 is so damn expensive! It would be $140/month for 1 TB of storage (ignoring transfer costs), which I could use to build my own damn server farm.

Try tonidopro. It is a home server software that comes with backup, sync, dlna server and mobile apps for iOS,android and windows 7.

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