My first home server was cobbled together from old hardware I had lying around and started more as an experiment than anything else. I loaded it up with a ton of media and my attitude at the time was that none of it really mattered because it could all be replaced. They were mostly ripped movies, TV shows, and random files that I wanted to share over the network. None of that was felt worth making a backup.
After a year with that server, my Plex library had grown to a respectable size. Backups haven’t crossed my mind yetespecially since everything had been going well this whole time. Then, one morning, a disk simply failed. There was no notice period or time to save anything; All data simply disappeared.
I didn’t really lose anything important. I was smart enough to save irreplaceable files on redundant drives, so important data survived unscathed. What I lost was my junk drawer, which turned out to be a lot more annoying than I thought.
Everything on my dead drive was replaceable
But reacquiring all those files was a huge hassle.
Nothing on the crashed hard drive was sentimental. All the movies could be copied or downloaded again, so I was much luckier than some people who only learned this lesson after losing precious family photographs. What I hadn’t taken into account was the sheer inconvenience of rebuilding from scratch. To begin with, he wasn’t even sure what exactly he had lost. There were thousands of movies, many of which took me a long time to find, and I had no way of finding out what the titles were now that the files were gone.
Needless to say, it was months before I could get close accumulating the files you had before the drive failed. Every few days, I would remember another movie that used to be there, so my lack of backup continued to be an inconvenience for me for much longer than I ever imagined. At least with critical data, you immediately know what’s gone and can recover it or make peace with its goodbye. With my file archive, I rediscovered lost files every week.
This whole ordeal also exposed how much I had been conflating redundancy with real backup. Copies of important files to a second drive kept irreplaceable data safe, but the failure made me realize how easily both drives, or the entire system, could have failed together, and then no amount of redundancy would have mattered.
Every drive is now backed up without exception
Because convenience is a good reason to make backups
After that drive died, I didn’t really change anything in my settings. All I did was buy two new drives (one extra for redundancy) and started accumulating files again, except this time they would have a backup. My backup script is actually just rsync commands, the only backup tool you need.
The rsync script syncs all my data to a second drive and then to an external VPS. The crux of the 3-2-1 backup strategy is in that last number – a backup must be off-site. If my only backup is on the same computer as the data it is mirroring, then a catastrophic event on the server means disaster for both drives and all copies of my files are gone. Offsite backup protects against that.
Isn’t it overkill to back up junk data?
Not all data deserves the same treatment
Many people would probably object to making backup copies of ripped movies. I understand that it seems like a waste of storage and bandwidth. That’s the kind of stance that made me avoid an endorsement in the first place. I can’t blame anyone for avoiding backing up their Plex library because they’re low on space, but I hope they at least keep a list of all the content they want to replace when they finally lose everything.
What changed my opinion about backup my media drive It was the realization that just because something is technically replaceable doesn’t mean it’s trivial to replace. Now, if something goes wrong, I have backups that I can restore from and everything is back up and running in a reasonable amount of time. Best of all, I don’t have the headache of cataloging everything I care about and I don’t need to search the web for reliable downloads of all the content I’m missing.
Backing up everything was the laziest (and best) solution
I now back up all my data indiscriminately and don’t plan to ever choose what is worth backing up or not. The hassle of reacquiring all my files that I take for granted is simply not worth it. With 3-2-1 backups, I no longer think about drive failures. That peace of mind is worth much more than the extra storage and rsync jobs it costs me.
