this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2026
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Hello!! Some recent technical problems on my family's NAS gave me a big scare and finally pushed me to figure out a way to back it all up. I'm asking here specifically because I really don't know where to even starts because of the fact I've got just under 50 terabytes worth of data stored in a 7-disk RAID-5 and would prefer to keep it cheap. What are your suggestions?

Edit: thank you for all the suggestions, I'll probably be considering using Backblaze for backups, or perhaps seeing if I can scrounge up old unused disks from people I know. Thank you all again <3

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[–] roofuskit@lemmy.world 54 points 16 hours ago (5 children)

How much of that 50 terabytes is media downloaded from the Internet? Because the cheapest way would be to trust that it's already backed up on the Internet and then use one of the usual services like B2 by Backblaze or Storagebox by Hetzner to back the rest of it up.

[–] Inkstainthebat@pawb.social 1 points 1 hour ago

It's kinda complicated because a good chunk of that is data that is technically redownloadable, but has been tweaked (most of my movies are a multiplexed high-res eng version merged with audio from lower-res dub.) Either way, thank you for the suggestions

[–] i_stole_ur_taco@lemmy.ca 34 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

This is a good compromise. When I was tight on backup space, I just had a “backup” script that ran nightly and wrote all the media file names to a text file and pushed that to my backup.

It would mean tons of redownloading if my storage array failed, but it was preferable to spending hundreds of dollars I didn't have on new hardware.

[–] roofuskit@lemmy.world 21 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

If you back up the modern day Arrs databases then it's essentially the same thing and already built into the software that will redownload them for you. That's my solution. I backup my backups of those, of my home assistant, my Immich library, my Nextcloud, etc... Pirated media is, for the most part, out there backed up on several places already.

[–] Zikeji@programming.dev 6 points 15 hours ago

This is what I do - well, I back up there entire container. But functionally the same.

There's only a few pieces of media that I have backed up manually due to their rarity, but even those I don't really care about.

[–] morto@piefed.social 12 points 14 hours ago (3 children)

But... can we trust that we will have stuff available on the internet in the future?

[–] BootLoop@sh.itjust.works 9 points 14 hours ago

All my TV shows and movies, I don't bother. But my 150gb mp3 library I keep backed up because it's much smaller and I know some of that stuff is not readily available online.

[–] bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 6 points 13 hours ago

Exactly. Regimes want to kill this as fast as they can to milk us of every penny witghr their shitty services. I dont trust any sites will stay up.

[–] kumi@feddit.online 4 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

You can replicate across more than one provider and do automated regular monitoring that backups are still accessible.

If one goes down you hopefully have time to figure out a replacment before the other(s) do.

Probably not worth it for a bunch of xvid dvdrips or historical archives of full system-level backups but for critical data it's sensible.

[–] RamRabbit@lemmy.world 13 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

Yeah, if 90% of that is movies/shows, then you really don't need a backup of that as you can always re-download it. Then you have a 5TB backup problem which is much cheaper to solve.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 3 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Because the cheapest way would be to trust that it’s already backed up on the Internet

That's a shit load of downloading. LOL wow!

[–] roofuskit@lemmy.world 12 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (1 children)

I have 45TB of data and the majority of that is definitely downloaded media. They call us data hoarders for a reason.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 5 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Oh sure I understand data hoarding. I was just thinking, to restore 50 tb from the internet is going to take more than a fortnight.

[–] roofuskit@lemmy.world 13 points 15 hours ago

It's literally downloading the same amount of data you would be backing up, and you won't be charged hourly for downloading it from the internet as opposed to a large storage service.