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I used to compress them and generally that's fine, but honestly storage has gotten cheap enough to where I don't bother. Every now and then the compression woul

I used to compress them and generally that's fine, but honestly storage has gotten cheap enough to where I don't bother. Every now and then the compression would introduce artifacts, even at a relatively low CRF level in ffmpeg, and just for peace of mind I decided to keep the raw movies. That said, since I have an elaborate tape backup system now, I've debated keeping the "masters" as archives on the tapes, and keeping compressed versions for streaming, but laziness has kind of won out on that.

extragood 3y ago
Agreed on your points about cheap storage and compression artifacts. I've entertained setting up a tape drive local backup for my NAS (4x 14 TB) for a few years. Is it worthwhile from your experience?
- tombert 3y ago
  Yes, the tape drive is something I am very happy that I ended up doing. I have two LTO-6 tape drives. They only connect via SAS, which is a little annoying, but I bought a 2-port used SAS card on ebay for $20. I ended up buying a pack of like 100 LTO-6 tapes on eBay two years ago for a steal, like $150 in total. Each tape is 2.5TB, so I can pretty easily back up my movies. Each movies is written to two separate tapes. I keep a spreadsheet of which tape every movie lives, in case I need to restore a specific backup. I would really like to get an LTO-7 or LTO-8 drive with Thunderbolt, but they cost an arm and a leg even used on eBay right now. If you get lucky, an external SAS LTO-6 drive can be had for about $200-$300. It's a slightly expensive up-front cost I'll admit, however, it came after I was using Google archive storage, and when I did a restore of 21TB of movies, the next day I had a bill for like $700! It's saved my ass one time thus far; I accidentally broke my ZFS RAID and lost everything, but fortunately I was able to restore all my blu-ray rips from tape, and it was pretty easy, and more importantly, didn't cost me anything extra. If you decide to go down this road, I do recommend getting one that has support for LTFS; otherwise you're going to be stuck using tar commands I think.
  - extragood 3y ago
    Thanks for the detailed response! That's really encouraging to hear, and I think thats enough to push me over the edge. Had a close call recently and lost a disk as I was preparing to migrate to my current hardware. I may adopt your 2 tape system as well. It'd be heartbreaking to lose my collection

extragood 3y ago

Agreed on your points about cheap storage and compression artifacts. I've entertained setting up a tape drive local backup for my NAS (4x 14 TB) for a few years. Is it worthwhile from your experience?

tombert 3y ago
Yes, the tape drive is something I am very happy that I ended up doing. I have two LTO-6 tape drives. They only connect via SAS, which is a little annoying, but I bought a 2-port used SAS card on ebay for $20. I ended up buying a pack of like 100 LTO-6 tapes on eBay two years ago for a steal, like $150 in total. Each tape is 2.5TB, so I can pretty easily back up my movies. Each movies is written to two separate tapes. I keep a spreadsheet of which tape every movie lives, in case I need to restore a specific backup. I would really like to get an LTO-7 or LTO-8 drive with Thunderbolt, but they cost an arm and a leg even used on eBay right now. If you get lucky, an external SAS LTO-6 drive can be had for about $200-$300. It's a slightly expensive up-front cost I'll admit, however, it came after I was using Google archive storage, and when I did a restore of 21TB of movies, the next day I had a bill for like $700! It's saved my ass one time thus far; I accidentally broke my ZFS RAID and lost everything, but fortunately I was able to restore all my blu-ray rips from tape, and it was pretty easy, and more importantly, didn't cost me anything extra. If you decide to go down this road, I do recommend getting one that has support for LTFS; otherwise you're going to be stuck using tar commands I think.
- extragood 3y ago
  Thanks for the detailed response! That's really encouraging to hear, and I think thats enough to push me over the edge. Had a close call recently and lost a disk as I was preparing to migrate to my current hardware. I may adopt your 2 tape system as well. It'd be heartbreaking to lose my collection