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While asking this question about a home NAS, Matt Rogish questioned my backup strategy for all this encoded video, and I had no answer. It seems that burning DVDs would be very time consuming. Also, do burned DVDs still suffer from degradation after n-years (where n is some number in the future)?

For those that don't want to read the other question, I currently have just under 1 TB of data and have estimated that I'll finish in the 1.5 to 2 Tb range, but may need more in the future. The data is primarily h.264 encoded video hand ripped from my DVD collection.

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There are some studies here that look into the long-term storage of information on DVDs. DVDs do end up suffering from degradation eventually - according some of these articles, you'd want to go gold-plated.

Personally, I would buy a few harddrives and use those for backup. You could even get a NAS that supports either RAID or JBOD (Just a bunch of disks) configurations and back up your data that way.

Edit: You might want to keep an eye on this question: http://superuser.com/questions/6107/what-are-my-options-for-a-multi-terabyte-home-nas, as the devices they're discussing are what you could use.

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Hey Jared, that's my question! And as user Matt Rogish pointed out, a RAID isn't a backup strategy. – Bob King Jul 20 '09 at 15:12
Haha, hadn't noticed you'd asked both! Yeah, RAID isn't, but using a NAS in JOBD mode would give you a huge logical drive to back stuff up to. I've heard good things about FreeNAS – Jared Harley Jul 20 '09 at 20:07
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You have two basic approaches :

  • the easy way is to buy 1 or 2TB eSATA drives, and use these as backup devices. It may be good enough if you don't need to back up every day.
  • slightly harder : buy some used tape drive. LTO-2 should be pretty cheap now, and enough to backup a couple of terabytes.

I personally backup to disks. However the backup partition are offline (unmounted) when not in use.

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I bought three identical external disk drives, copied my data onto all 3, then plugged one into my HTPC, one into my home office PC, and one into the PC at work. I use Windows Live Mesh sync on each machine to keep them automatically in sync. The two computers at home sync over the LAN, and the office one gets updated eventually.

No reason this shouldn't work with one PC at home and one at work (or a friends), and you can always do it with more than one drive too.

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up vote 0 down vote

Mozy. $4.95/month you don't have to worry about fires or theft

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Hey Keith, do you know, is unlimited really "unlimited"? – Bob King Jul 20 '09 at 15:13
All of the documentation says unlimited. I have around 120GB uploaded. I think they are playing a law of averages game... For every paying "SuperUser", there are probably 50 normal users holding 10GB. That would make the cost of the SuperUser be subsidized by the normal users. – Keith Sirmons Jul 22 '09 at 4:30
Interesting. I think I may give them a shot. I'll let you know how it goes! – Bob King Jul 23 '09 at 17:19
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So, we actually calculated it, and at peek upload speeds with my ISP, it'll take 115 days to upload 1 Tb. :-( – Bob King Jul 24 '09 at 17:23
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Totally useless for terrabytes of data. It would take forever to back up, bog down your internet line - and what about when you want to restore? Forget online services for these amounts of data - for now. – Kjensen Aug 9 '09 at 23:24
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