A lot of my files were shitty 480p versions of movies from the Napster days. Now they’re all 1080p, with a few 720p exceptions (mainly tv series episodes). All in all 500 something files in total. Now just watching uTorrent slowly download them all. Hopefully my VPN keeps the eyes off of me…
Sonarr/Radarr will do this for you automagically for most TV and Movies, never have to visit a dodgy torrent site again.
Started setting it up years ago and over time re-downloaded all those shitty yify rips with full fat bluray remuxes wherever available and the highest quality possible otherwise. Hit 100tb pretty quickly lol.
I have my rig set up to automatically upgrade to bluray remuxes when available, then once they are older than 1 month and over a certain filesize they get automatically compressed with a fairly slow, low crf H265-10bit encode with FileFlows to cut their size roughly in half while still being visually perfect on the normal TVs, all 4k content stays untouched for the main theatre.
What do you use for storage?
mostly unraid, some ZFS ontop for high priority storage, a couple of TB of SSDs on top of that for caching and ingest.
Just added it all up, its 110TB at the moment, with another 16tb to add in a couple of weeks.
How much did that setup cost you?
Not sure it’s more than 10years of slow upgrades. Nothing compared to the true datahoarders out there
Too much probably.
You’re crazy and I envy your setup so much.
I’m just starting, with a mere 4 TB storage, but I want to learn how it works before investing more money
That’s why unraid was (in my opinion) a good starting point, you can use whatever disks you have regardless of size and speed and pool them all together pretty easily. Stick jellyin or plex or both on it and you have a great starting server.
I’ll support this
If your goal is to set up a media server, a few services, and a storage for non-essential files*, it is hard to beat unraid. Free is obviously better, but it has the best support for mismatched drive sizes and, arguably, the highest percentage of “usable” space. Try to wait for a sale (there are quite a few per year) but it is also a lifetime license so…
There are performance implications and I never trust any solution that can only survive two drive failures. Especially when recovery involves heavy reads and writes. Because drives tend to fail in groups and stressing a drive on its last legs is never a good idea.
*: Which, to be fair, should be how any locally stored file is treated. Unless you have it backed up off site in at least one location (preferably two), it is not backed up. Which is why my media collection is YOLO but my (encrypted) documents and personal photos go into a cloud storage bucket on a weekly basis.
I was thinking of YOLOing my media collection too, but at the same time I’m scared of downloading lots of things and then losing everything and having to download everything from scratch again.
Yeah. For me, the vast majority of my media collection are rips of the blu-rays and DVDs I have in a box in the closet. So recovery is just annoying. There are a few somewhat obscure shows (or shows with massively generic or reused names) that I might never be able to find again but… whatever.
But I definitely have a few porn videos I found on DC++ ten (… twenty?) years ago that I have never been able to find again after accidentally deleting the “Special Textures” folder of my Unreal Tournament directory.
What is your general setup? Do you have a server with everything in docker running? On top of proxmox or OS? It then backups to unraid or do you only use the unraid for everything?
I’m on my way in setting up home server with storage for a few services but still in planning
Most of it just runs on my unraid box, bunch of Docker containers and a vm for a couple of windows apps I needed running. I also run a small secondary proxmox server with some home automation amd networking stuff that I wanted to stay online when the server is off-line for updates or maintenance.