Review: 24 TB add-on to your router for $99.78 (+disks)

[stevech]

with 4K video and Silly products like GoPro people will be amassing HUGE amounts of video data.

With no practical means of backup.

 

[azazel1024]

I think his point is less "I can't conceive of anyone EVER needing that much storage" than it is "I have a hard time figuring out how most typical people would need that much storage NOW".

My current storage needs are roughly 1.7TiB. Figuring my current rate of growth, in about 2 years, I'll need roughly 2.5TiB. In 4 years I'll need 3.1TiB and so on. That is predicated on 3 different factors though.

#1, I continue to mostly do 720p rips of my media collection*
#2, I do not posess a 4k TV (which ties in to #1)
#3, I do not purchase a new m4/3 camera and/or a newer higher resolution one doesn't come out

I think all 3 of those things are likely to prove invalid assumptions at some point. First, as I increase my storage pool and ability to back it up, as well as possibly/probably getting a newer tablet with storage and better networking, I'll likely transition to mostly 1080p rips if anything remotely seeming like it could benefit from it (and I'll probably go back and re-rip a lot of my collection to 1080p when I have some free time kicking around).

Second eventually will also probably prove to be untrue sometime. So that means more impetous for 1080p rips and if that 4k TV has a 4k BR player and 4k BR disks start becoming common, I'll probably be buying 4k BRs of newer releases and if 4k's get released of some older movies that I think might be really nice to have in 4k, that'll probably happen as well. 4k rips would be uncommon for me, because MAN does it take a lot of transcoding compute cycles (by my math, with my current quality settings in Handbrake, I'd encode at somewhere between 2-3FPS, which means around an entire DAY to transcode one movie...so something more powerful than my i5-3570 would be needed to do anything other than RARE 4k transcodes). Of course 1080p might be a common rip and sometimes 2k or rarely 4k might happen.

The 3rd assumption is deffinitely going to prove untrue at some point. Rumors of an Olympus E-M5 replacement sometime in the first half of next year abound and at this point it is likely to have both higher MP sensor, but also probably 1080p24/30/60 video and possibly 4k video as well. I don't do a lot of video (I am mostly a stills guy), but it doesn't mean I don't do any.


All of those will bump up my storage requirements and it could take my average of 25GiB a month and turn it easily in to 50-100GiB a month or more. So some day I could see needing a boat load of storage. My current 3TB max (I just dropped my 2x2TB array as it was aging and moving towards a 2x3TB array in both machines, but doing it slowly, just one 3TB disk in each machines for a couple of months) could tide me over for at least a year. A 2x3TB array likely could last me 5-6 years if I was even midly judicious. However, becasue of the changing nature of files, especially media, odds are excellent that what NOW could be 6 years of storage growth, could easily turn in to more like 2-3 years.

*This is in part a reluctance to suck up my limited storage as my desktop still has a limit of 2.5TB (about 2.2TiB) because it is running 2x1TB and a 500GB disk in it and it is also in part because my Asus T100 only has ~50GiB of storage between the internal and the micro SD card (yeah, sure I could easily get a 64GB card, no sweat), but also because the "crappy" 11n adapter in it tops out around 8-9MB/sec and frankly I'd rather sit there for 3-8 minutes transfering a movie rather than 6-16 minutes and I don't notice enough of a difference between 720p and 1080p transcodes most of the time to bother me much. Ideally I'd love it all to be 1080p, but the "hassles" right now aren't worth it.

 

[stevech]

I use a well backed-up NAS and really limit how much I store on a desktop.

 

[azazel1024]

My triple backup just saved my bacon. Migrating my server from old 2x2TB array to a 3TB disk (and eventually 2x3TB array when I have the money), I copied data from my desktop over, zero filled the old array and yanked it. Last night my wife mentioned she couldn't find some of her old pictures. Turns out I never had the data on my desktop for some crazy reason, but it HAD been on the server (and no more now, since I missed copying it over before zero filling the old array).

Fortunately it still resided on the USB drive, so populated to desktop and server now.

Otherwise I would have just written over our Honeymoon pictures, trip to England, all my wife's college and grad school pictures...

 

[htismaqe]

My triple backup just saved my bacon. Migrating my server from old 2x2TB array to a 3TB disk (and eventually 2x3TB array when I have the money), I copied data from my desktop over, zero filled the old array and yanked it. Last night my wife mentioned she couldn't find some of her old pictures. Turns out I never had the data on my desktop for some crazy reason, but it HAD been on the server (and no more now, since I missed copying it over before zero filling the old array).

Fortunately it still resided on the USB drive, so populated to desktop and server now.

Otherwise I would have just written over our Honeymoon pictures, trip to England, all my wife's college and grad school pictures...

Now that is what you call a TESTIMONIAL.

 

[stevech]

Good friend (non-geek) sad story. Lost 15 years of photos. She bought and used a USB external drive as backup. It had a head crash, I couldn't save it.

She said she got that to be the backup. So that if the Mac's drive failed or got a virus or whatever, she'd have a backup.

She didn't realize that the USB drive was the sole copy.

Obvious to us geeks. Not to the common real world person.

 

[azazel1024]

Well as above, sometimes even us Geeks can fall victim to "I thought I had it backed up". Of course in this case, the only reason I didn't have at least two copies is because I was shifting things between disks/arrays and admittedly, it should have been on my desktop as well. Part of the issue with the way I have backups running. That file folder that has all of my wife's/our very old pictures doesn't have any updates to it, so it isn't part of my backup/synch job, as it is static. Only folders that are dynamic, at least periodically, are setup to synch to save processing time/disk usage.

My bad. From now on, when I do a rebuild/transfer, what I am going to do is manually move folders and once I think everything is copied I'll do a one time whole disk backup/synch to ensure I didn't miss anything. Live and learn and fortunately this one didn't bite me at all.

 

[stevech]

In my NAS...
Automatic daily timed backup to 2nd drive in my two-bay. That drive is an independent volume/file system. Saved my buns many times.

Automatic daily backup of changed files to a USB3 2TB target. I don't backup folders containing backups (!).

VVIP folders on the NAS, like family photos and financial info (encrypted using SafeHouse Software) - are copied automatically to an SD card always in the NAS. In addition to the USB3 drive.

And I backup VVIP files manually to a USB OTG flash drive in my pocket - can plug into my Android phone's OTG.

And files I want to share and none of my financial/private, I put on OpenDrive.com. Been using that for years, and only in the last 1-2 years has it matured to a reliable service. Better than iDrive in many ways. I don't need/use Carbonite, Dropbox, and all that.

 

[azazel1024]

One of the things my brother and I are working on setting up is an SFTP connection (actually, already have that running) and a reserved partition on each other's servers to store our critical data remotely for a just in case. The issue both of us have is that we don't have enough spare storage space yet. At least not until I expand my array and until he replaces his drives.

Fortunately he also just moved to a new place a few months ago with a much faster connection (still 50Mbps down, but 10Mbps up instead of 5Mbps that he used to have. I think he is getting real world speeds of 51/12 (before it was 46/4.5)). It'll help him out a heck of a lot with backups

 

[stevech]

One of the things my brother and I are working on setting up is an SFTP connection (actually, already have that running) and a reserved partition on each other's servers to store our critical data remotely for a just in case.

Another option, better than STFP.. .CrashPlan freeware for peer to peer backups. Good stuff.

 

[htismaqe]

Another option, better than STFP.. .CrashPlan freeware for peer to peer backups. Good stuff.

Yeah, an intermediate peer-to-peer service conserves a little upstream bandwidth at both ends, so it works a little better than straight SFTP.

 

[stevech]

Yeah, an intermediate peer-to-peer service conserves a little upstream bandwidth at both ends, so it works a little better than straight SFTP.

My experience is that many FTP/SFTP servers fail to preserve file attributes across operating systems and file system types, e.g., date last modified, date created, NTFS/FAT/NFS, etc.

 

[htismaqe]

My experience is that many FTP/SFTP servers fail to preserve file attributes across operating systems and file system types, e.g., date last modified, date created, NTFS/FAT/NFS, etc.

That's an issue not only with transfer protocols but also operating and filesystems. I'm not even sure all of the possible scenarios where timestamps can get screwed up. And then you have metadata, like music and video files, which are also susceptible.

 

[azazel1024]

Metadata isn't necessarily as bad as that is often actually written in to the file itself, instead of being part of the filesystem data. At least with certain types of files. The time stamping isn't necessarily the end. I know some synching/backup/versioning programs actually granualar enough info (for example, the new time stamp on the target system as well as the time stamp on the original system) to know when/if something needs to be updated.

 

[htismaqe]

Metadata isn't necessarily as bad as that is often actually written in to the file itself, instead of being part of the filesystem data.

Yeah, that's why I said it's OS and FS dependent. It's not usually an issue but there are certain combinations (e.g. OS X with FTP) where it can be.

The time stamping isn't necessarily the end. I know some synching/backup/versioning programs actually granualar enough info (for example, the new time stamp on the target system as well as the time stamp on the original system) to know when/if something needs to be updated.

The sync program I use can actually do binary comparisons between files in addition to full versioning. Choice of backup/sync software is pretty important I think in preventing issues down the road. Unfortunately, I'm not completely "up" on all the ins and outs. I have no idea how the average consumer could ever deal with it all.

 

[azazel1024]

Yeah, that's why I said it's OS and FS dependent. It's not usually an issue but there are certain combinations (e.g. OS X with FTP) where it can be.



The sync program I use can actually do binary comparisons between files in addition to full versioning. Choice of backup/sync software is pretty important I think in preventing issues down the road. Unfortunately, I'm not completely "up" on all the ins and outs. I have no idea how the average consumer could ever deal with it all.

The answer to your last...by not dealing with it.

Same way most typical consumers of most things deal with things "pretty label, I should buy it".

I am arrogant enough to think I am never like that. Then I remember that I do that with plenty of things in life (wine, which I have no clue and not a huge taste for, clothes, etc. Tech, cars, tools, etc it certainly isn't the case...but I have the inclination and background to either know, or do the proper research).