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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.
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2013-02-12, 16:10
(This post was last modified: 2013-02-12, 16:11 by 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.
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T800
Posting Freak
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2013-02-12, 16:16
(This post was last modified: 2013-02-12, 16:19 by 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.
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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.