Advice needed for online needle drop storage

I have lots and lots of needle drops I have done. They represent the main way I listen to my collection, and they also represent thousands of hours of work. I have a number of hard drives to store them all - RAID drives, SSD's, etc. However, my fear is that I will have a drive failure and lose everything on it. I am dealing with a RAID setup now that appears to be dying.

I'm not a network expert, and I am not wealthy enough to pay a small fortune in initial costs.

I looked at online storage as an option, as I assume they are backed up off-site in case of failure in one location (is this true?). I probably need 3-4TB, although I'll need more and more as I do more 'dropping. Something like a DropBox account...

I need to be sure of 2 things in my selection:

1. I need a company that will be in business for years. I don't want my vendor to close it's doors suddenly because I'll lose everything.

2. I need to be sure they won't remove my files because they are "copywrited material". I am not looking to file share from here - just need a safe place to store my files.

The ability to access these files from anywhere is appealing to me, but not a requirement.

Any suggestions?

 

Backblaze $60 a year unlimited. They provide the backup software

Or just get a 12TB (or more) raid, and set it up for RAID1 (mirroring). That way if one drive goes, you have a full copy. And you get 6TB storage.

No one can really guarantee any of the other stuff you are asking for. Of course any large company is going to survive or get bought out. And pretty unlikely they will scan your files.

EDIT. As an afterthought, check for people who offer PGP encryption as a built in option. Or you could encrypt all you files and then have them backed up. I have not investigated this yet myself so cannot advise.

 

I don't understand the problem with RAID situation. Replace the HDDs. A larger hard drive today is going to be a lot less expensive than what you paid for your current HDDs. Swap the out drive and allow the raid to recreate the mirror. When that's done recreate the 2nd mirror. Then go into disk utilities and resize the partitions. If the actually NAS is failing, get a new NAS then copy over the files.

I get backup. A RAID isn't a backup. It's redundancy. A backup would be stored offsite to prevent ultimate catastrophic data loss. I have my NAS setup with 3 HDDs. I can swap out the 3rd HDD to create another redundant copy of my data. I put mine in a fireproof safe at my home. No it's not going to protect against data loss if my home gets hit by an asteroid. But, it will protect against double HDD failure which I'm more concerned about. If the house gets hit by an asteroid. I promise you, I'm not going to worry about data loss. I have other problems to deal with.

Of course you could look to upload to a cloud service. But, if you have an IP that limit your data usage, are you willing to take the hit for the data upload? It's probably not going to be much. But it's something to consider. You might be able to upgrade the service for more upload data at a lower cost than paying going over your data limit.

 

I've had good luck with Transcend external hard drives. Very dependable. I also found that as the technology improves, it pays off to get new ones every few years and transfer the important files to them.

Regarding your system, I hope those RAIDs hold out. If they seem to be going, remember: You'll have a minute to pray, but they'll take a second to die. (If this is the real Chris D., you'll get that.)

 

I would just use backup redundancy. Have at least two to three separate drives with one stored in a separate location in case of fire / flood / etc ...
I have about 2TB of digital music and have had it going for about the past 15 years over the course of 3 or 4 drive failures. I just make sure I have multiple backups. I currently use three but would probably feel safer with the fourth in another location.

I would imagine a 3-4 tb online solution will be very expensive.

I quickly looked into backblaze and although it sounds great at first I wouldn't use it for something like this because they have data retention policies that would make me nervous that my stuff is really safe. (i.e. if a drive is disconnected after thirty days data is deleted). backblaze really seems like a computer backup program not a true data backup.

 

Backblaze. Your only problem us uploading all that data. Better to keep your own backups.

 

Are you dealing with RAID featuring redundancy specifically for this scenario? My NAS had a hard drive failure but because of the redundancy, I didn't lose anything. Slapped another one in and away I went.

No, it's not ultimately a true backup but if you have redundancy, then it shouldn't be that problematic if one single HD dies. However, if your RAID array is dying, that's a whole other matter.

Personally, these backup companies don't seem to have much staying power so I wouldn't put that much faith into their staying power. You can subscribe to one so if one backup strategy doesn't work out (such as a dead RAID array), the other is there. Just don't expect any one of these companies to remain afloat forever. So I'd always have a RAID array or NAS physically at home with all the data.

Alternatively, you can have two NASes with a backup solution so the contents are continuously mirrored. They'd both have to be located in different environments. Chances of both NASes being compromised simultaneously (fire, theft, etc) are microscopic at best.

 

I'd just get a few large USB hard drives and setup a regular backup regimen. A tool which I have found to be invaluable for making sure that my backup drives always contain all of the latest versions of my files is Microsoft's SyncToy, which is a free download which I highly recommend for manual backup regimens.

Then just store one of these backup drives at the office so that if your house should burn down, you will still have all of your music.

 

You really should have an offsite set of your stuff. I do Raid-5 NAS with a 8TB Ext USB connected to it which I run a sync job from the NAS to it. I also use a Degoo account 10TB cloud storage that was 99.00/year. The software so far is really simple.

You could skip the cloud backup and take a snapshot of your data sysncd to a USB drive. Take that to a relative's house or somewhere offsite and then do differentials and take those offsite

 

While I don't have nearly as many files, I think this is a good long-term solution:

Consider Microsoft Office 365 annual subscription. You get 6 accounts, each with 1TB of storage. While you can't aggregate the 6TB, you can have 6 email addresses assigned to the same subscription. You'd have to split your needle drops up into folders <1TB. BUT, Microsoft/Azure storage is about as good as it gets. Price is very reasonable for 6TB.

 

I’ll hold onto copies for you

 

@Chris Desjardin Also, you can use O365 OneDrive storage just like a network drive(s). At least I can on a Mac, especially if I use the free app CloudMounter.

You'll see network drives #1-6 next your local drives, each with 1TB of storage... just drag and drop!

 

I’m using google drive to back up all my audio files these days- a few guys I work with signed up together for a google drive business account, so we now have unlimited cloud storage for $60 a year through them.
My files are all on an old synology NAS so I use the built in hyperbackup software on the nas to backup to google daily.
Initial backup of about 18 terabytes took 4 months or so with the backup running 24/7. Hyperbackup encrypts the files before they hit google, so no worries about copyright issues.

 

The cloud (somebody else's computer) is a preposterous idea for this much data. You might be able to trickle out your data over months, but when it's time to recover 4 TB, oops, you have a 1TB per month download cap on your cable modem service.

Cloud providers have no liability when the data turns out to be unrecoverable - or oops, they lost 10 years of everybody's music uploads during a server upgrade, or they find it unprofitable, or just go out of business. There are just too many examples of this for one not to have learned. Go ahead, try and find the customer service phone number, and give them a call like you need your data back. The fine print is likely online.

4TB external drive; it's yours, you can loan it to your relative to share your music collection and ask for it back if the worst happens.

 

If you have a cap then cloud backups obviously would not be a good fit.

As for cloud storage companies losing your data, you have as much reason to worry about that as an external drive becoming corrupted.

 

I mirror a pair of 6TB drives nightly. In addition to that, I backup the primary with another 6TB drive bi-weekly that goes into a fireproof safe. You could even add a fourth drive offsite that you could backup less frequently. The HDD cost would be lower than subscription cloud storage. Plus, I'm assuming like me you are dropping at 24/96 or higher which takes pushing a lot of updates to the cloud more time consuming.