Backup gigs, perhaps terabytes of music and video

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So I have a friend that posed this question to me. How can I backup all of my music and videos that I’ve saved over the years to various hard drives that are almost full. I don’t want to lose this stuff he said and I’m not sure if I’m need a raid? Obviously it’d take way too long to upload to cloud storage.

I know businesses can afford to do this sort of thing but how would an individual go about it in a logical manner without huge costs?

Forgot to mention, that he hooks these various hard drives up to his entertainment system to view and listen.

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This might work, but others probably will have better ideas:

One could write a simple interactive program or a script to read through a file or files with lists of what is in each of those backup HDs so far not connected to the computer, or etc. (I am guessing these are HDs, but this is not necessary) and have the script execute one of two alternative tasks:

(1) A search for the title, the authors, or some other character list entered by the user. Then display the hits with those words and their respective HDs in a list. Then the user can: pause the software, connect the correct HD to the device from where it will be played, or else backed up, find and (if is to be played) activate the file in question, either manually or re-starting the same software that has been paused, so it does the retrieval and finally launches the file with the music,video, or backs it up to wherever.

(2) Copying everything in each old HD, one HD at a time to another that can hold the contents of all the old ones, or to a disk array. This  may need using special software, but is not necessary to have it, as it can be done by hand. Putting a priced music collection together in one place justifies taking the time to do this, I think.

It requires the necessary level of knowledge to write the interactive script or program just described, unless something already exists that can be bought or obtained for free.

Many here may have those skills. No guarantee they’ll do it for free, though.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

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Mike

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Mike,

I’d take these steps:

1. Find the USED space on each drive in question and enter into a spreadsheet and then use the Sum function to determine the total used space.
2. If they can all fit on a single HD just get a 2 bay USB 3.0 dock and do the copying. I’d suggest a program like RoboCopy to accomplish this task.
3. If they can’t fit on a single HD (based on currently available consumer HD sizes, 16Tb seems to be the sweet spot) I’d get a Synology NAS with the appropriate number of bays (depends on total required space / drive size desired) as you can attach a USB 3.0 dock directly to the NAS to do the copying which is faster than doing it over the network. I’d use Synology tools for this process.
4. Whatever drive you buy make sure it is CMR (conventional magnetic recording) NOT SMR (shingled magnetic recording) since you’re using this for archival storage you don’t want the possible blead over with a SMR drive!

HTH

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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Mike

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@RetiredGeek

I’m not entirely sure what a NAS is, but it seems like the Synology ones are like having your own local cloud….and you could “serve” media to various devices.  Right ?    Anyway, I’m a bit confused on the model and the number of bays I would need (I’m assuming here that these bays you load up with say a 3.5 magnetic drive).  Or do I have that all wrong?

Could you point me in the right direction?

Mike

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Mike,

NAS = Network Attached Storage. Yes it is like having a personal Cloud.

Yes you would use 3.5 Magnetic drives although you could use SSD’s but that would be very expensive for large amounts of data.

The number of bays needed is based on how much data you have and the desired storage method. These units support RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks). I use RAID 0 on my Synology DS220+ (2 disks). That provides protection against failure of one of the disks as all data written goes to BOTH disks. Of course, this doubles the amount of storage space you need but since HDDs are so inexpensive it is the method I feel most comfortable with. I have 2 – 4TB Segate Iron Wolf drives in my unit. The entire setup cost me $425.00 USD. Well worth the cost for me. YMMV!

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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Mike

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Mike, we need to know how much data you have before advising on disk / NAS.

cheers, Paul

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Mike

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@Paul T. I’ve got to ask that question to my friend and I’ll add up exactly what he’s got.

@RetiredGeek.  So it sounds perfect for a backup scenario with redundancy.  Could you use the same configuration to also stream to devices at the same time….or would that be on advisable (since you’d want to maintain the robustness of the backup drives), and you’d perhaps need a different drive?

 

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Mike,

I see no reason that you can’t do both since you probably wouldn’t be streaming while backing up. That said streaming could shudder if the backup load is too great on the communications channel (LAN).

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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However backing up to external drives is the normal strategy, I prefer transferring to clouds, it would be the safe way that could keep all your data safe and you can yous any of the backup tools no matter what is it but for example Robocopy , Teracopy , GsRichcopy , Duplicati …etc .

Also you can check with clouds like AWS S3 or Azure blob

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