Who said that 2 TB would be enough!!??

[protokatie]

Well, my file server with its 2 1TB drives is now full (well 45GB free on each). Can't believe it took me only 6 months to fill, but I did. And no, I do not have just "random crap" on them either, this is stuff I want to keep (I named the drives Archive and Archive2 to drive that point home). I found another good deal on 2 new 1TB HDs to add to my storage so I should be able to stave off the data needs for another (year, I hope) bit of time.

Anyways, not bragging, but wondering what other board members have dealt with when it comes to your NAS/fileserver systems. Did you start out with a single 500GB drive thinking it would last? Or maybe a 1TB or 1.5 TB drive (or RAID of 2) and think it would be so massive you would never need any more space?

Like I said, I am not bragging, I am simply boggled at the fact I could fill up TB's of space simply because I have it as a NAS type setup. I guess I felt like I had a datacenter in my house like I was at IBM HQ. Does this kind of mindset make one just go and get whatever they want? (yep..). I remember when I had some pretty decent HD sizes, but they weren't NAS/fileserver and I would be really careful about how much I would put on them (and would even delete (gasp)).

New theory, the trend of setting up home NAS/fileserver systems is the new way for HD makers to drive up sales!!!

/rant off

[danny_galaga]

No one? 

[patrickl]

There are people who fill their whole house with newspapers they feel the need to "archive". Does that mean their house is too small?

I seriously doubt you have 2TB of stuff that you actually really need to keep. Just throw away old movies/tv episodes that you have seen already. You won't watch them again anyway.

[crashwg]

I've got to agree with you on that Patrickl...  For over a year I thought it would be good idea to copy every movie that came through my house.  Now I have a case full of 200 some odd DVDs, of which I might watch 20 again.  I wish it weren't illegal to sell them (not that it's not to own them) or I'd sell them all off for like less than $100 just to get them out of here.

[drventure]

Yeah, I'd say there's likely a lot there that you don't really +need+ to keep but just want to hang on to.

After archiving ALL my CD's, albums (some old and non-existent on vinyl, boy that was a chore) and tapes, I ended up with about 35gb. I don't generally watch movies more than once, so i don't bother copying rental dvd's etc. The biggest space hog for me is Mame and VMWare (as a developer, I have a PILE of Virtual Machines laying about).

Before Mame, 4 drive 240gb raid server was plenty (although a little tight with the VM's), but now, a 500gb nas isn't enough. But a 2tb server would do me for at least several years.

I will say this though. Upgrading my Tivo from 40 to 320gb was one of the best things I've done. Tivo suggestions rocks. Now If I could scare up the funds for a Tivo HD 

[J_K_M_A_N]

I remember when I got my 10 meg MFM hard drive. That's right, MEG. I thought I was set for life. Of course that was back on the IBM XT with green screen and DOS. Now I have about 3 TB of space and I am not full yet but I had to add 1TB recently to get to 3. I will agree with patrickl and crashwg, I could delete about 300-400 gigs easy and be fine with that but, I like to keep it all. I don't think I will add any more space to my setup though. If I get to that point, I will delete some stuff.

We do rewatch many TV shows and movies though. I have about 250+ movies we haven't seen yet but we still rewatch others instead.

J_K_M_A_N

[Haterot]

I am approaching about 40% filled of a 2.9TB. I have 4 1TB drives in Raid5 running on FreeNAS, which all the systems in the house can access. When I do fill those up I'll just replace the case it's in, get another raid card and add 4 more drives, probably 2TB drive by that time.

Can NEVER have enough storage.

[SavannahLion]

Sometimes it's just a chore to purge the drives. No matter how well organized I make a drive, there are still files that get buried so deep I would completely forget about them. I'm working on a HDD now and I found archival files from some of my old websites that I've completely forgot I created them. It was weird looking through old school papers, source code, databases, etc. I even found old videos like Troops, Star Wars Kid, and Jack Schitt before they were ruined and bastardized by crap like YouTube.

At some point, there's such an accumulation of data that a purge just doesn't seem worthwhile anymore. Much easier to buy a larger drive and keep going.

[patrickl]

At some point, there's such an accumulation of data that a purge just doesn't seem worthwhile anymore. Much easier to buy a larger drive and keep going.

You can use something like SequoiaView or WindirStat.

If it's old there is not much use purging it anyway. Old files tend to be small enough. Its the multiple GB files for DVD ISO's and BlueRay movies that fill a disk up fast.

[Epyx]

Most tv shows and movies never get watched again...the problem is that there are some series I will watch over and over again...Dr. Who (30 seasons worth), Star Trek seasons (32 seasons worth), Stargate/Atlantis (16 seasons)...those alone are nearly a terrabyte...then there are the games...

[SavannahLion]

At some point, there's such an accumulation of data that a purge just doesn't seem worthwhile anymore. Much easier to buy a larger drive and keep going.

You can use something like SequoiaView or WindirStat.

  I've been using Sequia and WDS for a long long time. I feel the analytical properties could be further refined, but they serve their purpose. Generally, I use it in combination with diff to find duplicate files (MP3's typically) and a collection of custom programs to analyze the contents across multiple drives and OSes.

In the end my statement still stands, sometimes it's just easier to buy a larger drive.

[protokatie]

Most tv shows and movies never get watched again...the problem is that there are some series I will watch over and over again...Dr. Who (30 seasons worth), Star Trek seasons (32 seasons worth), Stargate/Atlantis (16 seasons)...those alone are nearly a terrabyte...then there are the games...

For me it is like: Torchwood, StarTrek, Red Dwarf, and MST3k.  MST3k is like 135 GB and there is no way I would get rid of it. I have deleted some TV series that I watched once, but the ones I really like I want to keep around, esp for a rainy day (Like say, maybe tomorrow will be Sliders days or flip a coin on if it is the UK or US Life on Mars day). It isn't the movies that take up space (most are less than a gig) its the TVseries, and some of them are hard to find and or have not been released even tho the show has been off the air for a decade.

Oh well, I just ordered another 2 TB, which I do not think I will fill up any where near as fast, as I have pretty much all of the old favorite TV series I wanted, so the extra space is for new stuff as it comes up the pipe.

For those promoting deletion, bear in mind, I do not have TV service, so my file server IS my TV service.

[SavannahLion]

some of them are hard to find and or have not been released even tho the show has been off the air for a decade.

I know what you mean. I've been trying to track down episodes of Hawaii Five-O and Wild Wild West for months now.

[Thenasty]

some of them are hard to find and or have not been released even tho the show has been off the air for a decade.

I know what you mean. I've been trying to track down episodes of Hawaii Five-O and Wild Wild West for months now.

I've love to see an episode of  "Space 1999". Dunno if anyone remembers this.


I have (3) 1.5Tb HD. All 3 a identical in data. I'd kill myself if 3 of them GO BAD ON ME. This drives are only TURN on once I need to copy/dup the MASTER, then it goes off.

 I lost major DATA once and can't aford to do it again.

I remember having 20MB MFM drive also. Matter of fack I still have it installed in my IBM 5150 LAPTOP.

[danny_galaga]

I remember when I got my 10 meg MFM hard drive. That's right, MEG. I thought I was set for life. Of course that was back on the IBM XT with green screen and DOS. Now I have about 3 TB of space and I am not full yet but I had to add 1TB recently to get to 3. I will agree with patrickl and crashwg, I could delete about 300-400 gigs easy and be fine with that but, I like to keep it all. I don't think I will add any more space to my setup though. If I get to that point, I will delete some stuff.

We do rewatch many TV shows and movies though. I have about 250+ movies we haven't seen yet but we still rewatch others instead.

J_K_M_A_N

my hard drive wouldn't actually HOLD the 300-400 G you could easily get rid of. Even my pr0n collection fits on my half full 160 g Drive

[drventure]

Anyone use any of those "online" backup services for offsite backup?

I was considering mozie, but then discovered that it can't see network drives for backup purposes (even if they're mapped). Since I don't generally keep "data" type stuff on my local drive, that kills it for me.

And the "pro" subscription is a tad too pricey to wade into now.

Any others that warrant a mention?

[protokatie]

I've love to see an episode of  "Space 1999". Dunno if anyone remembers this.

Wow, forgot totally about that show. Thanx for reminding me. I should be able to start watching the whole series by tomorrow afternoon!

That also reminds me to delete "Space Above and Beyond"... Ugh... Just... Ugh...

[SavannahLion]

Anyone use any of those "online" backup services for offsite backup?

I was considering mozie, but then discovered that it can't see network drives for backup purposes (even if they're mapped). Since I don't generally keep "data" type stuff on my local drive, that kills it for me.

And the "pro" subscription is a tad too pricey to wade into now.

Any others that warrant a mention?

Hack-A-Day featured a mention of Blackblaze. I checked out Blackblazes site and they charge $5/month unlimited storage. Not sure of the details though.

[SavannahLion]

Oh wait... Blackblaze doesn't back up network data. That would kill it for you too.

Well... anyone want to do a group buy on their $8,000 NAS? Maybe we can build and design our own 67TB storage server and run it through arcadecontrols.com. Hey, you never know, I'm sure Randy or Andy could add the multiplier backplanes to their product lineup and someone could sell custom Arcadecontrols cases in BST. 

[patrickl]

For those promoting deletion, bear in mind, I do not have TV service, so my file server IS my TV service.

I mostly watch downloaded stuff too. I have a 1 TB disk in the "Popcorn Hour A110" and it downloads TV episodes and HD movies. When the disk starts to get filled up I clean it up. Movies I tend to delete right after I watched them.

If I ever want something back again I simply download it again.

Sure if you want to keep everything (or a lot of things) then you will quickly run out of space. That's not much of a surprise then. I filled that TB disk in a few months.

[J_K_M_A_N]

some of them are hard to find and or have not been released even tho the show has been off the air for a decade.

I know what you mean. I've been trying to track down episodes of Hawaii Five-O and Wild Wild West for months now.

I wish I could find the one season of Greetings from Tucson. I have 1 episode.

I do have the 1 season of That 80's Show though. Took forever to find. I have that backed up on another drive. We watch it about once a year.

J_K_M_A_N

[Haterot]

my hard drive wouldn't actually HOLD the 300-400 G you could easily get rid of. Even my pr0n collection fits on my half full 160 g Drive

So 80gigs, you call that a collection? That's maybe like a weekend., hardly a collection. 

[DaOld Man]

There was a TV series that came on in the mid 70's, when I was in high school, about alien invaders coming to earth to kidnap humans, and a secret moon base operation whose job it was to stop them before they got to earth.
I think it was called "UFO", anyone remember this series?

I remember the special effects were cheesy, but not really bad for that era, and the tight outfits the girls wore, well, for a male teen in the 70's, that made it much more interesting.

I wouldnt mind getting a few episodes of that show.

[drventure]

Looks like it +WAS+ UFO

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_%28TV_series%29

I was thinking it might be Space 1999, but the two shows were appearently done by the same people.

I'll have to see if I can find UFO now. I'm curious! I loved Space 1999.

[DaOld Man]

I just read the wiki on it, and it was early 70's not mid.
The wiki also said the episodes were released on DVD, but I dont remember seeing the DVD in stores.

[SavannahLion]

I just read the wiki on it, and it was early 70's not mid.
The wiki also said the episodes were released on DVD, but I dont remember seeing the DVD in stores.

They release an assload of DVD's. Most of the time they're reauthored and butchered. eg As bad as some Quantum Leap episodes are, the lack of desire to renegotiate for the music caused the studio to re-dub the shows with different music. Caught me by surprise when I was hearing different music.

Some shows just deserve to be on DVD, I've been after Gummi Bears for a long time and my step daughter discovered my 80's collection of movies. We just watched Flight of the Navigator twice.

[NiN^_^NiN]

I just read the wiki on it, and it was early 70's not mid.
The wiki also said the episodes were released on DVD, but I dont remember seeing the DVD in stores.

They release an assload of DVD's. Most of the time they're reauthored and butchered. eg As bad as some Quantum Leap episodes are, the lack of desire to renegotiate for the music caused the studio to re-dub the shows with different music. Caught me by surprise when I was hearing different music.

I got quantum leap on dvd down here and love the series but we got all the original music same as europe it was only America form what i have seen.

As for harddrives i've got quite a few usb hdd full of movies and others full of tv shows and i tend to keep all the movies i ever get and im pretty good with most movies id prob watch them again so i wouldnt say im wasting the harddrive space per say.

My tv shows are huge cause i've got MST3k on it and thats a pretty huge torrent for a tv show

I've got about 4gb worth of harddrive and have about 300gb of space left all up but i don't have them in any type of raid format which is sad cause i've lost 2 hdd already with lots of movies

[Ummon]

I wish I could find the one season of Greetings from Tucson. I have 1 episode.

There's such a show with that name?  First an SUV, then a freaking TV show. Who'da thunk?

[protokatie]

My tv shows are huge cause i've got MST3k on it and thats a pretty huge torrent for a tv show

I've got about 4gb worth of harddrive and have about 300gb of space left all up but i don't have them in any type of raid format which is sad cause i've lost 2 hdd already with lots of movies

@ MST3k      Did you get any of the season 0 eps too? Those a fun to watch. (IE, before they went nationwide)

4gb of harddrives? 4TB maybe?

Also, I dont have my drives in a RAID, but I wrote a few small batch files that handle backups and logging for me (Lists all the files copied in a txt file named for the day of the week). The reason I shied away from RAID is that yes it does backup data as redundant (RAID1) but if you accidentally delete a file, you lose the backup as well. I have my "primary" drive(s) set up fro sharing and the backup drives just for local access to the fileserver (which is headless, so must be accessed via Logmein.). (good thing I went this way too, as one of my roomates accidentally deleted some files while browsing the fileserver!)

[boykster]

I digitize all of my media.  I started several years ago with a 300gig RAID5 array built from small drives.  Upgraded to about 2.5Tb spread over a couple of arrays, and now I have a 10Tb RAID5 array built from 12 1Tb drives - and thats about 60% full right now.

[protokatie]

I digitize all of my media.  I started several years ago with a 300gig RAID5 array built from small drives.  Upgraded to about 2.5Tb spread over a couple of arrays, and now I have a 10Tb RAID5 array built from 12 1Tb drives - and thats about 60% full right now.

Query; how do you protect against accidental deletion? An undelete tool, or a tool to lock writing/deletion of the files? I would like to do RAID, but I am worried about accidental deletion (hence why I went with a backup strategy)

[boykster]

I don't really worry about accidental deletes all that much.  I have the volume shared out using samba so that the client machines see 3 seperate drives.  2 of the drives are for digital media and are shared out as read only.  For the share that is used for documents/software, its read/write, but I do incremental bu on those files.

If I lose digital media files (movies/music) my original media is the backup and I can always re-rip them.

[danny_galaga]

my hard drive wouldn't actually HOLD the 300-400 G you could easily get rid of. Even my pr0n collection fits on my half full 160 g Drive

So 80gigs, you call that a collection? That's maybe like a weekend., hardly a collection. 

It's amazing how little space ASCII pr0n takes 

[NiN^_^NiN]

Yeah i got whats called the KTMA era which is before they got big but there are a few episodes missing that no one has.

A friend put me onto mst3k and i love it to bits there are a few movies that were only barely watchable because of the jokes the guys made but when it's a bad bad movie and the quality isn't good then it gets boring but there are very few that are like that.

I'm still watching them slowly im still watching joel still haven't gotten to mike yet altho i did watch the mst3k movie

It be great if they could start up a show like that again

And sorry i ment 4tb

It would of been good to know what i lost by having a list but thats sorted now that i have made my html movie browser.

My tv shows are huge cause i've got MST3k on it and thats a pretty huge torrent for a tv show

I've got about 4gb worth of harddrive and have about 300gb of space left all up but i don't have them in any type of raid format which is sad cause i've lost 2 hdd already with lots of movies

@ MST3k      Did you get any of the season 0 eps too? Those a fun to watch. (IE, before they went nationwide)

4gb of harddrives? 4TB maybe?

Also, I dont have my drives in a RAID, but I wrote a few small batch files that handle backups and logging for me (Lists all the files copied in a txt file named for the day of the week). The reason I shied away from RAID is that yes it does backup data as redundant (RAID1) but if you accidentally delete a file, you lose the backup as well. I have my "primary" drive(s) set up fro sharing and the backup drives just for local access to the fileserver (which is headless, so must be accessed via Logmein.). (good thing I went this way too, as one of my roomates accidentally deleted some files while browsing the fileserver!)

[protokatie]

I'm still watching them slowly im still watching joel still haven't gotten to mike yet altho i did watch the mst3k movie

It be great if they could start up a show like that again

They did, it's called RiffTrax. You DL a rifftrack for a DVD you have and play the dvd on your computer with their special player that syncs the rifftrack audio with the dvd movie. It is only audio, but still fun. They had to go this route as they didn't have any money to buy the rights to actual movies to show as a video, on a plus side tho, most of the movies are recent ones)

[Epyx]

Yep, then there are the anime's which I enjoy as well. Space 1999 was a great show and is pretty cool to watch.

The way I look at it...I pay for cable and most of the shows I download to watch I treat like copying via VHS..they get watched once then never again...the ones I store for permanent are ones I own on DVD but prefer in a more storage friendly format (DivX/Xvid etc). 

I just hate commercials and would rather download a show than suffer through commercials (unlike in most of Europe here in Canada/America they show commercials every 15 mins not at the end of a show).

Scary to think my first hard drive was for my C64 and was 1MB in size...yep 1MB lol..sheesh.

[protokatie]

Epyx, are you sure you don't mean 10MB? The only HD for the C64 I remember from the Compute Gazette was a 10 MB drive that had to be partitioned into ~340KB partitions and used special software to allow you to access each partition as tho it was a 1541 drive.

[Epyx]

thanks but looks like we were both incorrect..looks like it was 5mb not 1 or 10 hehe...it was this model:

CBM D9060  5 MB Hard Drive, DOS3.0, Off-White, IEEE-488.

Took about an hour or so to format but I was able to store quite a bit on there.

They also had a 7.5MB model the D9090

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Suenarmy

[Expressline99]

Anyone use any of those "online" backup services for offsite backup?

I was considering mozie, but then discovered that it can't see network drives for backup purposes (even if they're mapped). Since I don't generally keep "data" type stuff on my local drive, that kills it for me.

And the "pro" subscription is a tad too pricey to wade into now.

Any others that warrant a mention?

I use backupsolutions.com and have been for 5 years now. It has saved my business 2 times now. The last time however I didn't properly mark some of my data and lost my emails. After that I setup a raid 10 with 4, 1TB drives. So now I use both.  They keep up to 10 copies of your data so if there are bad files within those you can go back to a working copy. This has helped a ton too.  Offsite is great...no matter what you have at home its possible it can be destroyed with your home.

Which reminds me my mame-cab isn't backed up. I should fix that.

[NiN^_^NiN]

I'm still watching them slowly im still watching joel still haven't gotten to mike yet altho i did watch the mst3k movie

It be great if they could start up a show like that again

They did, it's called RiffTrax. You DL a rifftrack for a DVD you have and play the dvd on your computer with their special player that syncs the rifftrack audio with the dvd movie. It is only audio, but still fun. They had to go this route as they didn't have any money to buy the rights to actual movies to show as a video, on a plus side tho, most of the movies are recent ones)

Now thats pretty cool altho it's abit sad you don't get the overlay of the guys but it could easily be done in VLC and just load the dvd in VLC and overlay a video ontop.