Hi, I am having a difficult time figuring out how to approach building a media server. As much as this sub preaches backing up, I assumed that having at least one backup would be a no-brainer. However, I’ve seen the idea floated that media servers filled with content downloaded from the internet shouldn’t be backed up, as it’s not worth it, and if/when you suffer data loss, you just make sure to have kept a manifesto of what you have downloaded and go back to redownload everything. This could be made easier with something like Radarr and Sonarr. But still, I feel like once I’ve downloaded something, why wouldn’t I safeguard it? So the three ways forward I see are as follows:
Use a cloud backup provider like Backblaze. The biggest con is that redownloading all the data would be slow, and take a long time.
Use RAID 1. I’m not sure I’d actually want to use RAID, I might just literally copy every download to both drives, because RAID seems not user friendly and also once you do it you’re kinda locked in place. But either way, people say that RAID isn’t actually a backup, and more of a way to prevent downtime. Which I don’t care about (that much) for like a personal media server.
No backups. When I lose data, just try to redownload everything.
I’m sure people here have massive media servers, so I’m interested in seeing if/how you guys back them up. Thank you in advance for your useful input!