How often do you consume the stuff you pirate? How do you avoid "hoarding"?
Asking mostly because I have fuckloads of video courses, plus a number of movies, that I have yet to even check if the content is as good as their titles imply and I really feel like I'm mostly hoarding this stuff because I have no fucking clue.
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Do you have an offsite backup? Or do you only backup specifics? Like 10-20% of that?
I do not have full proper offsites... yet.
I run proxmox, so if it's live on a server it's probably on my ~70TB (really 40*2TB ssd) ceph cluster. Which makes 3 copies across the 5 boxes, so it's more like 23TB of usable space for all my vms and such. The 400TB of storage is Truenas is really closer to 300TB after all the losses in raidz vdev and hot spares and what have you, there's 30x 16TB SAS seagates in the box, of which 2 are hot spares and 7 are parity for raidz1... For things that are slow or linear loads (a movie file could be a good example of that type of workload!). Backups of the the proxmox boxes... and mass stored stuff, 99% of it I could easily obtain again if I had to. Although I'd probably be pretty flustered about it.
Truly important stuff gets written to 100GB bluray(s) (specifically m-disc blurays) and put in the safe. I do this probably about once a year or so...
My dad was in the process of setting up his own cluster that's running 14TB drives rather than my 16TB... When he's finally done I intend to requisition probably about half of his space for offsite storage (maybe more). I'm figuring about 100TB of space is what I'll have there. Maybe more. He's about 65 miles away from me, different electrical grid and all.
So the count as it stands now. Everything running has at least 2 copies on 2 mediums (ceph cluster, and spinning rust). My "linux iso" repositories only live on the spinning rust storage, but is low priority anyway. Super important highly sensitive shit lives on at least 3 copies and 3 mediums, although one of the mediums may be out of date and none is offsite... Though it's rare I add to this category. There is plans for adding another copy of data, offsite on harddrive storage for most of my dataset as it is now.
Truenas usages:
And here's Ceph
Your setup: goals.
Where are you sourcing your hardware? Decommissioned enterprise DC stuff or are there options outside of the enterprise space that enable this type of setup?
Ebay and decommission. I got really lucky on my SSDs, those were all from a decommission. Company was going to pay an ITAD for destruction. I picked it all up and wiped it on site. The rest are relatively cheap hardware, supermicros and such... but with enough of them you can build a resilient cluster.
A lot of my stuff is Ebay... I did recently purchase a new rack as probably the only "new" item I have in regards to my setup. The old one had issues... and I didn't want to deal with thrifting broken racks anymore. And I needed a taller 45U rack rather than a 42U standard rack... Also the more depth means I can accommodate the 60 bay server in the future if it comes to that.
But things like 40gbps networking... ebay. The proxmox servers are decomissioned. the truenas server was ebay. switches was ebay.. Oh! The firewalls... That was new purchase. I am stupid lucky to live somewhere with 8gbps fiber. I needed real horsepower to push that with IDS/IPS enabled. So this was a new purchase from supermicro. The SAS spinning rust drives I picked up on Reddit homelabsales or something like that a while back. PDU's were ebay... UPS were ebay... Expansion batteries were craigslist. Most cables were new from FS
Previous versions of my rack were government liquidation/auctions. My dad has a lot of that equipment now. I found one auction that was 1400$ that was basically a whole racks worth of shit... most of it pretty usable 12 and 13th gen dells. And another auction for 600$ that had a dell m1000e with some 4TB of DDR4 ram...
But you can do a lot of this shit with a cluster of little N100 boxes if you really wanted. I just happened to get my hands on enterprise level equipment... So I joined the Romans...
This is a detailed breakdown so thank you. I guess the tl;dr is that it's a combo of ebay, luck, and filling in the gaps. Sounds about as complicated as I was expecting if I'm honest but I appreciate you taking the time to write it out.