Cheapest way to physically back up 15TB

[rando]

Not sure how this is still lacking a solution.  Buy the correct amount of hard drives that allows spreading the files across them at roughly 85% capacity to satisfy local backup.  If cost and/or internet speed make cloud storage an unassailable hurdle.  Double the number of hard drives and put them in your safe deposit box, a relatives house, or anywhere else you deem safe which offers access in a reasonable amount of time if needed.  

 

11 hours ago, PhilR said:

Not a bad price. How long do you think uploading/downloading 15TB of data through them would take on a typical 25Mbps home connection?

 

This is gold.  Picturing infarction and uncontrollable laughter fighting for prominence internally at your residential internet provider.  At 25 Mbps the monthly cap can't be above 500 GB/month.  On top of that you aren't going to see anywhere near full speed even before they start throttling your connection after maybe a half a day.  

[R1200CL]

10 hours ago, rando said:

At 25 Mbps the monthly cap can't be above 500 GB/month.

 

Is it normal to have limitations like that in the US ?

Doesn't exist here. We have on cell phone of cause. Where the theoretical speed is max 450 mbps at the moment. Everyone has access to full speed.

 

10 hours ago, rando said:

On top of that you aren't going to see anywhere near full speed even before they start throttling your connection after maybe a half a day.  

 

That you can monitor  and complain about. Should not be an issue.

https://emcosoftware.com/ping-monitor

 

[rando]

Incredibly common on the first count.  Besides, at his current speed it would be quite a task to work, eat, and internet enough to break 500 GB/month with normal use.  Cells normally top out with an unlimited data plan. 

 

Throttling, or service interruptions, are a tricky issue less related to this thread.  I only mention it as a warning if that after years of predictable patterns his connections suddenly spikes it will trigger some alarms.  Needless to say large corporations can be very deaf to consumer complaints and very aware of how to increase their own bottom line.

[jamesg11]

On 07/01/2018 at 11:08 PM, rando said:

Double the number of hard drives and put them in your safe deposit box, a relatives house, or anywhere else you deem safe which offers access in a reasona

I put my backups - of everything necessary  - in my wine cellar hire locale ie. external to home. Have done for 2 decades, & at a certain point, music files were in the mix.

Might look into these Seagate drives.

[rando]

A dark temperature and humidity controlled space would be ideal even before you account for the security features of a high value storage vault.  

 

Keep in mind that even within a line the different storage sizes could vary widely in how well they perform for a given duty.  1-2 TB v 8-16 TB 3.5" drives heat management for example

 

The unspoken side of cloud storage is what they do with your data.  Or at least how it differs from data which is intended to be accessed.  Getting that full 15 TB back out would be an adventure worthy of another thread.  

[Ron Scubadiver]

I used to have a 300 GB limit.  Never broke it, but I had to be careful.  Now it's 1000.

[R1200CL]

@PhilR

Have you made a conclusion?

[PhilR]

22 hours ago, R1200CL said:

@PhilR

Have you made a conclusion?

 

Will be picking up 4 of the inexpensive 8TB drives to make two separate copies of my library for offsite storage. Not quite as convenient as a separate NAS, but I'll pay half the price to spend a few more minutes creating the backups.  I can't imagine the time it would take to do a full backup to/from cloud storage with that many TB. Who knows, maybe in two years we will have 20TB thumb drives..

 

Thanks all for the help & ideas!

[Audio_ELF]

On 17/10/2017 at 12:51 AM, PhilR said:

Between music, video, and photo files, my Synology 1515+ NAS is approaching 15TB. I was using a few WD 4TB portable hard drives to create backups, but would like a one-unit solution that is cheap enough to have a couple physical backup copies of the library off site. So far, the best solution I have come across is a WD 16TB RAID External Hard Drive for $599 on Amazon:

 

 

Back to the original post...

 

The problem with things like this WD dual drive setup can be that you often have little to no control over how the drives are formatted.  If you can access each drive separately then yes go for this, if it’s forced into RAID0 striped or other method to see both drives as one, then you are reliant on the drive array to read the data and if this fails you are stuck.  Individual drives, either cased or uncased, are best for backup though you do then have some management to keep the backup size to below 8TB (vs 16TB overall).