this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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My household still subscribes to most streaming services at the moment, but I've often considered "alternative means of acquisition" just because it's now such a pain in the ass to figure out which service has the content I want to watch. Things move around way too much and sometimes disappear completely. It's just easier to go to one site, download, and watch.
I setup a Plex server with all the Arr's and it took me maybe 1 hour and about $1500 in hardware such as a desktop PC and 4 x 10TB drives. Then I had to pay for a News Servers service ($100 for 15 months) and I opted to purchase a domain for like $7/year. Quite the upfront cost but easy to setup and maintain and I can watch anything I want with the best possible experience possible. If my internet goes down? I can still watch everything. When my News Servers subscription runs out, I still keep everything I have and can watch it as many times as I want. It's so simple to use, my wife who LOVES TV now prefers 'on demand'.
All thanks to the greedy fuckers running literally every streaming service.
for anyone afraid of the upfront cost: you don't need to buy so many expensive hard disk drives to self host a media server like Jellyfin/Plex
RAID arrays add complexity and get expensive very fast while not being a proper backup solution at all, it's nice to have but not required
on a budget buying a large hard disk drive (12~16 TB is a good sweet spot right now) and later down the road another one as periodic backup solution might be the wiser choice while accumulating your collection of media
I just download what I want to watch, watch it, then delete it. I have a 500gb SSD in my Mac, and about 30gb of it is currently taken up by Plex.
Raid is exactly as much or as little of a proper backup solution as you configure it to be isnt it?
Technically speaking, RAID is redundancy not backup. A proper backup is an archived copy of the data stored not stored in the same logical infrastructure as the primary data.
With a RAID you can swap in a new drive if one (or more, depending on your RAID#) drive in your RAID array dies. If enough of your redundancy in a RAID fails, you will lose data.
With a proper backup you can restore the entirety of the RAID array even if the original data has been physically destroyed.
This was actually something i thought newer raid features included and is why asked the question!
Thanks for letting me know, im so far out of being in touch with current technology it makes me sad. But i still find i love listening to people like my brother explain to me the stuff hes always keeping up on that we had used in years gone by. Technology is so cool but its so hard to keep up with if you dont work with it professionally. Or have the time/capacity/talent and disposable money if you lack the ability for self learning.
We live in such a disappointing technologically advanced world of the future.
You just happened to get a reply from a former backup engineer who has had to explain this concept to customers.
Something else in the backup world that gets regularly misused: backups != disaster ecovery.
Disaster recovery is a whole plan of action. Backups can be a part of DR, yes, but I have had way too many companies consider their backups as the totality of their DR.
Well I really appreciate you taking the time to respond.
I really wasnt thinking of backup more than a drive failing, which for personal use i think is what most people have in their heads.
I remember having to use rerecordable dvds each day at one of my early jobs and then the owner also having monthly back ups as well. For home entertainment i never really think of that kind of planning.
I imagine you are familiar with zip and jaz drives? I still kinda think of backups being something like that to some degree if im not actually thinking about it. Not those technologies per say but just something the average home user will never see and is kinda mythical?
They seemed so future tech to a much younger me. Like when you were on dial up and someone said they were able to use an oc3 line once! (Ah the 90s kids we were)
I know of several very large companies that still use tape backups. Granted they're not like the cassette tapes we used back in the 20th century, but it is still the same tech.
Those tape libraries are more akin to zip/jaz drives.
Neat. Back ups in that world im sure there is a whole world of options/solutions depending on what it is that needs to be preserved?
It basically only protects against hardware failure. It's not going to protect you from ransomware or even just accidentally clicking delete.
Thanks. I was misunderstanding concepts here in a big way
I'd also put that as a "nice to have".
I've upgraded my server similarly. But I initially just plugged Unraid into an old (~2012) desktop with a handful of old 1-2 terabyte drives. It's super easy to spread out the cost over time. I just moved machines and it was literally as simple as having all the same hard drives plugged into the new machine.
Yup, good point. You don't have to buy a new desktop with the latest Intel CPU with massive storage. You can start small and upgrade as needed. I know I wanted this solution so I invested to make sure I had something I can use for a long time. I got a desktop with a 12th gen i5 so it can do transcoding though it's not needed.