Input On Storage Expansion for Torrent Data

My desktop hard drives are maxing out & I'm seeking some type of external storage expansion for my PC which I run a Jellyfin server on. This would be for storing my torrent data and also working towards a 3-2-1 backup solution equivalent to about ~10-20Tbs of storage space, maybe more.

I'm leaning towards an enclosure type of setup with several ~10-12Tbs HDDs in it of which one would be removed after complete backup and stored offsite as part of the 3-2-1 strategy but I'm not sure. I'd need something very simple to work with as I'm not very Hardware-literate.

Also, I am finding it difficult to find a reliable Cloud service, again as part of the 3-2-1 scheme except maybe Filen which seems to have good reviews on TrustPilot

Any positive suggestions on how to store & access large amounts of data safely for a long period of time & appropriate hardware/software to do so would be most appreciated. Thanks!

Thanks Kindly!

10 comments

Oh matey. I literally just went through this and debated putting together a blog post or similar.
I'm not at my computer so I'm typing this from my phone.
The TL;DR: you need to decide whether you'll pay for the security by paying for restore upfront, or when you need it.
Since I yarr most of if not all my content, I did not worry about backing up my TV shows or movies. I take a directory listing of my jellyfin and back that up weekly. Music is small enough that I do back this up.
Cloud cost is abstract and hard to compare apples to apples. But the biggest thing you'll need to decide is how likely will you need to do a cloud restore. The more robust your on-prem backups the less likely you'll need them so I personally went with AWS S3 using rclone. Glacier cold storage is super cheap and for my needs I'm paying roughly $2-3 a month. The catch is if I need a restore, I'll have to pay for the S3 retrieval and then the egress which can be roughly $60 one time.
For companies like Backblaze, you pay roughly $60 annual for about 2TB of hot storage, which includes egress 3 times.
I prefer to save the $40 difference year over year, and instead put that in a budget for a break-glass situation.
In terms of hardware, some people recommend buying different brands with the same storage size. Others recommend spacing out your hard drive purchases so that they don't all fail at the same time. I prefer the latter.
Hope that points you in the right direction
- Even S3 cold storage is expensive when you have tens of terabytes to backup. If you pay for a year or two of that, you could have bought more hard drives to back it up on.
  
  That's a trade-off between cloud storage vs manual off site storage. You could do a monthly backup to a HDD and then save that at a safe deposit box, like the old days. Except replace HDD with tape.
  Optionally you and a friend could trade HDDs, and you'd only have to spend gas money or postage.
  Either way you're going to have some sort of regular cost.
- I don't have all the *arrs setup. I'm lucky to have gotten Jellyfin setup and working correctly. LOL But, I've heard of other people doing some type of *arr backup so if they lose their video, they just go back into the *arrs and do something to get everything downloading again. It's all a bit over my head.
  I'm not really worried as much about the cloud right now as just finding some good hardware to store the data on and cloud comes as last step. Many people seem to endorse BackBlaze's yearly PC plan so I guess I need to take a look there.
  Yup, that's what I've heard. Don't ever buy more than 1 HDD at the same time from the same place at the same time as you could multiple bad HDDs if there happens to be a "bad batch" so I hear ya' there. Thanks for the input!

What do you want to back up? Media and "linux isos" are usually huge and you cannot compress them further and not really worth it to fork out money for cloud. You can just download again or get 2 hdd and keep one disconnected.
If you absolutely want to go for cloud, i would recommend backblaze backup (the personal computer one with flat fee).
Stick your drives in the case to have them always connected to take advantage of backblaze (exclude the uncompleted torrents folder). And use whatever mobile rack you have to connect the backup drives.
- Video, mainly. I have a ton of torrented video and video I need to rip and I'm trying to setup the hardware before starting on the all the processing. Yeah, a lot of it I could redownload ore reprocess but much of it has very few seeders and could disappear at any time so I'd like to keep all I can locally plus it takes sooo long to re-rip 100s of BluRays. Ok, I'll take a look at the Personal Computer/Flat Fee option for BackBlaze and see what it's all about. Thanks!

I am finding it difficult to find a reliable Cloud service
I'll tell ya what I have issue with.
Tailscale allows me and others to access our own locally hosted storage but requires a SSO provider. Currently using Google and Github I ain't too confident with that and would love others thoughts on how to self host it?
- The two options I know of are Headscale and Netbird.
  
  Really appreciated, and you use either of these?
- Not familiar with Tailscale but look at Filen. They have an excellent rating on TrustPilot. I don't know why they aren't in the major search engines. Maybe too new a service. Don't know but good luck to you.

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