Do you guys back up your libraries?

[fizzik]

Hey guys! Do you guys back up your Jellyfin libraries? I've been thinking about it only because it'd take a considerable amount of time to do it, but I'm concerned about the costs involved in purchasing enough storage to back it up.

[Efficient_Good_5784]

There's no way around this. If you want to have a 1-1 backup of your libraries, you need to obtain disks with enough capacity to hold all of your data. So if you have a library that's 50TB in total, you will need to buy enough disks to equal 50TB in the backup location.

You can try to compress your library to shrink its size by a percent, but this will be extremely slow, and video do not compress well.
And when it's time to restore from a compressed backup, you need to decompress it before adding it back to your main server.

If you backup your libraries with something like rsync, only the initial backup will take the longest. Each future rsync to the backup source will be way faster as it only needs to send data for new files or files that were modified.

To figure out how long the initial transfer will take, you need to find the max data transfer rate between your main server and the backup server. If both are connected with a 1Gbps link, that's ~117MB/s. So get the total size of your library in MB, then divide it by 117 to get the total seconds (keep in mind that this is not taking into account transfer rate dips, your just finding out what the fastest a transfer could be under ideal conditions).

[abpjf]

yeah, depending on how much you value your collection, there's no getting around drive-storage backup. it is a not-insignificant cost, I have mine on a 1:1 backup (60TB x 2). the initial backup can take days, but once it's done, the backup software is smart enough to just do a diff backup (only touches items that are changed or new or removed), I have that running every 3a.m.

[TheDreadPirate]

I backup irreplaceable data only onto separate disks I don't use for host my library and also to the cloud. Family photos/videos, Music/Shows/Movies I no longer have discs for (damaged, lost, etc.). This is a small percentage of my library. Everything else I will just re-rip if a hard drive fails. Though I plan to have some redundancy in the future with some form of RAID so my setup has SOME tolerance for disk failures.

My PSA for whenever RAID is mentioned: RAID IS NOT A BACKUP! RAID IS FOR UPTIME.