Storage Solutions Home media Storage

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greenhorn

greenhorn

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Juggernaut
Here is my problem. I have a lot (~100 GB+) of mp3's on various hard disks - initially had them on hard disks, but then moved them to DVD when i lost some when my hard disk crapped out, but now my DVD's have started crapping out, so put them on hard disks, and some of the hard disks are getting bad sectors, and most of the music is extremely hard to find stuff (ye olde english vinyl rips etc), and since the stuff is spread across a no of hard disks with some amount of overlap (to make sure that one hard disk loss will not take my music with it ) its hard to find stuff, and again, issues with bad sectors on some of the hard disks,

So looking for something more reliable, and easier to use. The music will be used by my laptop mostly (if i had a desktop, would have setup RAID inside it) and if i can add some media server functionality without much added cost ( so as to acess it from the android phones in the household) it would be nice.

I'm guessing it will involve some sort of RAID and mix of home server hardware and software. Have not used RAID myself, but i guess that's the only way to save my stuff from bad sectors and failing hard disks. Would appreciate what would be the cheapest way to go about it. Dont mind spending some time to set it up, but after that, it should be more or less run on its own.

What should I do ?
 
Two disks with sync is good enough. Your music is always online, and you have a failsafe in case one drive goes out.

I have close to 8.5TB of storage + mirror (so total 17TB of disks) and there is no RAID involved, just two copies of data. I use a free program called SyncBack to synchronise the drives - it's very powerful for a free program. Of course, music is critical so I have three copies of that.

*knock on wood* yet to lose a drive or piece of data. The secret is regular maintenance, regular backup and a good power supply that doesn't kick the crap out of disks.

I also prefer this because if I delete something accidentally I always have another copy on the backup drive as long as I don't resync manually.

Like you, I learned my lesson when I lost about 4GB of music in one night when one disk gave out - my only copy. This was over 12 years ago and I swore this would not happen again (biggest hard drive was 20GB).
 
I have the storage, but syncing multiple hard disks over USB with a laptop was such a pain - I thought I would do it, but in practice, its not really working out - I really dont have the time, so figured I'd get something that would just do it in the background and make the access easier.

Do you have to run syncback ever time, or does it just keep running as a background process and keep everything synced?
 
Haven't used SyncBack for quite a while now but IIRC you can tell it what you want to back up, do it manually or set up a schedule to sync automatically. cranky can confirm or reject this.
 
You have to set up profiles and then you can run them manually, or scheduled as you see fit. The profiles are very flexible, and if you have scheduled runs you just have to open the program (or open it along with Windows) and leave it be.

I prefer doing it manually, once a week as it gives me more control over the data and I know what has been backed up and what has not.

Do note that that for a small data set even the Windows utility is sufficient but it is limited to one profile and one source/destination set, which is its only limitation.

I do have a separate machine with all the drives on it, kind of like a server. Only one or two data sets (and small ones at that) are synced over a network.
 
Ideally you need to fix the disks on to some kind of computer permanently if you want this to be automated.

You have to either Remote Desktop to the connected machine, or create mapped drives in Explorer and work with them on the client terminal.

24x7 really helps when automating tasks.
 
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