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Comment by qskousen | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure you're aware but consider putting another drive in for some flavor of RAID, it's a lot easier to rebuild a RAID than to rebuild data usually!

Edit: By "some flavor" I mean hardware or software.

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RAID doesn't cover all of the scenarios as offsite backup, such as massive electrical power surge, fire, flood, theft or other things causing total destruction of the RAID array. Ideally you'd want a setup that has local storage redundancy in some form of RAID and offsite backup.

In fact for home users backup is WAY more important than RAID, because your NAS down for a (restore time) is not that important, but data loss is forever.

For essential personal data you're right, but a very common use case for a home NAS is a media server. The library is usually non-essential data - annoying to lose, but not critical. Combined with its large size, it's usually hard to justify a full offsite backup. RAID offers a cost-effective way to give it some protection, when the alternative is nothing

For a number of people I know, they don't do any offsite backup of their home media server. It would not result in any possibly-catastrophic personal financial hassles/struggles/real data loss if a bunch of movies and music disappeared overnight.

The amount of personally generated sensitive data that doesn't fit on a laptop's onboard storage (which should all be backed up offsite as well) will usually fit on like a 12TB RAID-1 pair, which is easier to back up than 40TB+ of movies.

Same here, I use raid 1 with offsite backups for my documents and things like family pictures. I don't backup downloaded or ripped movies and TV shows, just redownload or search for the bluray in the attic if needed.

Having to restore my media server without a backup would cost me around a dozen hours of my time. 2 bucks a month to back up to Glacier with rclone’s crypt backend is easily worth it.

How are you hitting that pricing? S3 "Glacier Deep Archive"?

Standard S3 is $23/TB/mo. Backblaze B2 is $6/TB/mo. S3 Glacier Instant or Flexible Retrieval is about $4/TB/mo. S3 Glacier Deep Archive is about $1/TB/mo.

I take it you have ~2TB in deep archive? I have 5TB in Backblaze and I've been meaning to prune it way down.

Edit: these are raw storage costs and I neglected transfer. Very curious as my sibling comment mentioned it.

Yup, deep archive on <2TB, which is more content than most people watch in a lifetime. I mostly store content in 1080p as my vision is not good enough to notice the improvement at 4K.

> more content than most people watch in a lifetime

The average person watches more than 3 hours of TV/video per day, and 1 gigabyte per hour is on the low end of 1080p quality. Multiply those together and you'd need 1TB per year. 5TB per year of higher quality 1080p wouldn't be an outlier.

Holy crap! I watch like, maybe a couple of movies a month and two or three miniseries a year?

Is that including ads too? And sports/news?

EDIT: Wait, are these "average person" or "average American?"

Average person.

https://uk.themedialeader.com/tv-viewing-time-in-europe-ahea...

https://www.finder.com/uk/stats-facts/tv-statistics

https://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/daily-tv-watching-time...

"In a survey conducted in India in January 2022, respondents of age 56 years and above spent the most time watching television, at an average of over three hours per day."

https://www.medianews4u.com/young-india-spends-96-min-per-da...

For china I'm seeing a bit over two and a half hours of TV in 2009, and more recently a bit over one and a half hours TV plus a bit over half an hour of streaming.

Yes it includes ads, sports, and news.

Personally I don't watch a lot of actual TV but I have youtube or twitch on half the time.

Have you checked the costs for restoring from Glacier?

It's not the backing up part that's expensive.

I would not be surprised if you decided to spend the dozen hours of your time after all.

AWS Glacier removed the retrieval pricing issue for most configurations, but the bandwidth costs are still there. You pay $ 90 to retrieve 1 TB.

The retrieval cost is less than 1 hour of my time and I expect less than 10% chance I'll ever need it.

I think there's a very strong case to be made for breaking up your computing needs into separate devices that specialize in their respective niche. Last year I followed the 'PCMR' advice and dropped thousands of dollars on a beefy AI/ML/Gaming machine, and it's been great, but I'd be lying to you if I didn't admit that I'd have been better served taking that money and buying a lightweight laptop, a NAS, and gaming console. I'd have enough money left over to rent whatever I needed on runpod for AI/ML stuff.

That assumes disks never age out and arrays always rebuild fine. That's not guaranteed at all.

for the home user backing up their own data, I honestly think that raid has limited utility.

If I have 3 disks to devote to backup, I'd rather have 1 local copy and two remote copies, vs 1 local copy with RAID and 1 remote copy without.

It's super useful for maintenance, for example you can replace and upgrade the drives in place without reinstalling the system.

If it's infrequently accessed data then yes, but for a machine that you use every day it's nice if things keep working after a failure and you only need to plug in a replacement disk. I use the same machine for data storage and for home automation for example.

The third copy is in the cloud, write/append only. More work and bandwidth cost to restore, but it protects against malware or fire. So it's for a different (unlikely) scenario.

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