Techies, what's your personal data storage setup (photos, music, movies, docs) and what do you recommend everyone should be using?

I have my important folders synced to my nextcloud and do nightly backups of that using borg.

There is no one size fits all for how someone should do their backups, it really depends on what you have and how much. What do I have? Over 100TB on a redundant unrais server with it backed up off-site. That's probably overkill though. Most people would just benefit from an external hard drive with automated backups set up.

If you want to know it's safe, the go to solution is 3-2-1. 3 total copies of your data across 2 different types of data storage, with one of them off site. That's the only way to truly know your data is safe.

I use Backblaze for all offsite backups

Personally I never reached a point where I had to use any kind of storage software. All you need is a good external storage and a little bit of organization.

If anyone is serious about data storage I would honestly choose external SSDs or an enclosure that supports SSDs. I've had terrible experiences with hard drives failing over the years or clicking and corrupting my data.

Follow the 3-2-1 rule for all data you would be upset to lose. Having a server (really just any networked computer that can receive and store enough data) is the easiest way to accomplish "1" and "2". Then encrypt and send that data offsite to either another server you maintain or to the cloud.

I have a Nas running nextcloud for general ease of automatically backing up anything important from my phone or pc.

Nextcloud and important things from the server are backed up using a tool called "restic" which honestly does not get enough mention here.

Restic is amazing, it supports just about every cloud storage provider out there - could be Amazon S3 or backblaze, but it could also be OneDrive or Google drive. If you've got some cloud storage somewhere, restic will probably support it.

Restic is super clever, it takes snapshots and only backs up any data that has changed - so it's very space efficient and fast. I back up hourly, it only takes a few mins and if nothing has changed, there cost is also basically nothing. But you can pull back files from any snapshots you keep and when you delete a snapshot, it only deletes data that's not used by any snapshot.

This means you can have backups going back months or years at very little data cost. You can restore a full backup, or just a specific file if you need.

Seriously, restic is amazing and more people need to know about it.

• Pictures: On a folder on a server I syncthing to. I don't really look at them. I used to have NextCloud for browsing them, but it was slow. I might give Immich a try
• Music: Youtube and the songs in my head. Sad, but it's true. I have a large collection I rarely look at. I also have a rockbox I sometimes pick up and play to rejig my tastes.
• Movies/Tv shows: Kimcartoon was main goto for cartoons, but it's down now. I use other sites. Movies, usually I find some recommendation on Lemmy and then I go find a nice DCC on an irc server somewhere with irssi. I had JellyFin for a bit, but I just don't watch movies or series that often.
• Backups: Some in the cloud. Rest in a big old hard drive. Plug it in once a year, update and tidy it up. Power down, back into cold storage.

Hard copy.

Photos in a photo album, documents in a filing cabinet.

I’m all about keeping it simple with a NAS drive at home and cloud backups for that extra peace of mind. Having a local copy is great in case of internet issues, but the cloud is there for when disaster strikes. A mix like that gives you flexibility and quick access for your media needs!

OWC Express 4M2 with four 8TB m.2 chips raided for 24TB of lightning fast storage for media. And a Synology DS1522+ with expansion bay for 96TB of storage for backups plus more media (plex library to stream to home theater). Additional backups to 8TB SSDs for the builtin storage of my main machine. This is somewhat excessive, not what I recommend for most users, but definitely right for my use.

Everyone should have minimum two backups. Ideally three with one of them being offsite in case of disaster such as fire.

I use Onedrive for storing files offsite, and a Synology NAS for onsite. I've got my PC as the main source of my files, and use Syncthing to sync to my laptop and NAS, and Onedrive syncing the PC and NAS to the cloud.

I know Onedrive isn't always popular here, but it does everything I need, and is cheap. It also lets me access my files from my phone

My setup is simple:

• Pictures: I don't take many and rarely look at them tbh. So they just sit on my laptops NVMe
• Music: I only ever use cmus for listening to music => Therefore music is also only locally on my laptop, managed with beets
• Movies/Tv Shows: I have jellyfin running on a raspberry Pi 4. For single user use this works fine (even transcoding DVD quality works). For multi user or higher resolution transcoding this probably won't work.
• Backups: One off-site backup at a cloud storage provider using restic and one backup on a USB hdd I simply plug in every other week.

My recommendation is: Keep it as simple as possible. In the past I created the craziest setups, but it turns out that in every day life I have neither the time nor motivation to maintain that shit.

SMB file share, nightly backup for files, monthly backup for entertainment media, both to a RAID 1 18TB backup mount. Important docs also copied to a flash drive that I keep at an off site location, and swap about once a month.

I've got a beginner 2 bay NAS set up with about 18TB for all my family's media.

Pictures from our phones are also backed up in Google Photos. Not private at all but it works as an off site option.

ATM
Most of the files are local to my PC
Backed by Veeam to an SMB share.

Anything else like videos, music etc. are on my media server

Local files, s3 sync on a 5 minute scheduled task to a glacier flexible retrieval bucket with versioning. Then I have an s3 sync app on my phone to make it all work like dropbox.

My home server has an NVMe that has the OS and all the Docker Compose stacks and their database data. The big data (photos, movies, backups, etc) are on a big 6 drive RAID 6 array. The NVMe gets backed up to the RAID every night. They go into folders named after the day of the week, so I’ve always got 7 days worth. Then every week or so, I rsync the whole RAID to a big drive at my parent’s house. The reason I do that manually is because I don’t want it happening if I get hit with a ransomware attack.

That was all relatively easy to set up, but server administration is also my profession, so for normal people, I recommend an easier home server setup and a commercial backup solution.

I’m actually working on an open source backup solution based on my deduplicating WebDAV server, Nephele. If I can pull it off, it’ll be free and open source to run on your own hardware, or you can pay my company to back up to my hardware.

I have a BackBlaze B2 cloud cold storage where I back up everything from my entire family. If they have a computer, I back it up, fully encrypted, via Duplicati. Not the best option for a machine-side client, but I like it and it’s been reliable for me.

As for on-site storage, I have a pair of 4U rack mount cases with 24 hot swap bays in the front. Once I have my server room configured and cooling correctly, it will be the local backup site for everything in-house, and likely serving other duties as well.

Photos are stored in iCloud but originals of every photo is kept on both my iPhone and Mac. Plex library, it is stored with Unraid Parity, and additionally I’ve got all the magnet links in one spreadsheet.

Edit: oh no, downvote! Why?