Comment Re:Directories (Score 1) 356
" I see this as adequate “backup” for stuff that is replaceable (the large portion of my media is rips of DVDs I own... so although it would be a huge pain in the ass to re-rip them all... it’s not impossible)"
RAID is NOT a backup solution. Ever. I have twice (once on RAID 6 and once on RAID 5) had logical device filesystem issues that were completely unrelated to any particular physical drive, and could not therefore be fixed by replacing one or more drives.
You think that your media rips are replaceable, but with "about 6TB of data" (most of which is likely to be video content I assume) I assure you that when your drive fails and you're faced with re-ripping them, you'll find that "theoretically replaceable" is not the same as "feasibly replaceable".
Oh, and BTW if you do decide to continue without backups (or even if you do create backups) I recommend running a torrent client (even if not connected to the internet) as a way of creating and managing checksums for files - torrents are a great way to identify file corruption. I had a RAID failure where about 30% of my files lost random parts of their data, and having torrents for those files really would have helped! (no way of knowing what video file is corrupt and what's not otherwise except by watching it all).
Yes, there are other ways to calculate checksums, but torrents are easy, visual etc. In fact, torrents in general would probably have been a better solution than ripping (provided you own the DVDs!!) because then the torrent client would have just identified any inconsistencies and re-downloaded those parts of those files where corruption had occurred, thereby avoiding having to go through the soul-destroying process of trying to manually check and identify what had been corrupted and re-ripping / converting the entire file in each case.
RAID is NOT a backup solution. Ever. I have twice (once on RAID 6 and once on RAID 5) had logical device filesystem issues that were completely unrelated to any particular physical drive, and could not therefore be fixed by replacing one or more drives.
You think that your media rips are replaceable, but with "about 6TB of data" (most of which is likely to be video content I assume) I assure you that when your drive fails and you're faced with re-ripping them, you'll find that "theoretically replaceable" is not the same as "feasibly replaceable".
Oh, and BTW if you do decide to continue without backups (or even if you do create backups) I recommend running a torrent client (even if not connected to the internet) as a way of creating and managing checksums for files - torrents are a great way to identify file corruption. I had a RAID failure where about 30% of my files lost random parts of their data, and having torrents for those files really would have helped! (no way of knowing what video file is corrupt and what's not otherwise except by watching it all).
Yes, there are other ways to calculate checksums, but torrents are easy, visual etc. In fact, torrents in general would probably have been a better solution than ripping (provided you own the DVDs!!) because then the torrent client would have just identified any inconsistencies and re-downloaded those parts of those files where corruption had occurred, thereby avoiding having to go through the soul-destroying process of trying to manually check and identify what had been corrupted and re-ripping / converting the entire file in each case.
