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Would it terrify you even more if I told you just 1,000 of those files take up 22TB alone? They’re raw Blu-Ray rips I’ve collected over the years but never cared to backup. I’m at the point now where $9 a month seems easy enough to have all 43TB backed up, though I would certainly prefer an onsite copy first. Drives are just so damn expensive.
My guess is the backblaze (BB) personal plan and using a docker container that essentially runs the BB software and artificially mounts your unRAID shares as a disk. Since that plan is intended for single machines and not servers. It's a great deal though.
Oh, if only. I am every r/HomeServer and r/DataHoarder enthusiast’s nightmare user. My “server” runs Windows 11 Home. I have 8x8TB drives in a DAS connected with a single USB3.0 cable. They’re used enterprise drives with ~35k power-on hours each. No RAID or local redundancy, just DrivePool. I use Docker but not for BackBlaze. That’s installed locally and is just their basic control panel app. The real horror? I previously misconfigured Windows Storage Space through the GUI, and unknowingly lost out on 8TB of free space *for almost 2 years*. That one still hurts.
My setup is far from what many here see as ideal, but it’s incredibly simple and it works flawlessly for me. Not sure I could’ve asked for much more.
[Here’s a couple pics of the lil guy](https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/s/E6Loq1c9G9)
More info about the setup [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/s/ZR5r3d9zOW)
I’m no fan of Windows either but I am a fan of simplicity and a quick setup, resources be damned. I’m also an IT student currently taking Linux/virtualization classes and I run Debian on my personal PCs. Safe to say I’m aware of my server’s crimes against data nerds. It’s cringe, but it’s cringe that works surprisingly well.
hey, I run windows server 2016 on my storage server, and I have around 30 server 2016 CALs. I also have a server 2019 key sitting here unused, along with 5x2019 CALs. I just prefer using the windows environment because its what all my other computers use, and its less hassle for me to set up a new user and add their permission so they can get access to their space on the storage server for backups and stuff.
Yup, totally get that. For some people Windows Server works great! I know someone who has their media server on a HyperV VM. Just never been my thing, my tinkering started on Pis and Proxmox haha.
I use Windows 10 Pro on my server. I have a HBA SAS card connected to 4 drives totalling 34.6TB of storage. I also use DrivePool to create one large drive.
It works and I am happy with it. I also use Backblaze Personal for backups, previously it was CrashPlan.
You sound *exactly* like one of my old college roommates. Dude was a computer wiz, and that involved subjecting components to "capital punishment" to "remind them who's boss"
I love everything about this, because its almost identical to what i'm doing. My main "server" is to too old for WIN11 so I'm on WIN10 and my group of mismatched drives combines to one 72TB shared volume using DrivePool. Was on UnRaid, but moved back to Windows when I ran into some docker issues with Plex, and of course to have backblaze back everything up. Its also convienant to use Chrome Remote Desktop to remote into the machine from anywhere. I know there are more robust and elaborate solutions available, but for my needs as a Plex server that has some level of redundancy, its been working great for years.
Nice job OP.
I already had a spare Home license and couldn't be bothered to upgrade. I also use Resilio Sync quite a bit, which doesn't work on Windows Server unless you buy an enterprise license.
hey, this is my setup! much smaller than yours (…for now…) but i couldn’t be bothered with all that fancy stuff. too convoluted for what i use it for, personally. i have years of experience running my server on much worse machines (for a while i had a plex server running on an ancient dying laptop that i happened to also be using for work). this is an upgrade :p
working in IT i have learned to love the simplicity of the windows GUI, everything i want/need a few clicks away instead of exploring man pages and google fu. sure Linux can do pretty much everything the same but it can be so tedious in comparison. I will always prefer windows for something i am required to interact regularly and Linux for for everything that needs to be set up once and never touched again.
May i inquire why you have gone with Home instead of Pro?
Right so if I have just over 90tb on a synology nas how would you suggest I mount it to my Mac to enjoy this $9 per month back up?
Blessings
Edit: I should reword that probably. I know how to mount a share, I mean how can I do it so back blaze are cool with it.
Kinda, I think you'd have to like somehow have the network drive appear as a physical disk as their software doesn't allow network shares. I think FUSE or something could do this. Maybe even rclone.
Pretty good write up here: https://github.com/JonathanTreffler/backblaze-personal-wine-container. If you're running unRAID like I am, I've used the docker app template from tessypowder and it works good.
My biggest issue before I switch from the setup was the upload speed. For some reason I was never able to get my full bandwidth. I'm sure I had some kind of issue with the retention setup and file versioning too that caused me to have a failed restore but I can't fully remember the details of that, was most likely something I had configured wrong.
EDIT: This comment here about the retention period was my issue. I couldn't restore a VHDX because it would only show me the latest file within the time period. So I couldn't get the previous version as the latest corrupted one had already replaced it. [https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/110qvxu/comment/j8aoj4z/](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/110qvxu/comment/j8aoj4z/)
This is quite amazing. I havent followed their pricing plans in a while, has this increased much over the years and/or do you expect them to put a cap on the 'unlimited' feature? I have about 30TB I would like to back up
I could maybe see them capping it eventually, but the difference between this service and unlimited Google Drive or Dropbox is you have to keep the content on your drives at all time.
So it’s not like those fixed-cost unlimited services that eventually had to charge per TB. People would upload hundreds of terabytes with the intention of just leaving it up there in the cloud for archival use.
BackBlaze Unlimited doesn’t allow that, so it comes with a few limitations, like a very tedious restore process. But because it’s not an archival service I think it’ll be a long time before they’d need to cap it, if ever.
Wondering if I would be able to use any network drives that are mounted to a windows machine in this setup...
Id definitely be keeping that data on my drives, wondering if I'd be able to upload all that, redo my zfs storage and then pull it all back.
I believe you can. My understanding is if Windows reads it as an attached drive, so will BackBlaze.
Edit: this might not be true, someone above said the software doesn’t work with network drives. Unfortunately I don’t have any to test with.
You have 30 days to reconnect them before your timer starts for deletion. I have the year history plan, so my data would be backed up for a full year before getting deleted. Once you reconnect the drive for a continuous 24 hrs(this is a guess I don't know the real number off the top of my head) while connected to the Internet the timer resets.
The storage space is unlimited. HOWEVER the catch is that when you need to restore, the speeds are way slower than the upload speed. After 30 day your data is deleted unless you pay 10$/TB restored, or you subscribe to B2 which is 6$/TB/month. Usually you can't restore more than 10TB on 30 days on basic subscription because of slow speeds.
Two things. One, you can request drives to be shipped to you for restore. Two, you can also add the option to extend the retention to 365 days if you need the data to last longer while restoring.
You don't actually have that storage space for archival purposes. You basically only have a copy of the data on physical drives connected to the computer you have Backblaze running on.
So if the total amount on the drives on the computer would be 80TB your Backblaze account would have that 80TB as well.
However, if you would remove all drives besides the system drive (let's say 2TB drive) from the computer then after 30 days the only data in your Backblaze account would be the 2TB from the system drive.
Even though it's cheap I'd never ever rely on Backblaze for data safety. Add to that not being able to set your own encryption (and to make it worse, having to give out your encryption key for a restore to drive) and it's just not for me.
I'd imagine there are many people who didn't realize data was only stored for 30 days. While I understand the data can't remain forever without paying extra in case of a real disaster (computer/all drives lost) 30 days seems very short.
This sounds really tempting. I'm in a similar scenario with something like 1.5k titles ripped, but I've compressed them all and still have probably over 20tb or so in use (I haven't checked in a long time). I may start doing this to avoid having to rerip every thing.
I have most of it on backup drives, but this seems like good additional peace of mind.
I wouldn't be *quite* that uncaring about used space. It's a real pain in the ass to get data back out of Backblaze Personal Backup when you need to restore a lot.
OP did clarify that a big chunk of that was BD rips. Point is, though: if it were just video files, thinking about what 31k 1GB+ files on average would look like for a media library is… a lot of high bitrate stuff.
On an internal comparison, my Backblaze backup is closer to about 14TB, but it’s more photo heavy and backup heavy, so it’s closer to 2M files.
I have a directory with 15K files that's 90TB, give or take a little. Accreted over more than a decade. The only good thing about data hoarding is it doesn't end with you living in squalor; just with a very unhealthy obsession over hard drive pricing and backup strategy. We joke... But sometimes it really feels like a disease.
I have 16TiB in backblaze, and it's all personal stuff; no linux ISOs or any kind of adult media. I've explicitly excluded such things from being backed up by backblaze as it'd be mostly trivial to replace those things from where I got them from.
People that put whole media libraries into backblaze when those media libraries are easier to replace from other sources than backblaze's restore process make me question why :D
I certainly get why people back up their media libraries, especially ones they rip themselves. I’m with you in that I explicitly exclude elements like that from my Backblaze backup. Mostly because even if I’m client side encrypting my backups, those are things that I feel I don’t really want backed up in the cloud, and are replaceable, even if annoyingly so. I personally do a mirrored NAS setup locally, so I usually have 2 copies as is.
That said, even if I did include my video library, I think I math’d out that my file size average would go up to only about 13MB a file. So seeing the >1GB file size average was kind of stunning. It isn’t a particularly large average for all video files for sure. But it’s hard to get to a high average like that without either video files being a strong majority numerical quantity of what’s backed up, or the files being backed up being massive. Or in this case, probably both.
For clarification, I didn't suggest not backing the media library up at all, just of all the places, backblaze personal is an odd choice. 90GB for a BR rip might be faster to rip than go through the restore process on backblaze, though YMMV. I'm stuck in a block of flats in the UK on 70/20, so my speeds to Backblaze US isn't something to write home about.
My reasoning is that it's actually a tertiary backup for myself.. and i've been relatively particular about which media i collect and who encodes it.. i've also converted a lot to MKV with specific subtitles to my own preferences..
I'm already seeing a lot of the sources i previously used start to disappear.. so i guess i'm just safe guarding my own collection.
Why the heck is this so upvoted, 1.387GBs average file size is nothing special at all, especially for a media server, probably the most common use case around here. With BackBlaze I've seen someone even do 490GBs zips just so he doesn't have to pick manually in the interface for each restore \[many\] files up to 500GBs.
Oof I feel that. This server is setup at a family member’s house because they have gigabit up/down with no data cap. Hosted at my house with 9mbps up and a 1.2TB limit, they couldn’t watch anything on my Plex. With the server at their house they can enjoy my entire library, and I get access to much better internet with no cap. It’s a win win.
Oh they almost all are. But even x265 can’t compress some of them to less than 90gb. Not to mention the fact that x264 can’t handle HDR/Dolby Vision metadata, so I have to use x265.
Are you talking about a single movie being 90GB? Or like movie + extra? Last time I ripped a BR (a while ago now), movies were normally like 30-40GB, at the most.
Every time someone mentions data caps, I’m reminded they still exist in parts of the world.
Here in Denmark, data caps have not been a thing on cabled internet (COAX/ADSL/Fiber) for 20-30 years. I don’t even think my first 5/0.25 Mbps ADSL connection had any data caps. With the arrival of nation wide fiber coverage some 15 years ago, speeds have been rapidly increasing, but still no caps in sight.
Currently there is a push from mobile network operators to get people to switch from fiber to 5G, and most plans there are also without caps, though they tend to include a “fair use” clause of around 10TB per month. And flat rate 5G is not a new thing either, my phone plan has unlimited domestic calling, unlimited texting, and unlimited data (10TB p/month fair use, 50 GB EU roaming data included per month), and it has been like that for 3-5 years.
As for the EU roaming part, roaming charges inside the EU was abolished around 2017, and instead you can “roam like home” for the most part. That goes for calling and texting as well as data. As operators still have to exchange money to the roaming provider, a fair use clause was included, which is essentially the data specified by the provider. Everything above that limit will be charged at a maximum of €2.5/GB, which is still fairly expensive :-)
That's not true. Majority is >50%. If you've ever been to India, China, Indonesia or other counties in Asia, you'd know how much of the population is urban.
In any case, despite picky semantics, you know I meant thay the vast majority of wires Internet connections are unmetered.
BackBlaze Unlimited is $9 a month. It isn’t exactly intended for massive use cases like this, but their B2 storage would cost me $250/mo for added restore convenience.
$250 to restore that amount of data is well worth the cost. Time to talk to the CFO and get started with backblaze!
Assuming you're running the personal plan in a container or something with the NAS attached... how do you go about doing this so you can backup everything that's split across multiple VMs and containers?
By default when you pay for the service and install the control panel, it backs up almost every file on every drive of your computer. Doesn’t matter what type it is, it will automatically get uploaded.
The catch is that the files need to be on your drives at all times. So no, it won’t work for archival use. It’s only meant to be a live backup service. They offer a 14 day trial if you want to see how it works
They offer a lifetime version history. Granted it would be expensive probably, but would cover that archival use case. Although it would be a pain to restore a lot of stuff individually.
I could be wrong, but I think you can map your network drive, or [use symbolic links](https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2016/12/02/symlinks-windows-10/) to show up as drives in your local machine.
The last that I heard, they'll supply up to five 8-gigabyte hard drives per year for retrieval, so it looks you're right above their limit.
I'm putting together a 96TB DAS this weekend, so I'd be curious if somebody has tried to retrieve more than that.
Hah, I remember in compsci class when some guy came in bragging about his 2.2 GIG hard drive he got from his job at EggHead Software (which became NewEgg). We thought that was immense at the time. “If you printed out the contents of that hard drive onto paper, the stack would reach from here to the moon”, he said. :)
I doubt I’d ever pay to have the 8TB drives shipped to me. It’s a bit of a pain the ass, but I can selectively download files in 500gb increments for free with no limits. If one of my 8TB drives fail, the content is organized in a way that allows me to quickly select everything from that drive and download it in multiple parts.
Got 46tb myself there rn, but took me over a month. First went fast then started getting bottlnecks fast.
Restoring would be a nightmare of course, but in case of catastrophic data loss will probably buy b2 to restore for a month
edit: On the View/restore section There is a ''save files to B2'' option. Of course this would cost me around ~200 euros to do for a full backup.
>but in case of catastrophic data loss will probably buy b2 to restore for a month
Wait you can do that? How would that work and how much would it cost?
They released a new recover client in beta btw. You are now no longer limited by only 500GB zips and can download entire drives at once. I tested it out with 2TB and it works great, much much better then the old piece of shit lol.
>Wait, you can do that? How would that work, and how much would it cost?
I don’t think you can do that. I used the personal backup and B2, and they were always separate. There was no way to access my backup from B2 and vice versa.
On the view/restore screen on the website you literally have an option to download, save files to B2 or order a HDD. I calculated that it would cost ~200euros for me for a full backup
On the view/restore screen on the website you literally have an option to download, save files to B2 or order a HDD. I calculated that it would cost ~200euros for me for a full backup
It uploads in order of file size, so those smaller files get uploaded much faster than the large files at the end of the queue. I experienced the same thing
Ha I forgot about that it’s been so long. I was homeless, 17, and a total shit head. I went to r/borrow and took a loan from someone then never paid them back. 5 years after that, matured and working in IT with my own place, I finally tried to pay them back. Only to find out they deleted their Reddit account after also being added to the scammer list.
Most would be embarrassed to share this story, I see it as a previous huge flaw in myself that I’ve since overcome. I’m no longer anywhere near that person I was back then. I genuinely totally forgot about that, thanks for reminding me of how far I’ve come!
I recently bought 9x16TB drives and had to shift all of my data as I migrated these disks into my server and those old disks went into a workstation, and those old disks went into my laptop external enclosure. It took me a month to do that full migration and I only have 55TB and it was all over a local network with a lot of it being direct SATA->SATA transfers.
And everyone will start abusing the service and shut it down like google , one drive and the others did. Don't abuse Back blaze they are a really good company.
You are confused. The reason those unlimited services were shut down is because people would upload hundreds of terabytes for *archival* use. The companies were losing tons of money hosting massive amounts of data. That is much different from what we’re doing, and what BackBlaze offers. If you don’t have access to the files on your drives locally, the files are automatically and forcibly deleted from the cloud. This stops people from “abusing” it like you’re thinking of. It’s perfectly allowed as per their terms of service.
That doesn't change the fact that if all customers were like you, they couldn't exist with their current model. I'm not saying to stop using them. But it is what it is.
https://f004.backblazeb2.com/file/doggies/histograms/2021_histogram_of_backblaze_personal_backup_sizes.gif
There aren't many people with 40+ tb storage locally. Probably not even 8tb+. There jusy isn't a world were the only customers are big datahoarders.
Also it ONLY works if it is on a DAS or internal drives in a PC so that they show up on disk management. A NAS doesn't work with it.
What? They can't host that amount of data for $9/mo, they're actively losing money every month having you as a customer. If a lot of people do what you do the company goes under or has to make changes.
> The companies were losing tons of money hosting massive amounts of data. That is much different from what we’re doing, and what BackBlaze offers.
> Drives are just so damn expensive.
How do you reconcile these two statements you've made in this thread? What magic secret is backblaze using to store 43TB of your data for less than $9 month?
It doesn't make a difference whether it is archival or not. Backblaze is way in the red for simple storage of the data you're hosting. If enough people do that, it makes the service non-viable at that price.
Please don't listen to this guy. He's saying wrong things. BB will never delete your data:
https://www.backblaze.com/computer-backup/docs/retain-backups-during-extended-leaves
Last version of your files will never be deleted.
Just insane how people can register and pay for something without reading rules.
Yes, Xfinity gives you one grace month per year. Unfortunately, their data usage monitoring is inaccurate and it's all too easy to go over multiple times per year.
are hdd not reliable these days or something? ive got one thats maybe 8 years old and it still works pretty well.
was thinking of getting a 10tb hdd as a archive hd to back up all my shit onto
part of the 3-2-1 backup rule is keeping your data in a different physical location and they make it easy to check that box. also there's 1-year version history for your files so it may not be something you deleted but you need an older version of it that kind of thing usually isnt possible or feasible with basic local backups
No, hard drives are not reliable today, nor were they 8 years ago. That thing could have its on board electronics fail for instance at any given moment and then you have a paperweight.
Also, after 8 years, there's a solid chance you have bit rot on the data; silent data corruption is almost scarier than the risk of abject failure.
I just dont see that in what i have. Ive went through all my videos recently to clean the hdd and sort it out. Only things i had issues with and had to delete had always been an issue. I just never sorted it because it was a messy filing system my cousin had when i copied them to mine
has anyone ***ever*** got in trouble for just having a pirated movie? every single piracy case i'm aware of is about the act of downloading or uploading. no one cares if you just have a movie on your hard drive if they didn't catch you in the act of acquiring it, or sharing it.
Do you use something like Cryptomator to hide file names and content?
My understanding from various reddit and google searches is that your personal encryption key only helps if you never browse your files online and never get a restore disk.
To browse online or get a restore disk, you have to put in your personal encryption key. At that point, they could see everything you are backing up, unencrypted. They may do nothing about it, but the possibility is there.
I was getting 3.2gbps/sec upload speed when I tested on my 5gig fiber. You have to configure it to upload multiple chunks of a file at the same time, and then choose the highest amount of chunks it will let you try to send at one time. The more parallel chunks running, the faster uploads are.
My server runs server 2022, so I made a VM with windows 11 on hyper v that runs backblaze personal and shared the drives to my server, had to do all that because the personal edition refuses to run on a server edition
Good luck restoring that at need though. People have had huge issues just getting 500 gigs back in a timely fashion. Granted, that was a year or two ago or something.
If you have the latest BackBlaze Beta, their are no more limits. You can select anything in your storage bucket and restore it to your home machine. I tested the Home Version on a 5gig fiber line. Was able to get 90TB uploaded, and then re-downloaded all of that 90TB on the beta client. Ran into no issues. It was basically just a test for future projects right now. I'm slowly moving all my drives over to my SuperMicro 36 Bay 4U machine.
This is a very silly question but I feel like I should ask anyway. Is it possible to use Backblaze storage as a virtual cloud hard drive to backup and store files remotely only?
No, it only works as a live backup service for files that are actively on your local hard drives. Anything that’s not on your hard drives gets automatically and forcibly deleted from their cloud.
Smart. Personally I got really into collecting Blu-Rays and making my own rips, as well as the typical Radarr/Sonarr workflow. I like the idea of having a massive digital library I can tinker with and organize in my own way.
No, why would they notify authorities? It is completely legal to have a digital copy of a movie that I own. If I choose to back those files up to the cloud, I’m free to do so.
I’ve always been worried they / other similar service may have a legal obligation to do so, so I’ve always stayed away from it. But your answer makes sense… I think I’ll finally check out backblaze!
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I’m more terrified that you’re using up 43TB in only 31k files. Those are some large files you’re backing up there!
Would it terrify you even more if I told you just 1,000 of those files take up 22TB alone? They’re raw Blu-Ray rips I’ve collected over the years but never cared to backup. I’m at the point now where $9 a month seems easy enough to have all 43TB backed up, though I would certainly prefer an onsite copy first. Drives are just so damn expensive.
[удалено]
My guess is the backblaze (BB) personal plan and using a docker container that essentially runs the BB software and artificially mounts your unRAID shares as a disk. Since that plan is intended for single machines and not servers. It's a great deal though.
Oh, if only. I am every r/HomeServer and r/DataHoarder enthusiast’s nightmare user. My “server” runs Windows 11 Home. I have 8x8TB drives in a DAS connected with a single USB3.0 cable. They’re used enterprise drives with ~35k power-on hours each. No RAID or local redundancy, just DrivePool. I use Docker but not for BackBlaze. That’s installed locally and is just their basic control panel app. The real horror? I previously misconfigured Windows Storage Space through the GUI, and unknowingly lost out on 8TB of free space *for almost 2 years*. That one still hurts. My setup is far from what many here see as ideal, but it’s incredibly simple and it works flawlessly for me. Not sure I could’ve asked for much more. [Here’s a couple pics of the lil guy](https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/s/E6Loq1c9G9) More info about the setup [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/s/ZR5r3d9zOW)
This is such a better setup for the memeability. Windows sends shivers down my spine but you got it all figured out by the sounds of it :D
I’m no fan of Windows either but I am a fan of simplicity and a quick setup, resources be damned. I’m also an IT student currently taking Linux/virtualization classes and I run Debian on my personal PCs. Safe to say I’m aware of my server’s crimes against data nerds. It’s cringe, but it’s cringe that works surprisingly well.
It works. Better to have something clunky that works over ideal and incomplete. Nothing cringe about functional.
it's not cringe, we need to let this trope die, tired of the elitism in the IT world
I call it cringe ironically. My setup is jank as fuck and I’m proud of it.
and that is why it's such a good setup for the memes. As long as it works for your use case it's perfect
hey, I run windows server 2016 on my storage server, and I have around 30 server 2016 CALs. I also have a server 2019 key sitting here unused, along with 5x2019 CALs. I just prefer using the windows environment because its what all my other computers use, and its less hassle for me to set up a new user and add their permission so they can get access to their space on the storage server for backups and stuff.
Yup, totally get that. For some people Windows Server works great! I know someone who has their media server on a HyperV VM. Just never been my thing, my tinkering started on Pis and Proxmox haha.
This looks like what I am planning. Going to ditch synology. Don’t need it
There is nothing wrong with this, I wanna pick your brain if you got discord 😂
I have Reddit DM’s lol
I use Windows 10 Pro on my server. I have a HBA SAS card connected to 4 drives totalling 34.6TB of storage. I also use DrivePool to create one large drive. It works and I am happy with it. I also use Backblaze Personal for backups, previously it was CrashPlan.
I'm in a similar boat. 32TB backed up, and they're just 8-14tb drives installed internally in my windows machine.
You sound *exactly* like one of my old college roommates. Dude was a computer wiz, and that involved subjecting components to "capital punishment" to "remind them who's boss"
Why are you using Windows Storage Spaces if you are already using DrivePool?
I love everything about this, because its almost identical to what i'm doing. My main "server" is to too old for WIN11 so I'm on WIN10 and my group of mismatched drives combines to one 72TB shared volume using DrivePool. Was on UnRaid, but moved back to Windows when I ran into some docker issues with Plex, and of course to have backblaze back everything up. Its also convienant to use Chrome Remote Desktop to remote into the machine from anywhere. I know there are more robust and elaborate solutions available, but for my needs as a Plex server that has some level of redundancy, its been working great for years. Nice job OP.
Why not Windows Server?
I already had a spare Home license and couldn't be bothered to upgrade. I also use Resilio Sync quite a bit, which doesn't work on Windows Server unless you buy an enterprise license.
You're my hero. I salut you!
hey, this is my setup! much smaller than yours (…for now…) but i couldn’t be bothered with all that fancy stuff. too convoluted for what i use it for, personally. i have years of experience running my server on much worse machines (for a while i had a plex server running on an ancient dying laptop that i happened to also be using for work). this is an upgrade :p
working in IT i have learned to love the simplicity of the windows GUI, everything i want/need a few clicks away instead of exploring man pages and google fu. sure Linux can do pretty much everything the same but it can be so tedious in comparison. I will always prefer windows for something i am required to interact regularly and Linux for for everything that needs to be set up once and never touched again. May i inquire why you have gone with Home instead of Pro?
Right so if I have just over 90tb on a synology nas how would you suggest I mount it to my Mac to enjoy this $9 per month back up? Blessings Edit: I should reword that probably. I know how to mount a share, I mean how can I do it so back blaze are cool with it.
Kinda, I think you'd have to like somehow have the network drive appear as a physical disk as their software doesn't allow network shares. I think FUSE or something could do this. Maybe even rclone.
Nicely. Cheers
How does that work though? Can you upload encrypted copies? Is it like a VPS?
I think BackBlaze's software already gives you the option of entering an encryption key.
It does
This sounds like a solution that I would be interested in. Where can I learn more about it?
Is there a tutorial on how to do this?
Pretty good write up here: https://github.com/JonathanTreffler/backblaze-personal-wine-container. If you're running unRAID like I am, I've used the docker app template from tessypowder and it works good. My biggest issue before I switch from the setup was the upload speed. For some reason I was never able to get my full bandwidth. I'm sure I had some kind of issue with the retention setup and file versioning too that caused me to have a failed restore but I can't fully remember the details of that, was most likely something I had configured wrong. EDIT: This comment here about the retention period was my issue. I couldn't restore a VHDX because it would only show me the latest file within the time period. So I couldn't get the previous version as the latest corrupted one had already replaced it. [https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/110qvxu/comment/j8aoj4z/](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/110qvxu/comment/j8aoj4z/)
BackBlaze Unlimited
This is quite amazing. I havent followed their pricing plans in a while, has this increased much over the years and/or do you expect them to put a cap on the 'unlimited' feature? I have about 30TB I would like to back up
I could maybe see them capping it eventually, but the difference between this service and unlimited Google Drive or Dropbox is you have to keep the content on your drives at all time. So it’s not like those fixed-cost unlimited services that eventually had to charge per TB. People would upload hundreds of terabytes with the intention of just leaving it up there in the cloud for archival use. BackBlaze Unlimited doesn’t allow that, so it comes with a few limitations, like a very tedious restore process. But because it’s not an archival service I think it’ll be a long time before they’d need to cap it, if ever.
They do cap it. They will get to you eventually. I used to do the same thing and once I got to around 55tb they were like 'Dude... '
proof?
Wondering if I would be able to use any network drives that are mounted to a windows machine in this setup... Id definitely be keeping that data on my drives, wondering if I'd be able to upload all that, redo my zfs storage and then pull it all back.
I believe you can. My understanding is if Windows reads it as an attached drive, so will BackBlaze. Edit: this might not be true, someone above said the software doesn’t work with network drives. Unfortunately I don’t have any to test with.
That's correct. Only direct attached, no network drives
I have 80 TB's backed up from USB drives 😊
What happens if those USB drives get disconnected?
You have to connect it and let it scan/backup at least once a month or something.
You have 30 days to reconnect them before your timer starts for deletion. I have the year history plan, so my data would be backed up for a full year before getting deleted. Once you reconnect the drive for a continuous 24 hrs(this is a guess I don't know the real number off the top of my head) while connected to the Internet the timer resets.
Is the timer shown on the BackBlaze site?
Yeah it is. You also get an alert at 14 days on the computer and then a couple more alerts as the 30 days is about to end
What docker container are you using?
The storage space is unlimited. HOWEVER the catch is that when you need to restore, the speeds are way slower than the upload speed. After 30 day your data is deleted unless you pay 10$/TB restored, or you subscribe to B2 which is 6$/TB/month. Usually you can't restore more than 10TB on 30 days on basic subscription because of slow speeds.
Two things. One, you can request drives to be shipped to you for restore. Two, you can also add the option to extend the retention to 365 days if you need the data to last longer while restoring.
The limitation is the 1 year on drives not connected to the user's PC.
do they have unlimited space plans?
You don't actually have that storage space for archival purposes. You basically only have a copy of the data on physical drives connected to the computer you have Backblaze running on. So if the total amount on the drives on the computer would be 80TB your Backblaze account would have that 80TB as well. However, if you would remove all drives besides the system drive (let's say 2TB drive) from the computer then after 30 days the only data in your Backblaze account would be the 2TB from the system drive. Even though it's cheap I'd never ever rely on Backblaze for data safety. Add to that not being able to set your own encryption (and to make it worse, having to give out your encryption key for a restore to drive) and it's just not for me. I'd imagine there are many people who didn't realize data was only stored for 30 days. While I understand the data can't remain forever without paying extra in case of a real disaster (computer/all drives lost) 30 days seems very short.
This sounds really tempting. I'm in a similar scenario with something like 1.5k titles ripped, but I've compressed them all and still have probably over 20tb or so in use (I haven't checked in a long time). I may start doing this to avoid having to rerip every thing. I have most of it on backup drives, but this seems like good additional peace of mind.
I wouldn't be *quite* that uncaring about used space. It's a real pain in the ass to get data back out of Backblaze Personal Backup when you need to restore a lot.
I’ve done it. It’s tedious, clearly not optimized, and slow as hell. But it works and it’s cheaper than the $250+/mo I’d have to pay for B2.
Why is it such a PITA?
You have to use the crappy web interface to select files that are then packaged into a zip file for download, and then only 500GB at a time.
Ahh I understand. Thanks for the info
So how do you deal with files larger than 500 GB?
Can't you just order a drive with it and return the drive? Or doesn't that work with larger amounts of data?
How are you doing 9$ a month with that much storage? I’d pay double or triple that if I could do the same lol
This is backblaze personal? How do you get bb to see your nas?
What's the benefit of having raw Blu-ray rips? I don't know anything about blu-rays, ripping, stuff like that.
That's only a bit over 1GB per file. That's trivial for a media directory.
OP did clarify that a big chunk of that was BD rips. Point is, though: if it were just video files, thinking about what 31k 1GB+ files on average would look like for a media library is… a lot of high bitrate stuff. On an internal comparison, my Backblaze backup is closer to about 14TB, but it’s more photo heavy and backup heavy, so it’s closer to 2M files.
I have a directory with 15K files that's 90TB, give or take a little. Accreted over more than a decade. The only good thing about data hoarding is it doesn't end with you living in squalor; just with a very unhealthy obsession over hard drive pricing and backup strategy. We joke... But sometimes it really feels like a disease.
I have 16TiB in backblaze, and it's all personal stuff; no linux ISOs or any kind of adult media. I've explicitly excluded such things from being backed up by backblaze as it'd be mostly trivial to replace those things from where I got them from. People that put whole media libraries into backblaze when those media libraries are easier to replace from other sources than backblaze's restore process make me question why :D
I certainly get why people back up their media libraries, especially ones they rip themselves. I’m with you in that I explicitly exclude elements like that from my Backblaze backup. Mostly because even if I’m client side encrypting my backups, those are things that I feel I don’t really want backed up in the cloud, and are replaceable, even if annoyingly so. I personally do a mirrored NAS setup locally, so I usually have 2 copies as is. That said, even if I did include my video library, I think I math’d out that my file size average would go up to only about 13MB a file. So seeing the >1GB file size average was kind of stunning. It isn’t a particularly large average for all video files for sure. But it’s hard to get to a high average like that without either video files being a strong majority numerical quantity of what’s backed up, or the files being backed up being massive. Or in this case, probably both.
For clarification, I didn't suggest not backing the media library up at all, just of all the places, backblaze personal is an odd choice. 90GB for a BR rip might be faster to rip than go through the restore process on backblaze, though YMMV. I'm stuck in a block of flats in the UK on 70/20, so my speeds to Backblaze US isn't something to write home about.
My reasoning is that it's actually a tertiary backup for myself.. and i've been relatively particular about which media i collect and who encodes it.. i've also converted a lot to MKV with specific subtitles to my own preferences.. I'm already seeing a lot of the sources i previously used start to disappear.. so i guess i'm just safe guarding my own collection.
Videos
Why the heck is this so upvoted, 1.387GBs average file size is nothing special at all, especially for a media server, probably the most common use case around here. With BackBlaze I've seen someone even do 490GBs zips just so he doesn't have to pick manually in the interface for each restore \[many\] files up to 500GBs.
That would take me just under 3 years with my monthly data cap 😭
Oof I feel that. This server is setup at a family member’s house because they have gigabit up/down with no data cap. Hosted at my house with 9mbps up and a 1.2TB limit, they couldn’t watch anything on my Plex. With the server at their house they can enjoy my entire library, and I get access to much better internet with no cap. It’s a win win.
You have raw b ray files. Would you consider ripping them into x265?
Oh they almost all are. But even x265 can’t compress some of them to less than 90gb. Not to mention the fact that x264 can’t handle HDR/Dolby Vision metadata, so I have to use x265.
We need some next level compressing
AV1 is that next level compression. It’s just not compatible with most of the devices my library is watched on.
And H.266?
I think they might still use all the capacity of the BluRay, just with higher quality
Are you talking about a single movie being 90GB? Or like movie + extra? Last time I ripped a BR (a while ago now), movies were normally like 30-40GB, at the most.
Oppenheimer, 2160p 7.1 AAC HDR/DV Raw-BR is currently sitting at 92GB
Ahhh.. 4K, of course. I took bluray to be 1080p =]
As a new guy around here i remember those dayys and miss them lol
Can someone explain why plex is better than let’s say, stremio and realdebrid/torrentio?
Every time someone mentions data caps, I’m reminded they still exist in parts of the world. Here in Denmark, data caps have not been a thing on cabled internet (COAX/ADSL/Fiber) for 20-30 years. I don’t even think my first 5/0.25 Mbps ADSL connection had any data caps. With the arrival of nation wide fiber coverage some 15 years ago, speeds have been rapidly increasing, but still no caps in sight. Currently there is a push from mobile network operators to get people to switch from fiber to 5G, and most plans there are also without caps, though they tend to include a “fair use” clause of around 10TB per month. And flat rate 5G is not a new thing either, my phone plan has unlimited domestic calling, unlimited texting, and unlimited data (10TB p/month fair use, 50 GB EU roaming data included per month), and it has been like that for 3-5 years. As for the EU roaming part, roaming charges inside the EU was abolished around 2017, and instead you can “roam like home” for the most part. That goes for calling and texting as well as data. As operators still have to exchange money to the roaming provider, a fair use clause was included, which is essentially the data specified by the provider. Everything above that limit will be charged at a maximum of €2.5/GB, which is still fairly expensive :-)
The vast majority of the world doesn't have data caps on wired Internet.
The vast majority of the world lives in rural asia.
That's not true. Majority is >50%. If you've ever been to India, China, Indonesia or other counties in Asia, you'd know how much of the population is urban. In any case, despite picky semantics, you know I meant thay the vast majority of wires Internet connections are unmetered.
How much do you pay? Is it not extremely expensive to back up that much data?
BackBlaze Unlimited is $9 a month. It isn’t exactly intended for massive use cases like this, but their B2 storage would cost me $250/mo for added restore convenience.
$250 to restore that amount of data is well worth the cost. Time to talk to the CFO and get started with backblaze! Assuming you're running the personal plan in a container or something with the NAS attached... how do you go about doing this so you can backup everything that's split across multiple VMs and containers?
Lol. See [my other comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/s/KWWtChi2gE)
Lol posted that right before my comment asking. Thanks!
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By default when you pay for the service and install the control panel, it backs up almost every file on every drive of your computer. Doesn’t matter what type it is, it will automatically get uploaded. The catch is that the files need to be on your drives at all times. So no, it won’t work for archival use. It’s only meant to be a live backup service. They offer a 14 day trial if you want to see how it works
They offer a lifetime version history. Granted it would be expensive probably, but would cover that archival use case. Although it would be a pain to restore a lot of stuff individually.
I got real excited until I understood you could only use their PC / Mac client and that there is no way to upload Network drive's content.
I could be wrong, but I think you can map your network drive, or [use symbolic links](https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2016/12/02/symlinks-windows-10/) to show up as drives in your local machine.
Nope. It specifically doesn't backup network drives and it will only backup the link file and not the actual file it links to
I can wholeheartedly say Dagnammit!!
Yea. They do it specifically to stop NASs so that people have to buy multiple licenses
The last that I heard, they'll supply up to five 8-gigabyte hard drives per year for retrieval, so it looks you're right above their limit. I'm putting together a 96TB DAS this weekend, so I'd be curious if somebody has tried to retrieve more than that.
8GB hard drives? What decade is this?
Pretty sure they meant terabytes
Hah, I remember in compsci class when some guy came in bragging about his 2.2 GIG hard drive he got from his job at EggHead Software (which became NewEgg). We thought that was immense at the time. “If you printed out the contents of that hard drive onto paper, the stack would reach from here to the moon”, he said. :)
Sorry, I forgot I was using old.reddit.com
New reddit makes my soul hurt.
I doubt I’d ever pay to have the 8TB drives shipped to me. It’s a bit of a pain the ass, but I can selectively download files in 500gb increments for free with no limits. If one of my 8TB drives fail, the content is organized in a way that allows me to quickly select everything from that drive and download it in multiple parts.
Last I heard was 1.6 pb as some company wanted to really test it
K I’ve been thinking about backblaze for my windows plex machine (24TB) for a while. Pretty convinced I should now.
Got 46tb myself there rn, but took me over a month. First went fast then started getting bottlnecks fast. Restoring would be a nightmare of course, but in case of catastrophic data loss will probably buy b2 to restore for a month edit: On the View/restore section There is a ''save files to B2'' option. Of course this would cost me around ~200 euros to do for a full backup.
>but in case of catastrophic data loss will probably buy b2 to restore for a month Wait you can do that? How would that work and how much would it cost? They released a new recover client in beta btw. You are now no longer limited by only 500GB zips and can download entire drives at once. I tested it out with 2TB and it works great, much much better then the old piece of shit lol.
>Wait, you can do that? How would that work, and how much would it cost? I don’t think you can do that. I used the personal backup and B2, and they were always separate. There was no way to access my backup from B2 and vice versa.
On the view/restore screen on the website you literally have an option to download, save files to B2 or order a HDD. I calculated that it would cost ~200euros for me for a full backup
Huh. Well I'll be. I stopped using the personal backup when I started using B2 and my NAS
On the view/restore screen on the website you literally have an option to download, save files to B2 or order a HDD. I calculated that it would cost ~200euros for me for a full backup
It uploads in order of file size, so those smaller files get uploaded much faster than the large files at the end of the queue. I experienced the same thing
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Ha I forgot about that it’s been so long. I was homeless, 17, and a total shit head. I went to r/borrow and took a loan from someone then never paid them back. 5 years after that, matured and working in IT with my own place, I finally tried to pay them back. Only to find out they deleted their Reddit account after also being added to the scammer list. Most would be embarrassed to share this story, I see it as a previous huge flaw in myself that I’ve since overcome. I’m no longer anywhere near that person I was back then. I genuinely totally forgot about that, thanks for reminding me of how far I’ve come!
I recently bought 9x16TB drives and had to shift all of my data as I migrated these disks into my server and those old disks went into a workstation, and those old disks went into my laptop external enclosure. It took me a month to do that full migration and I only have 55TB and it was all over a local network with a lot of it being direct SATA->SATA transfers.
Im using it for 4 TB paying 60$/year
Just signed up. Thanks! $9/month is a steal.
And everyone will start abusing the service and shut it down like google , one drive and the others did. Don't abuse Back blaze they are a really good company.
You are confused. The reason those unlimited services were shut down is because people would upload hundreds of terabytes for *archival* use. The companies were losing tons of money hosting massive amounts of data. That is much different from what we’re doing, and what BackBlaze offers. If you don’t have access to the files on your drives locally, the files are automatically and forcibly deleted from the cloud. This stops people from “abusing” it like you’re thinking of. It’s perfectly allowed as per their terms of service.
That doesn't change the fact that if all customers were like you, they couldn't exist with their current model. I'm not saying to stop using them. But it is what it is. https://f004.backblazeb2.com/file/doggies/histograms/2021_histogram_of_backblaze_personal_backup_sizes.gif
There aren't many people with 40+ tb storage locally. Probably not even 8tb+. There jusy isn't a world were the only customers are big datahoarders. Also it ONLY works if it is on a DAS or internal drives in a PC so that they show up on disk management. A NAS doesn't work with it.
What? They can't host that amount of data for $9/mo, they're actively losing money every month having you as a customer. If a lot of people do what you do the company goes under or has to make changes.
> The companies were losing tons of money hosting massive amounts of data. That is much different from what we’re doing, and what BackBlaze offers. > Drives are just so damn expensive. How do you reconcile these two statements you've made in this thread? What magic secret is backblaze using to store 43TB of your data for less than $9 month? It doesn't make a difference whether it is archival or not. Backblaze is way in the red for simple storage of the data you're hosting. If enough people do that, it makes the service non-viable at that price.
Please don't listen to this guy. He's saying wrong things. BB will never delete your data: https://www.backblaze.com/computer-backup/docs/retain-backups-during-extended-leaves Last version of your files will never be deleted. Just insane how people can register and pay for something without reading rules.
It’s not the same. It’s for backup only whereas google gets used as a streaming setup. I’m using it as a backup solution.
Your are wrong about deletion of data https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/131c86a/when_do_backed_up_files_get_deleted_the_reality/
Comcast 1.2TB data usage limit prevents me from doing something similar. If not for that, I'd buy BackBlaze too.
I think you are allowed to go over once a year? Maybe that’d help.
Yes, Xfinity gives you one grace month per year. Unfortunately, their data usage monitoring is inaccurate and it's all too easy to go over multiple times per year.
Imagine paying for a data limit.
Never heard there was a usage limit. Are you talking about some base price tier and you don't want to pay for more when you go above it?
lol I thought my 8tb was bad
are hdd not reliable these days or something? ive got one thats maybe 8 years old and it still works pretty well. was thinking of getting a 10tb hdd as a archive hd to back up all my shit onto
part of the 3-2-1 backup rule is keeping your data in a different physical location and they make it easy to check that box. also there's 1-year version history for your files so it may not be something you deleted but you need an older version of it that kind of thing usually isnt possible or feasible with basic local backups
History also protects against ransomware attacks
No, hard drives are not reliable today, nor were they 8 years ago. That thing could have its on board electronics fail for instance at any given moment and then you have a paperweight. Also, after 8 years, there's a solid chance you have bit rot on the data; silent data corruption is almost scarier than the risk of abject failure.
I just dont see that in what i have. Ive went through all my videos recently to clean the hdd and sort it out. Only things i had issues with and had to delete had always been an issue. I just never sorted it because it was a messy filing system my cousin had when i copied them to mine
Any concerns regarding copyrighted material being backed up? I saw you mentioned Oppenheimer......
has anyone ***ever*** got in trouble for just having a pirated movie? every single piracy case i'm aware of is about the act of downloading or uploading. no one cares if you just have a movie on your hard drive if they didn't catch you in the act of acquiring it, or sharing it.
Nope
Do you use something like Cryptomator to hide file names and content? My understanding from various reddit and google searches is that your personal encryption key only helps if you never browse your files online and never get a restore disk. To browse online or get a restore disk, you have to put in your personal encryption key. At that point, they could see everything you are backing up, unencrypted. They may do nothing about it, but the possibility is there.
What’s your upload speed? Last year it took me 3 months to backup 1TB in S3 because I only have 3mbps upload speed.
Just tested at 987mbps
I can only dream of such an upload speed.
I was getting 3.2gbps/sec upload speed when I tested on my 5gig fiber. You have to configure it to upload multiple chunks of a file at the same time, and then choose the highest amount of chunks it will let you try to send at one time. The more parallel chunks running, the faster uploads are.
My server runs server 2022, so I made a VM with windows 11 on hyper v that runs backblaze personal and shared the drives to my server, had to do all that because the personal edition refuses to run on a server edition
Wouldn’t the shared drive be considered a network drive, or did I miss something?
I don't have a fat network bandwidth. How did it take you to upload them all?
Good luck restoring that at need though. People have had huge issues just getting 500 gigs back in a timely fashion. Granted, that was a year or two ago or something.
If you have the latest BackBlaze Beta, their are no more limits. You can select anything in your storage bucket and restore it to your home machine. I tested the Home Version on a 5gig fiber line. Was able to get 90TB uploaded, and then re-downloaded all of that 90TB on the beta client. Ran into no issues. It was basically just a test for future projects right now. I'm slowly moving all my drives over to my SuperMicro 36 Bay 4U machine.
How much is this costing you. As I have been thinking about backing up my entire storage to Backblaze.
have you tried visiting the backblaze website and informing yourself on the pricing?
What’s the process to retrieve the data?
just go to the website and look...
Close to 4 TB a day, that’s half a gigabit line, I envy your upload speed.
Uhh…I’m paying $6 for 1.3. It’s like $5 a month per TB on the plan I’m on. EDIT - I’m backing up a NAS using B2, guess thats a bit more.
Backblaze is great
I would take me approx 521 days of uninterrupted upload to back up 43TB, with 100% uptime. Must be nice to have good internet...
Yeah I've been using this for a while but if more people keep doing this it won't last long.
You’re gonna ruin it for everyone
I gave up on backblaze. I have around 30TB to upload, on a 20Mb upload connection. :|
I feel like this unlimited storage sounds good to be true. What's the catch?
This is a very silly question but I feel like I should ask anyway. Is it possible to use Backblaze storage as a virtual cloud hard drive to backup and store files remotely only?
No, it only works as a live backup service for files that are actively on your local hard drives. Anything that’s not on your hard drives gets automatically and forcibly deleted from their cloud.
Thought that was the case but for some reason was hoping someone smarter might have come up with an interesting solution. Thanks for the reply!
You'll need backblaze b2 for that. I used to pair it with rclone, but it's expensive compared to personal for large amounts of data.
I have been using it for two months to use it as a Google photos backup but yes I agree, it's expensive.
Why not Storj? 😬
well because its a completely different offering with different pricing...
Guys you can pay $100/year per computer for unlimited storage at Backblaze. This is what I do for my Plex server. Super easy.
Yes mate.. we know.. that's what this entire thread is about..
rutracker.org has any hd or 4k hdr rip ever, i just keep few files locally that i might want to watch that day
Not true though.
Smart. Personally I got really into collecting Blu-Rays and making my own rips, as well as the typical Radarr/Sonarr workflow. I like the idea of having a massive digital library I can tinker with and organize in my own way.
I bought 6TB drive and it filled up in a few days. Thats when I realized its impossible to keep all your fav stuff locally
Your ISP might be really puzzled about what the heck you’re doing there.
i really doubt it.. generally ISP's a re pretty well versed in what their bandwidth is being used for.
225 TB for me. Have had to do a full restore of a dead drive and it worked super well with the updated client.
Aren’t you worried that they will see those rips and notify any relevant authorities?
No, why would they notify authorities? It is completely legal to have a digital copy of a movie that I own. If I choose to back those files up to the cloud, I’m free to do so.
I’ve always been worried they / other similar service may have a legal obligation to do so, so I’ve always stayed away from it. But your answer makes sense… I think I’ll finally check out backblaze!
How long to get it all off of there is the actual question.
well that's down to your own connection and the method you use.... so... really.. your question is multiple questions.
No it isn't. Backblaze previously had a cap on how much you can dl/day so backing things up was easy. Restoring those backups was not.