[typo]

i just recently started using XBMC on my raspberry pi and have been looking for suggestions as far as storing my media. Currently i have a harddrive in my win7 pc set up as a SMB share. Space is becoming a problem as i start to rip my dvd collection to it. Would you guys suggest a linux fileserver, windows fileserver, NAS. I guess my problem is thinking of a good expandable way to grow the storage and back up. My orginal plan was to nuild a freenas box with raid 5 but there is no good way for me to back that up then another simple method was to set up another drive in my pc and mirror all my drives. i'm thinking of biting the bullet and buying a NAS but again that leaves me with not being able to expland the space after i aleady started using the raid. Any suggestion or ideas?

[Atomic Zombie]

my personal preference is a Linux server in RAID5, however you should go with whatever you are comfortable with. There will never be a good way to back up large media shares like this, just a fact of life. NAS's are not very cost effective, however they can be easier to set up.

[BrooksyX]

Personally what I did was just throw some old parts in a cheap case I picked up (AMD Dualcore, AM2+ Motherboard, 4gb ram) and just added drives and parts as I go (recently added 2x TV tuners :p ). I am running XBMCBuntu 11.10 w/ Frodo and share my media to the rest of the house via a read only samba share. Now my system has grown a little out of control though... ha but its fun. I am up to 2x 2TB HDD's and 4x 1TB HDD's. Before I had absolutely no back up but am experimenting with an rsync cron job or two to at least back some stuff up.

[T800]

I'm using unRAID which has a parity drive as partial back up protection. I can expand as long I have available SATA connections.
If I wanted an onsite 100% duplicate back up I would build a 2nd unRAID server.

Not including harddrives my movie server cost me less than £200 and I can expand that to 60TB without replacing any of hardware.

[eg4190]

The only way to insure against data loss is to have 100% redundancy, which is a waste of money for a media server, in my opinion. A professional video editor needs total redundancy to make sure work isn't lost, but what's the worst case scenario when a 3TB hard drive full of MKVs blows up? You just download the MKVs again. I've had one hard drive failure in the last four years of owning a media server and yeah, it took about month for my SAB queue to clear out, but in the end I was just out the $120 for a replacement drive. It definitely wouldn't have been worth something like an extra $700 to have a duplicate of each drive.

Solutions like unRAID do give you the option of having a parity drive. It's also a good idea to check for SMART errors every once in a while -- if a drive starts spitting out errors, buy a replacement and copy everything over. But even if these methods fail, as long as you back up your XBMC database regularly, you can always look at the database after a hard drive explodes and see what movies and TV shows you had on the broken drive.