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“It’s a Silent Fire”: Decaying Digital Movie and TV Show Files Are a Hollywood Crisis
(www.hollywoodreporter.com)
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Funny how bittorrent solved this with a simple distributed hash algorithm...
I guess fuck using what works, amirite?
Pirates are unironically better digital stewards of content and history than media organizations.
I wish there was a good way to store a backup of my media. I recently suffered a terrible hard drive issue. I lost a terabyte of media. Fortunately, the pirate ship has saved me and has me rethinking some of my backup methodologies.
Outside of periodically backing up onto an external hard drive, I haven't been able to find a reasonably priced online backup solution that isn't going to fuck me when I have to pull data out. Egress fees are killer.
It's a lot of up front cost, but a NAS that is RAIDed with parity puts you in a pretty safe spot.
The short explanation is you have at minimum three drives, and you "stripe and span" them. This is a setup called RAID 5 where, if any one of the three drives fails, it can be replaced with a similar-sized drive and the "parity bits" from the other two drives can rebuild the data on the third drive. Yes, this means you only have the effective space of only two out of the three drives. So say you had 3x4TB drives, you'd have a total of 8TB to work with, and one drive is the "parity" drive (although this is actually split among the drives, so if any one fails, it can be revived by the other two).
However, in practice, the space lost is worth it for redundancy. It does mean an up-front cost in buying drives, a NAS enclosure (or using something like TrueNAS plus off the shelf parts to build your own), and includes the cost of physical maintenance and support (a Uninterruptible Power Supply to keep the hardware safe, for instance, on top of eventual maintenance of physical parts).
The offers the cloud solutions seem cheap up-front, but they don't buy you as much time as the one-time up-front cost of building your own NAS and maintaining it. I understand why people choose the cloud solutions, it's much easier. But if you're dedicated to this lifestyle, it's something worth looking into, at the very least.
Backblaze personal is $9 a month or $99 a year for unlimited backup. The first result on Amazon for a 4tb HDD is $85. Building a NAS costs the same as 2.5 years of this cloud backup for the drives alone, and doesn't actually give you a backup at all. The costs scale even more poorly if you need to store more than your 8tb.
https://www.raidisnotabackup.com/