32 ms·

How many movies do you have? A 5TB hard drive is slightly over $100 and will hold a minimum of 100 Blu-ray rips, assuming they use the entire disk capacity and

by opencl 8y ago

How many movies do you have? A 5TB hard drive is slightly over $100 and will hold a minimum of 100 Blu-ray rips, assuming they use the entire disk capacity and you don't reencode them to something smaller.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
Well, for one, hard drives also fail. So I need backups, unless I want to have to sit and re-rip everything when it happens. I'm a big fan of RAID 1 since I don't have horrific rebuilds, and I offsite my data as well. (Most of my data is stored on five hard drives currently.) So take your estimate drive costs and start multiplying. Second, my Vudu library contains over 600 movies and significantly more television shows than that. And before you calculate the cost of the storage, bear in mind there's another, secondary cost: The much higher cost I'd have spent to have built that library solely on ripped discs. I never paid full price for a digital purchase. (And specifically, never more than it would've cost to acquire it via disc.) Third, time. I'm also significantly backlogged in organizing my ebooks, which I do store on drives. Blu-ray ripping time just isn't something I want to dedicate a big chunk of my life to.
- scarface74 8y ago
  Backblaze is $5 a month for unlimited storage. If your hard drive fails, you can order a hard drive with your data.
  - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
    You better store encrypted if you're pirating movies/music. It's rather easy to get TOS'ed even if you match filenames of common pirate name signatures.
    - tomatotomato37 8y ago
      Luckily passive commercial scanners don't require much; tossing it into an encrypted zip with everything set to fastest still runs over everything passive that's not nationstate
      - michaelmrose 8y ago
        It makes more sense to encrypt the entire data store and just sync the entire data store. This is proof against anyone who isn't willing to hack your computer or break into your house while its open.
    - AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
      Backblaze insists that your data is encrypted and that they can't see it. It's supposedly not like Box/Dropbox/Google Drive. Do you have any examples where someone's Backblaze account was terminated for backing up pirated media?
      - shittyadmin 8y ago
        I can comment on this - it's flawed. They encrypt locally and only send encrypted data to their servers, true, but they deduplicate that data between customers meaning they know file hashes or something similar and could remove pirated content if they so desired. Second, in order to get your data back their solution is to go ahead and type your "private" encryption passphrase into their site so their servers can then decrypt it and send you a zip or hard drive full of decrypted data. I still suggest it for friends and family because it's cheap and damn sure that encryption is better than nothing, but if you have a lot of sensitive data I wouldn't recommend it. If you demand privacy, use Restic and Backblaze's B2 service, you're paying per GB then though.
        tzs 8y ago
        > I still suggest it for friends and family because it's cheap and damn sure that encryption is better than nothing, but if you have a lot of sensitive data I wouldn't recommend it. If you demand privacy, use Restic and Backblaze's B2 service, you're paying per GB then though. First, though, find out if your friends or family have an Office365 subscription. A lot of people get one because they want the Office apps, and don't make heavy use of the 1 TB of OneDrive storage that it includes. Restic vis rclone should be able to use that for backups. Backblaze is cheap, but using something you have already paid for is even cheaper. :-)
        scarface74 8y ago
        How many of your friends are going to know how to use rclone?
        tzs 8y ago
- ChuckMcM 8y ago
  I totally feel your pain. I have been slowly building a local search engine for navigating the ebooks, PDFs, and other documents I've got stored on my NAS device. I ended up replacing my NetApp StorVault (6TB (4TB usable), RAID6) with a FreeNAS box from iXSystems (24TB (20TB usable), RAID6) which cost me a bit more than $2500. (it is also much quieter than the StorVault was :-)). And on that 20TB I've stored a bit more than 200 book volumes that I had digitized at 1DollarScan, probably close to 1000 magazines (scanned generally manually with my ScanSnap 1500), and perhaps as many PDF documents that were never printed to begin with (like data sheets). I also have my music collection, and I have recently looked at putting movies on there as well since the streaming services are letting me down here as well. At the end of the day it is the 21st century version of one's personal library.
  - myrandomcomment 8y ago
    I have had a FreeNAS mini for 5 years now. Best 2K on tech I have ever spent. So much better then rolling my own (which I used to do). 4x4TB (2 striped 4TB mirrors). Thinking about replacing the drives with 8TB ones. I had one drive fail in 5 years.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    Currently I can only really do metadata search, but I'd really love to set up fulltext at some point. I have this dream where someday I can do things when the Internet is down. The other thing I'm interested in, and wonder if you have thoughts on: When you pass, your personal library is inherited. Will people know what to do with your digital library? Will it be useful? Will people want it?
    - ChuckMcM 8y ago
      My goal is exactly that, usability without me present :-). The tools for processing PDFs into searchable text have a lot of warts. For a while IBM was offering a free Watson service to do this (now its part of Watson Discovery) which has some warts. I did manage a set of perl scripts that would post process the statements that I downloaded from the bank into CSV files, but I would still like to pull tabular data out of PDF book scans to make the data they provide more useful. I have a simple frontend based on the perl Mojolicious module which Blekko had developed as part of another project but my indexing tools are still quite primitive. Simple bi-gram and tri-grams, and a growing synonym index. I don't give it enough queries to use my own traffic for ranking feedback. So basically everything is nearly equal rank. Basically I am about to the AltaVista level of search capability :-). The vision is it just runs as a server and anyone on the same network can access it like a web service an pull up documents (and in the future media) of interest.
- shittyadmin 8y ago
  There's actually great tools to help you build and organize that library... assuming you pirate everything. I'm just hoping the movie/TV industry gets the picture soon and goes the way the music industry has with streaming.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    I don't pirate everything. In fact, I don't pirate anything. For instance, with regards to eBooks, I hit Humble Book Bundles hard. They're bloody incredible for the discerning legitimate DRM-free digital content purchaser.
    - shittyadmin 8y ago
      I was more just making the point that it's actually easier to do library organization for movies and TV as a pirate than it is as a legit owner of Blu-Rays for example. Sad state for the industry, really.
      - sosborn 8y ago
        Meh, it isn't that difficult with ripped blu-rays either. Plex can do it quite well.
        cannonedhamster 8y ago
        I've found Plex great for movies, my ripped television shows on the other hand tend to be weird. Since the order of DVDs, BRs don't always match up to the airing order there can be a lot of manual work in cleaning that up. Plex is also not super great with music yet. It's getting better but it's definitely having problems with a lot of my music since I've got a lot of local/indie bands.
- ViViDboarder 8y ago
  You have backups. You don’t have to throw away the disk after you rip it. The disk itself is a great backup. Personally, I prefer everything to be in my Plex server, but I’m in no rush and just rip as I go. I’ll probably never actually rip every one. By the sounds of it, I don’t even have anywhere close to the number of disks to rip as you, so I get it no being appealing.
jasonjayr 8y ago
You'll want 2 copies there --- 100 blu-ray rips will take some time to rebuild if that drive dies.
close04 8y ago
You'll probably want 2 (or more) drives since even if you have the original discs the time needed to rip them again will justify the investment. On top of that you will most likely want a NAS to make the setup practical. This adds up to a few hundred dollars that you wouldn't need to spend if the DRMs implemented were sane and reasonable with legal owners. And I don't even factor in the cost of the time, electrical power, or computing power involved to make it happen.
AdrianB1 8y ago
You are right, but just recalculate with 8 TB drives (more modern, quite cost effective) and 3 disks at minimum (RAID5) and you reach $600 for ~ 14 TB usable and safe storage. Add a CPU, MB, RAM and you reach $1000.
- Pxtl 8y ago
  Can't you just plug an external HD into your existing wifi router's USB port to make it into NAS and invest in a paid off-site backup service for failures?
  - dragontamer 8y ago
    A dedicated NAS is useful, if only for keeping hard drives together. Any good NAS build will be primarily hard drives for your cost. 5TB to 8TB hard drives are cost-efficient in my experience. 6x 8TB Hard Drives for 24TB of storage (RAID1 like redundancy. Use ZFS btw) is $1200 (~$200 per 8TB hard drive). > invest in a paid off-site backup service for failures What's your recovery plan? If you want to recover 5TB of data off of a 100 MBit connection, that's 140 Hours. Local is the only thing that makes sense if you're at the point of filling up hard drives. Having 1Gbps or even 10Gbps (local "fiber" with Direct Attached Copper) connections locally is relatively cheap. And it seems like 10Gbps is getting cheaper. Accessing a hard drive, even a sped-up RAID set of drives, over 10Gbps is going to have the same bandwidth as a local SATA connection. (SATA is only 6Gbps). Your NAS is practically a "local drive" at that point.
    - Dylan16807 8y ago
      > What's your recovery plan? If you want to recover 5TB of data off of a 100 MBit connection, that's 140 Hours. Local is the only thing that makes sense if you're at the point of filling up hard drives. It's a media archive. As long as you can recover specific files on demand, it doesn't really matter if it takes two months to download the entire thing.
- stmfreak 8y ago
  My $2k NAS holds over 2,000 movies and 20k tv episodes. The cost per is negligible.

by opencl 8y ago

ocdtrekkie 8y ago

Well, for one, hard drives also fail. So I need backups, unless I want to have to sit and re-rip everything when it happens. I'm a big fan of RAID 1 since I don't have horrific rebuilds, and I offsite my data as well. (Most of my data is stored on five hard drives currently.) So take your estimate drive costs and start multiplying. Second, my Vudu library contains over 600 movies and significantly more television shows than that. And before you calculate the cost of the storage, bear in mind there's another, secondary cost: The much higher cost I'd have spent to have built that library solely on ripped discs. I never paid full price for a digital purchase. (And specifically, never more than it would've cost to acquire it via disc.) Third, time. I'm also significantly backlogged in organizing my ebooks, which I do store on drives. Blu-ray ripping time just isn't something I want to dedicate a big chunk of my life to.

scarface74 8y ago
Backblaze is $5 a month for unlimited storage. If your hard drive fails, you can order a hard drive with your data.
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  You better store encrypted if you're pirating movies/music. It's rather easy to get TOS'ed even if you match filenames of common pirate name signatures.
  - tomatotomato37 8y ago
    Luckily passive commercial scanners don't require much; tossing it into an encrypted zip with everything set to fastest still runs over everything passive that's not nationstate
    - michaelmrose 8y ago
      It makes more sense to encrypt the entire data store and just sync the entire data store. This is proof against anyone who isn't willing to hack your computer or break into your house while its open.
  - AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
    Backblaze insists that your data is encrypted and that they can't see it. It's supposedly not like Box/Dropbox/Google Drive. Do you have any examples where someone's Backblaze account was terminated for backing up pirated media?
    - shittyadmin 8y ago
      I can comment on this - it's flawed. They encrypt locally and only send encrypted data to their servers, true, but they deduplicate that data between customers meaning they know file hashes or something similar and could remove pirated content if they so desired. Second, in order to get your data back their solution is to go ahead and type your "private" encryption passphrase into their site so their servers can then decrypt it and send you a zip or hard drive full of decrypted data. I still suggest it for friends and family because it's cheap and damn sure that encryption is better than nothing, but if you have a lot of sensitive data I wouldn't recommend it. If you demand privacy, use Restic and Backblaze's B2 service, you're paying per GB then though.
      - tzs 8y ago
        > I still suggest it for friends and family because it's cheap and damn sure that encryption is better than nothing, but if you have a lot of sensitive data I wouldn't recommend it. If you demand privacy, use Restic and Backblaze's B2 service, you're paying per GB then though. First, though, find out if your friends or family have an Office365 subscription. A lot of people get one because they want the Office apps, and don't make heavy use of the 1 TB of OneDrive storage that it includes. Restic vis rclone should be able to use that for backups. Backblaze is cheap, but using something you have already paid for is even cheaper. :-)
        scarface74 8y ago
        How many of your friends are going to know how to use rclone?
        tzs 8y ago
ChuckMcM 8y ago
I totally feel your pain. I have been slowly building a local search engine for navigating the ebooks, PDFs, and other documents I've got stored on my NAS device. I ended up replacing my NetApp StorVault (6TB (4TB usable), RAID6) with a FreeNAS box from iXSystems (24TB (20TB usable), RAID6) which cost me a bit more than $2500. (it is also much quieter than the StorVault was :-)). And on that 20TB I've stored a bit more than 200 book volumes that I had digitized at 1DollarScan, probably close to 1000 magazines (scanned generally manually with my ScanSnap 1500), and perhaps as many PDF documents that were never printed to begin with (like data sheets). I also have my music collection, and I have recently looked at putting movies on there as well since the streaming services are letting me down here as well. At the end of the day it is the 21st century version of one's personal library.
- myrandomcomment 8y ago
  I have had a FreeNAS mini for 5 years now. Best 2K on tech I have ever spent. So much better then rolling my own (which I used to do). 4x4TB (2 striped 4TB mirrors). Thinking about replacing the drives with 8TB ones. I had one drive fail in 5 years.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  Currently I can only really do metadata search, but I'd really love to set up fulltext at some point. I have this dream where someday I can do things when the Internet is down. The other thing I'm interested in, and wonder if you have thoughts on: When you pass, your personal library is inherited. Will people know what to do with your digital library? Will it be useful? Will people want it?
  - ChuckMcM 8y ago
    My goal is exactly that, usability without me present :-). The tools for processing PDFs into searchable text have a lot of warts. For a while IBM was offering a free Watson service to do this (now its part of Watson Discovery) which has some warts. I did manage a set of perl scripts that would post process the statements that I downloaded from the bank into CSV files, but I would still like to pull tabular data out of PDF book scans to make the data they provide more useful. I have a simple frontend based on the perl Mojolicious module which Blekko had developed as part of another project but my indexing tools are still quite primitive. Simple bi-gram and tri-grams, and a growing synonym index. I don't give it enough queries to use my own traffic for ranking feedback. So basically everything is nearly equal rank. Basically I am about to the AltaVista level of search capability :-). The vision is it just runs as a server and anyone on the same network can access it like a web service an pull up documents (and in the future media) of interest.
shittyadmin 8y ago
There's actually great tools to help you build and organize that library... assuming you pirate everything. I'm just hoping the movie/TV industry gets the picture soon and goes the way the music industry has with streaming.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  I don't pirate everything. In fact, I don't pirate anything. For instance, with regards to eBooks, I hit Humble Book Bundles hard. They're bloody incredible for the discerning legitimate DRM-free digital content purchaser.
  - shittyadmin 8y ago
    I was more just making the point that it's actually easier to do library organization for movies and TV as a pirate than it is as a legit owner of Blu-Rays for example. Sad state for the industry, really.
    - sosborn 8y ago
      Meh, it isn't that difficult with ripped blu-rays either. Plex can do it quite well.
      - cannonedhamster 8y ago
        I've found Plex great for movies, my ripped television shows on the other hand tend to be weird. Since the order of DVDs, BRs don't always match up to the airing order there can be a lot of manual work in cleaning that up. Plex is also not super great with music yet. It's getting better but it's definitely having problems with a lot of my music since I've got a lot of local/indie bands.
ViViDboarder 8y ago
You have backups. You don’t have to throw away the disk after you rip it. The disk itself is a great backup. Personally, I prefer everything to be in my Plex server, but I’m in no rush and just rip as I go. I’ll probably never actually rip every one. By the sounds of it, I don’t even have anywhere close to the number of disks to rip as you, so I get it no being appealing.

jasonjayr 8y ago

You'll want 2 copies there --- 100 blu-ray rips will take some time to rebuild if that drive dies.

close04 8y ago

You'll probably want 2 (or more) drives since even if you have the original discs the time needed to rip them again will justify the investment. On top of that you will most likely want a NAS to make the setup practical. This adds up to a few hundred dollars that you wouldn't need to spend if the DRMs implemented were sane and reasonable with legal owners. And I don't even factor in the cost of the time, electrical power, or computing power involved to make it happen.

AdrianB1 8y ago

You are right, but just recalculate with 8 TB drives (more modern, quite cost effective) and 3 disks at minimum (RAID5) and you reach $600 for ~ 14 TB usable and safe storage. Add a CPU, MB, RAM and you reach $1000.

Pxtl 8y ago
Can't you just plug an external HD into your existing wifi router's USB port to make it into NAS and invest in a paid off-site backup service for failures?
- dragontamer 8y ago
  A dedicated NAS is useful, if only for keeping hard drives together. Any good NAS build will be primarily hard drives for your cost. 5TB to 8TB hard drives are cost-efficient in my experience. 6x 8TB Hard Drives for 24TB of storage (RAID1 like redundancy. Use ZFS btw) is $1200 (~$200 per 8TB hard drive). > invest in a paid off-site backup service for failures What's your recovery plan? If you want to recover 5TB of data off of a 100 MBit connection, that's 140 Hours. Local is the only thing that makes sense if you're at the point of filling up hard drives. Having 1Gbps or even 10Gbps (local "fiber" with Direct Attached Copper) connections locally is relatively cheap. And it seems like 10Gbps is getting cheaper. Accessing a hard drive, even a sped-up RAID set of drives, over 10Gbps is going to have the same bandwidth as a local SATA connection. (SATA is only 6Gbps). Your NAS is practically a "local drive" at that point.
  - Dylan16807 8y ago
    > What's your recovery plan? If you want to recover 5TB of data off of a 100 MBit connection, that's 140 Hours. Local is the only thing that makes sense if you're at the point of filling up hard drives. It's a media archive. As long as you can recover specific files on demand, it doesn't really matter if it takes two months to download the entire thing.
stmfreak 8y ago
My $2k NAS holds over 2,000 movies and 20k tv episodes. The cost per is negligible.