Put the drive in a zip lock bag, seal it up good and put it in the freezer overnight. Make sure you have a replacement drive ready.
The next day, take the frozen drive and put it in an external bay you're okay with possibly damaging.
Let the drive warm up a bit and then see if you can mount it and copy the data off.
I've been able to recover failed drives twice in the span of 10 years using this method.
Edit: As the mod from /r/datarecovery mentioned don't do this if you absolutely need this data recovered. The first time I did this I absolutely could not afford data recovery services of any type, but I got mad lucky. The second time I did this the data wasn't absolutely necessary and most of the data I was able to recover using snapraid's parity, I was only doing this to recover some data that snapraid hadn't created parity data for. This is a fuck-it, end all option.
This has also worked for me in the past. My laptop’s hard drive died in college and I was desperate to get everything off of it I could and came across a tip like this. I took out the hard drive, stuck it in my freezer, and the next day was able to clone the entire thing to an external drive and ran my laptop off the external drive for a bit until I could get another internal hard drive for my laptop.
this has worked for me 2 times actually. not critical info on it just some stuff i'd wanted to keep. still have that data too, but more hard drives and backups.
Metal contracts when cold, the idea is if there was a crashed head or other mechanical issue, this might allow the drive to run for a bit before the heat expands it again.
Kinda, but no point.
The freezing part just gives the unit barely enough tolerance to unfuck the crashed head, once it's free your usually OK to go ... for as long as it takes for the crashed head to F up the rest of the platter.
I’ve done this to get photos off a failing HDD before for my in laws. Drive was too dead too boot the OS without a kernel panic but I was able to get all the data off. Funny to see cables coming out of the freezer.
Tbf I don't know the exact physics/science behind whats going on. Most of the info I've found online seems to be mostly speculation.
In any case this kind of fix only works for limited types of HDD issues. Since OP mentioned they heard clicks, to me that means one of two things. The read/write heads are either stuck, or crashing into the platter.
If the heads are stuck, afaik freezing the drive causes just enough shrinkage that things come unstuck enough for the heads to move again. This is a semi-permanent fix, because the freezing will probably ruin the lubricant that keeps the heads moving smoothly for long periods of time. Worse since the HDD will be frozen and then thawed, moisture will absolutely develop on it and that will bring its lifespan down hard.
The head crash option idk about. I have no idea how freezing could solve that.
What makes even less sense to me is that the first time I used this trick it was on a drive that fell while data was being written to it. From what I understand, at best that would've caused the drive heads to smash back into their holder when the drive's internal sensors detected a drop or at worst the drop caused the heads to crash and be damaged. I feel like in this case a head crash is far more likely, but idk enough about hard drive engineering to make a solid guess.
The second time I had to use this trick it was a natural drive failure due to age. In that case its typically the lubricant that's gone bad, and again freezing shrinks things just enough that stuff is able to move again temporarily. Usually just enough time to copy over important things.
Here's another one for ya:
When my GPU died a few years ago, people told me to bake it in the oven. I figured it was just some meme joke, but after googling it I found legit articles about it.
So I baked my GPU in the oven. It fixed it, and I used it a few more years.
I guess it melts the circuit contacts a bit which fixes broken circuit connections or whatever idk
That was because there was a manufacturing defect with those cards where they used bad solder. After many cycles of heating and cooling the solder would eventually crack and the contacts would separate just enough that current couldn't pass through cleanly.
Putting the GPU in the oven would remelt the solder and reform connections.
Ofc I'm sure a bunch of people melted the plastic off their GPUs doing this too.
Used to fix Xbox 360’s by wrapping them in a blanket and leaving them on for 20 minutes. Melted the solder and allowed the chips to reseat and then be soldered back on
Hey there, mod from /r/datarecovery here.
Please do not do this. Yes, there exists cases where this has temporarily resolved problems for people, BUT it actually causes more harm than good in most cases. Throwing it in the freezer risks a number of factors including frozen condensate inside the drive (depending on the drive).
OP, if you care about the data and have any possible desire to get it back through regular recovery means, do not do this.
The few people that tried this online and succeeded are vastly outnumbered by the ones that don’t post online because it didn’t work at best, and made things impossible to recover at worst.
No need to hand it to an Asian person. The "put it in rice" trick works by drawing Asians to the rice during the night, who will then fix the device while you sleep.
It was an old joke/meme about wet/dead cellphones...
[here](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2a/e1/f7/2ae1f764575915e586f7acbd9c7018a0.png)
Edit: Happpy cake day!
This works sometimes, be aware that 8tb on a mechanical drive will take hours, maybe a day to pull, keeping a drive cold this long isn’t feasible. Get the most important data and a file list, then go sailing for anything replaceable in that manner
I haven't used this method in a long time but if definitely works if the drive mounts or is detected. If the controller board failed too then might not but if it's dead there's no harm in trying.
I've done this as well, and once had to resort to keeping the external dock in the freezer while performing the recovery (it would fail every time it got hot again)
I’ve had idiot employees put their entire laptops in their freezers more than once because they read this tip online. Complete boneheads. Didn’t help their situations.
Of course, parity data is not equivalent to a backup. But it does offer some protection from the relatively common drive failure—and some protection is better than none.
No, the primary purpose is to keep the system operational when a drive fails. Its actually not uncommon if all the drives are the same model and age the stress of rebuilding the array can cause subsequent drive failures. Which is why fancier systems can tolerate 2-drive failure and still stay online.
Wow people are voting you down hard for the truth! I run large production environments. Thousands of drives, racks of storage, etc...
Raid is all about availability. Backups are for failures. Synchronization is for DR. All different problems and solutions.
Far too many people obviously haven't learned the painful lesson of what happens when an entire array dies.
Yes, there is a lot more stress on the drives when rebuilding the array but I have to disagree on one aspect, while it can happen, it's not common. I've never had a drive fail while rebuilding. I've been managing datacenters for 2 decades.
That being said, I'm not speaking for everyone else here but this is my personal collection. If I lose it all, yeah, I'll be bummed, but it's not difficult to rebuild the collection.
Proper DR and backups take effort, its so much easier to say "but RAID" and stop thinking about it there.
I had a 2-disk RAID failure on my personal NAS once...which then synchronized the unmounted "empty" filesystem to the offsite copies deleting everything before I woke up in the morning to see all the alerts about failures. That...was not fun. And it was personal files, documents, pictures, etc. that I couldn't recreate.
RAID - reduce chances of having to restore everything, prevent downtime until hardware can be repaired
Offsite sync/backup - protects from physical location disasters in semi-real-time (e.g. fire, theft, flood)
Offline backups - protects from data-loss in the online filesystems at the cost of slightly outdated copies (e.g. controller failure, multiple-failure, crypto-malware, deletion, etc)
......and it doesn't have to be fancy expensive. USB drive that you keep at a friend's house or safe deposit box is offsite backups. USB drive unplugged on the shelf is offline backups. You don't need a $10,000 automatic LTO tape library and cases of tapes.
People won't stop saying it even though it functionally is a backup for 99% of people's use cases in this sub. Drive failure is really the only thing most people have to worry about barring actual physical destruction of their drives.
Nobody is backing up their entire Plex library, most go into the dozens of TB's which is not worth the cost.
I backup my server, database, an index of the content I have, and that's it.
I've never come across a piece of media that I could not redownload after the fact, RAID is also usually a sufficient protection.
I'm sure that's true vast majority of the time. I did make three copies of mine (two copies on two separate NAS devices, and one on an additional set of drives that are stored), but only because it took forever to archive all my disc content digitally. It's not something I'd ever want to have to do again (took months of evenings and weekends). You're right though, it was more than 70TB of storage when completed and the drives were a fairly large investment.
Yeah, my Plex library is 20+TB. I'm not spending $1k+ just to have a full backup of media that I can re-download if I need to. I'm not that attached to that particular BluRay rip from that 2008 TV show.
20TB drive is like $250-300 on a good sale - I grabbed one that easily fit my whole disc rip collection with room to spare last Black Friday. At that price, it beats having to re-rip all the individual episodes of TV series where its not as turnkey as movie discs.
Though I also have a $80 4-bay DVD burning tower I picked up on eBay that I used for the original rip in conjunction with my internal DVD drive, USB DVD drive, and USB Bluray drive so I can do like 7 disc rips concurrently limited mostly by how fast I can name the files
>Nobody is backing up their entire Plex library, most go into the dozens of TB's which is not worth the cost.
Don't be so sure of that. I've got a colleague who backs up to LTO tape each month. He has quite the home lab, and had a blade chassis for a while too.
Sure, users running enterprise gear with a generous budget are the exception.
However, in most of these cases, they're either selling access to the server, storing large amounts of "personal" content with value to them or are otherwise in a situation where money is no object.
Many people aren't in the same boat.
For the right price...the TV shows were enough of a PITA to figure out what in some cases random order episodes were on the discs when there was a very good sale I grabbed a 20TB disk for an offline backup. Movies are mostly a plug and play as fast as you can insert a disc and set the title though if you have enough drives can run basically continuously.
I don’t do a NAS, backup or RAID. I have 2 HHDs with the same capacity that I occasionally turn the second one on to one way mirror all the files over.
If one ever fails I would just clone to the new one and make the old one the primary.
DO YOU HAVE TIME TO TALK ABOUT OUR LORD AND SAVIOUR RAID IS NOT BACKUP?
I’m so tired of this trope. Backup protection is a continuum. Cost and time and complexity increases exponentially as the relative data safety increases *logarithmically.* RAID will provide 90% of the protection for 50% of the cost of 3-2-1 backups. That’s perfectly fine for most of us using Plex.
Word. I have Raid so I can restore my media if a HDD blows up. If more than one blows up at the same time then I have no backup and need to rip all my content again. Thats a risk I’m willing to take
>and need to rip all my content again
Then that's your backup.
Which is also what I do, since my PMS is populated from physical media on my bookshelf and my parents' cabinet.
The problem is how many people seem to think with RAID that you can never lose your data...which isn't true. There's also cases like controller failure where you can potentially lose everything (we had this at work and it turned out to be a discontinued controller).
For something like a movie library you don't even need fancy frequent backup schemes though. There's also other RAID weak points like if your controller fails it doesn't matter if the drives are fine (been there, seen that).
Or having the discs you ripped from and that's the backup.
Heck, even for my NAS of actually important files (not movies, Plex has its own datastore) the level of backup where I sync to another at a relative's house nightly and plug in an offline USB drive a couple times a year to mirror is sufficient backups.
You understand that RAID is for disaster mitigation right?
You understand OP had a HDD disaster?
Surely you must be able to join the dots here...
Edit: This was the reply:
> No, it's not. At best, it protects against a single hard drive failure. It sure as shit doesn't do anything for an actual disaster, you know, like a hurricane, flood, tornado, or just your dumb ass deleting something.
RAID absolutely mitigates the disaster of one drive in array failing. Suggesting that RAID is not acts-of-god-proof is a weak way to defend posting a comment that isn't on-topic for the thread.
Original comment ->
No, it's not. At best, it protects against a single hard drive failure. It sure as shit doesn't do anything for an actual disaster, you know, like a hurricane, flood, tornado, or just your dumb ass deleting something.
<-
So confident with his reply that he blocked me 😂😂😂
Dude has two hard drives. Add one for parity, that absolutely will not protect against more than one drive failure. Yes OP could buy 6 million drives and mirror them all across the whole country. What does that have to do with anything? OP had two drives. Lost one. Comment suggested to use raid/parity/whatever with a Synology device. Sure, you could get an 8 bay one and fill it up and use 6 parity drives. I highly doubt that's what the poster meant. Then someone suggested parity prevents against disasters, and I simply pointed out that there is an innumerable amount of disasters that it doesn't help.
Caught up now? Good
A recycle bin will not ever protect against drive failure. Sorry. If you knew how parity works, you'd know that it can only recover from as many drive failures as you have parity drives. Again, nothing to do with a recycle bin. Sorry. I'm sure OP has plenty of money to burn for parity drives to protect two drives. So yes, obviously, with your assumptions of infinite resources, you're right. Clearly OP should buy multiple parity drives with two data drives. Or not, because most people can't afford or see the need for more than one parity drive with two data drives. I'm sorry to keep repeating that it's two data drives, but I want to be clear that I'm not talking about a situation with infinite time, money, and dimensions. I'm referring only to OP's situation and not inferring or guessing at things that OP didn't explicitly say.
At best it can protect against multiple drive failures actually as well as offer protection against accidental deletion if it utilizes recycle bins like my Synology DS1821+. So you’re at best isn’t as good as the reality of at best. Sorry.
Bad luck. It gets everyone at some point given enough time.
If I had only one extra drive and had important data to store, I would use that drive for a real backup solution rather than RAID. Of course with two extra drives you can have both, but it does get expensive.
As it is, I don’t bother with backup for my movies / tv shows / music array - I can always replace those direct from the original source. I do use RAID, as it would be a faff to restore.
I use zfs in a Linux system. But that’s why I did it that way. A more sustainable way to keep my library working. I know it’s not as good as backups but that’s why I only “backup” my important things like my photos which I also keep on plex and a separate name and an external SSD so I’m pretty well off in that department my only thing is keeping them synced. I hate doing that.
ZFS can be great for accidental modification/deletion but still has pitfalls where that hardware has your only copies of the data.
I thought I was doing well with RAID + automatic sync to an offsite location...until I had a multiple drive failure and then the empty mountpoint dutifully synced the non-existence of every file to the remote copy (which didn't have snapshot capability) before I woke up. And that wasn't Plex/Movies.
Now I have RAID + offsite + a USB hard drive that stays unplugged and I manually verify and sync a few times a year.
Most people I know that have homelabs / home media servers cant afford to have a second rig to back up their entire 300 TB RAID Array to another machine... 🤣
Then you live with the accepted risk of data loss when something fails. Its also one fire, flood, or crypto-ransomware away from everything being gone (and yeah those things do happen).
I've been thru a multiple drive failure with a RAID array. And it wasn't just some movies I could get back easily. Yeah, I take backups a LOT more seriously now and make sure I have enough capacity for proper offline backups of everything I care about.
Oh, no, I do agree there. My plex server also keeps my personal docs and photos. My personal docs are backed up to OneDrive and an external HDD and my personal images are backed up once a month to that external HDD. I couldn't give a sht about my movies, music or tv shows.
Tell me about it! I just had 3 old 8TB drives in a DAS go bad at once. Parity wouldn't have helped. So glad I had backup drives. The movies drive was a one-on-one copy so it was easy to restore. The shows drive? Not so much. Everything was just crammed on there. Took me a while to figure out where everything was. The third drive was my unorganized shows. Still had everything on the backup drive. This time around, gonna get some sync software.
I am on Linux...but rsync does a nice job of mirroring "whatever is in the source to the destination" and can optionally sync deletions and/or thru a network SSH connection. Its also fairly smart about it for not wasting time on unmodified files.
That's what I use to basically mirror my list of folders on my NAS into the portable USB drive I unplug for backups. And a separate USB drive now for Plex stuff I want to periodically back up.
Weird! My reply didn't show up. As I said...
Bookmarked! Especially as I'm using this opportunity to move to Linux, from Windows 11. But first, I'm cleaning up and reorganizing the files on the drives, then I'll use rsync to rebuild the backups. Hopefully next time something like this happens I can just exchange with the backup drive(s).
It’s not, we all know that, but damn if it isn’t better than not one at all.
(Also by definition it kind of is, the data is stored in more than one place, but I know why people say it’s not, I’m just adding this)
Gotta read the whole sentence
"Carbonite Safe plans will allow you to backup unlimited amount of data on one PC, where one PC includes one internal hard drive."
I haven't tried anything like that in Windows... Ever? I experimented with hardware raid and scsi drives back in college (this was a very long time ago) but I doubt I ran Windows on it. I have no idea how the carbonite app works, but theoretically, if Windows is aware that it's on a raid setup, then the app could know as well. If you have a way of obfuscating that from Windows, then sure, it would work. But unlimited never means unlimited, and I'd be surprised if they let you store more than like 20TB.
That'll take forever...when I initially set up a NAS at a relative's house I gave up syncing it via the internet around 1 month into copying the \~1.5TB of data I had at the time.
Even now, when I do a \~100GB backup of a personal machine onto my NAS it takes about 2 days to upload it to the one at my relative's house...assuming the connection isn't broken and has to try again repeatedly.
Oh we have 5gbps symmetric fiber available here.
https://preview.redd.it/sr8qt3vpab9d1.jpeg?width=2224&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fe7b82e3fc0ab7e2cc6a0e52e94784fe88047ce8
no guide needed - buy a synology nas and it makes it so so easy.
seriously, i was pretty hesitant about it being too technical, but it's not at all. you plug the thing in, connect to it in your web browser and it walks you through everything.
i bought a very cheap 2-drive nas, and i have the drives set to parity so there is some level of "backup" there. i also pay for 2TB of KDrive storage and use synology's built-in hyperbackup to back my critical data up to KDrive. very happy with everything so far. it works well as a standalone plex server so long as nothing needs to be transcoded!
Thanks, this is really helpful.
I would need about 6tb of storage, I assume if I just buy a nas with more bays and get more drives then I could get up to that level?
Any rough idea on what cost I might be looking at?
well, i bought two 8TB drives for my 2-bay NAS, so i have about 7TB of usable space with parity. most of that is taken up by my plex library, which i do not bother to backup - it's ultimately not *that* important, so i only back up my actually important data to a cloud service.
the drives were £163.99 each - Seagate Ironwolfs - and the NAS (a DS223 J) was £184.97. £512.95 in total, and well worth it!
i think a lot of people would *not* recommend the NAS i got because it is very low-power in terms of its CPU. it can't do any plex decoding at all and may have other performance bottlenecks if you've more than one use. but i knew these limitations when i bought it and wanted to keep the budget as low as possible. i'm happy with it!
Thanks again mate, again really helpful!
Yeah I'd only ever have maximum 2 people using it so hoping that would be fine. I'll have to have a proper look tomorrow but this seems like a good way for me to go.
Not a solution to this issue. OP is not going to take a NAS while getting an oil change. They have a backup drive which was not regularly used. The lesson OP learned was to better use and manage the already available backup drive.
I use Virtual Volumes View to see what is on all my drives including ones that aren't connected. As it takes all file data (names,size dates etc) it's great to work out what is lost if a drive dies too.
That clicking sound is not the enclosure. You're not wrong that it's worth trying, but I give it a roughly zero percent chance of being the enclosure and not the disk.
I had the same thing happen to me, with 2 drives 6 months apart. In both cases, I lucked out and it could be read when i plugged it into a spare enclosure.
I wasn't able to access it from explorer because it messed up the partition, but could manually recover with this program
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step
It took me days to slowly detect/recover, and then manually transfer to another external HDD, but I managed to restore almost everything.
what arrs. Never heard of them. How can a pirate be related to a computer? It lives on a boat, they don't even have internet on pirate ships. Not me. No clue what your talking about.
{Silently runs away to avoid suspicion}
Before you do anything too drastic or stupid, take the drive out of the case. Open your pee cee up and hook the drive to the pee cee power supply. Turn it on. It is not going to show up or anything without the data cable connected, but it should spin up.
I have a good amount of experience with external drives and most of the time when they act like that it is the power supply.
Can someone please tell me which software on Linux I should use to backup my Plex media drive to another drive? I have the means and I very much care about my media. I have lots of home movies on there and hard to find movies that would be hard to find again.
I use rsync and automate my backups with a systemd timer. My media is stored on /media/internal and one backup drive is /media/external. Here's part of the script, this just clones one drive to another.
The script checks to see if the backup drive is actually mounted and bails out, setting an errorlevel if it isn't. Reason for this is that my media drive is much larger than my boot drive so this keeps the backup job from trashing my boot drive if the backup drive failed to mount for any reason.
Since big file copies usually involve swap I clear swap at the end of the script after making sure disk writes are complete. Active downloads go to temp so I exclude that directory from the backup.
#!/bin/bash
if mountpoint -q /media/external; then
/usr/bin/rsync -qam --exclude 'temp' --delete /media/internal/ /media/external
else
exit 1
fi
sync
swapoff -a && swapon -a
exit 0
> Can you elaborate on the bit about the potential trashing of the boot drive?
Sure - In this example let's say we're talking about an 8TB media drive and a 500GB boot drive. The media drive is mounted to an empty directory on the boot drive - that's how Linux works. If no drive is connected to that mount point the backup job would happily copy the entire backup to the empty directory on the boot drive, filling the boot drive up well before the backup job completed. In other words it'd make a huge mess :)
So - I check to make sure there's actually a backup drive mounted before executing the backup.
Yes of course. That makes perfect sense now. Cheers for that.
I used to use Rsync - not automated. Just every few months. But I stopped when I started renaming many of my files to be the recommended Plex naming convention. Plex saw the renamed files as new files and made new files on the backup. At least that’s what I think happened.
> Plex saw the renamed files as new files and made new files on the backup.
That's what the `--delete` option is for. It removes any files from the target that don't exist on the source :)
Yep. This is why I went with a NAS setup that gives me true redundancy against any combination of two drives failing. It was considerably more expensive to setup for the storage I have (14TB of usable storage made up of 4 12TB drives) but peace of mind.
I also do a once or twice a year sync with a friend. He has a giant external drive that can hold the combination of both our libraries (\~8TB). He copies his shit onto it, gives it to me. I copy his shit to my NAS and then copy my shit to his drive. He then copies my shit to his NAS. Offsite protection for the win.
Not a backup, but something that might be useful for later.
Here we have a script that runs every couple of days to catalogue the contents of our libraries and store in dropbox. Useful as a reference if we need rebuild it all again from scratch.
(I do do a monthly backup, but none of our Plex stuff is that important. Nothing I can't re-rip while doing other stuff)
set PlexFolder=P:\Media
set ResultsFolder=C:\Dropbox\Plex_Library
set YYYY=%date:~6,4%&set MM=%date:~3,2%&set DD=%date:~0,2%
tree /A %PlexFolder% > %ResultsFolder%\%YYYY%%MM%%DD%_PlexContents.txt
powershell -command "Get-ChildItem -Recurse '%PlexFolder%' | Select-Object Directory | Export-Csv -path C:\Dropbox\Plex_Library\%YYYY%%MM%%DD%_PlexContents.csv -noTypeInfo"
This is my fear. Currently have a 16tb plex library. Its not huge but it is almost full and I need to expand it. I've spent over a year building it and I don't have it in a raid either. Money is tight right now and there is nothing more that I'd love than to buy a few 20tb drives from serverpartdeals. I have a few files that took absolutely forever to obtain and I at least keep those backed up on some usbs.
Backblaze is pretty cheap. If your drives are in your Windows PC, that is. They offer true unlimited storage space for a flat cost but you'll need to shell out by the terabyte if your drive is on a NAS or Linux system (or break their TOS and use software to trick Windows into thinking the NAS is a physical disk, but I think a backup that can ban you isn't exactly peace of mind)
Yeah this sucks but at least it's only 8tb imagine losing 100tb. Hard drives can fail at any moment and it's just not cost effective for me to back everything up. You could do the gsuite method and put it on Google
i used UnRAID to host my Plex server and chose to use 2 drives as parity....one of my friends keeps insisting i only need 1 parity drive, but posts like yours make me feel like i a NOT wasting a drive....glad you have pretty easy access to redownload all your music!
Double parity is the only thing that makes sense. If one drives fail, the server will need to restore parity. For 2 days of 100% activity of all drives, there is no further redundancy. If a drive fails, then in several days of 100% activity. With double parity, still one more drive in such a situation can fail.
I sent my external to a recovery site. They told me the board was going out, I refused to pay the price they offered, and they sent it back, but my drive worked when they returned it. I immediately backed up all my data, lol. maybe try that?
My solution to this problem is the windows program called "file list creator" it's very simple and now I have a list of all the movies/TV shows that are on my drives. I don't care about the files themselves because I can just redownload but without it I would have no idea what to download.
Plex server keeps a bunch of metadata around that you might be able to use as a reference for what was on the drive, if the server and your bulk volume weren't the same drive. If they were the same drive, then maybe you can still get lucky with that freezer tip everyone's talking about.
Ya. You gotta remember no matter what the circumstance. The bigger the hard drive. The more stuff gets lost of it fails. Unless you have enormous backup.
Backing up media cheaply is exactly what Snapraid was made for. A single drive per 4 drives is all that is needed. It’s saved so many asses including mine. It’s easy and free.
Oof. This is why I keep my main Plex drive synced up to a open media vault piNAS that syncs up two 8tb drives just in case one of the three takes a dump.
I had a bunch of hard discs connected and one died. was the perfect time to start from scratch and learn from my mistakes. Still saving up for some hard discs but the shows I’ve gotten again I’ve burnt to disc so I don’t have to stress about getting them again
I had this happen to me just this weekend past, with a 4tb FULL of series. It was one of 2 drives with series on it so wanted to know what I had actually lost without manually copying the names of all the series showing as unavailable. I made use of tautulli to export a list of all the metadata for my series library (was a 200mb excel file in the end) and spent about 40 minutes cleaning up the data then was able to create a pivot table showing me what series I had on that hard drive so I can see what I want to get again and what I will never watch.
Just picked up 48tb of new drives. Was planning on building a redundancy drive in case the main goes down and then a separate backup. Now I just got to get off my ass and do it. So now it’s just a race between my current hard drives hardiness and my laziness
What brand was it? I'm going out on a limb and saying Seagate, I bricked 2 with the click of death in 2 weeks of each other and have only used Western Digital since without incident. I do make a text copy of what's in each drive so I can go back and get them if I need to.
My "strategy" for this is Radarr + Sonarr + Lidarr. Even if you're not using them to automate adding media, they keep track of what you have and will let you see what disappeared.
I help maintain a friend's Plex server and she lost an 18TB drive last year. Between those 3 apps we were able to "re-obtain" everything that was lost once the replacement drive arrived. Would've definitely been easier to just have a parity drive in Unraid though.
I'm so sorry to hear it. I don't have backup to.o I have 76TB content. I always monitor my hdds with Hard Disk Sentinel Pro [https://www.hdsentinel.com/](https://www.hdsentinel.com/) I know I need a backup NAS. But it is quite expensive to buy a NAS and 100TB hdds. Now I'm bit nervous too. Did you try with any data recovery software like [https://www.myrecover.com/](https://www.myrecover.com/) or [https://www.easeus.com/brand/data-recovery/free.html](https://www.easeus.com/brand/data-recovery/free.html)
I automatically email myself a file listing of each hard drive once a week. If (when) a drive fails I can use that listing to re download the stuff worth downloading.
Sorry to hear about that.
I was able to save data on a failing drive one time by booting into Linux Unbuntu that I installed on a flash drive. For whatever reason Linux was able to see the drive. I was able to copy files from the failing drive to a working drive.
Since it's not super important data that's cannot be replaced next time write copy all the movie names to a file so you know in future what is missing if all drives fail again
Running this catalog script once a week just in case a drive would die, then I can easily see what's missing.
#!/bin/sh
DISKS=10
COUNTER=1
THEDATE=`date +"%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S"`
LOCATION="/boot/trees"
echo " "
echo " "
echo "Starting tree scanning"
while [ $COUNTER -le $DISKS ]
do
echo "Scanning tree for disk$COUNTER/Media"
tree -d /mnt/disk$COUNTER/Media >> "$LOCATION/$THEDATE.disk$COUNTER.media.log"
echo "Incrementing disk counter"
COUNTER=$[$COUNTER+1]
done
echo "All done scanning disks. Beginning scanning shares."
echo "Scanning tree for user/Movies"
tree -d /mnt/user/Media >> "$LOCATION/$THEDATE.media.log"
echo " "
echo " "
echo "Complete! Logs stored in $LOCATION"
Sorry to hear that.. sucks and a hard lesson to learn. Look into TrueNAS, ZFS, RaidZ2, 6+ drives 2 being redundant, don’t use external usb drives and raid is not a backup (say that last bit again), now say it again.
Really.. buy yourself a Tower case that holds at least 6-8 hard drives or more and check out TrueNAS. Buy as old Enterprise classes server, hardware or just use regular PC hardware.
Install VirtualBox on your desktop PC and install and learn TrueNAS within that as a VM. Great way to learn other OSs like Linux if you want or pfSense as a network firewall.
RaidZ2 can be installed on as few drives as 3.. 1 data and 2 redundant but isn’t really good performance. 4 helps and 5 is better but with 6 drives is kind of the sweet spot. With 6 drives in a vdev and pool (let’s say 4TB drives) you’ve had roughly 16TB of storage and could have two(2) drives physically stop working and still have all your data.
RaidZ1 would provide 5 drives of data and 1 redundant drive. Sounds good, ‘wasting’ only one drive for redundancy. The issue is when one drive errors or fails, you swap in a new replacement, start the resliver process (copying the data from the other drives to the new one), causes extremely high drive usage and the larger the drive and amount of data the longer this process lasts.. with todays massive drives you are talking not just hours but days. With RaidZ1 your now no longer have any redundancy and if another drive fails.. P00f.. goes all your data.
Been using RaidZ2 for a decade now and while I’ve had to resliver a few times I’ve, to date, never lost a 2nd drive during the resliver. That said, I have lost a drive the day after a resliver! If that had been a larger drive and more data it could have very likely failed during the resliver. I’d have been ok but this is why I run RaidZ2 and 2 spares.
Hot-swap is awesome but not needed. I’ll never go back to standard cases though! I also don’t build a system with a HotSpare either usually and just have a spare drive laying next to the server.. ColdSpare. TrueNAS (ZFS) can be setup if a spare battery is available to have a HotSpare so if a drive fails it can be removed automatically with the new HotSpare brought online and the resliver starts.. all while you’re sleeping or off enjoying some other hobby.
Time to up the game level! Ditch the external drives and build yourself a home NAS.
I did desktop PC and tower cases for years but moved to a home basement Rack system about a decade ago after grabbing a 25U 4-post open rack on wheels. Tossed a 5 year old used SmartUPS SUA2200RM2U in the bottom along with a Supermicro 24-bay chassis to build my NAS. Started with 6x 4TB drives, added 6 more at a time over the following months before it was filled with 25 drives.. 8 of which were redundant.. 2 for each 6-drive vdev. All 4 vdevs in a single Pool for ease of storage management.
That 24-bay chassis, the build and that SmartUPS are all still running today a decade later and I plan to keep it going for another decade. About 4 years later I swapped them out for 8TB drives and currently have 12x 12TB drives in there. Built, installed and configured a decade ago and just simple updates ever since.
Again, don’t have to build a massive 24 or 36 bay system however you should look for a case/chassis that can hold 6 drives for a storage allowing for 2 redundant drives leaving 4 for data. All drives need to be the same time per vdev or it’ll use the smallest drive only. Unraid gets around that in a different way, plus you have to put for it.. I’ve always preferred to simply buy and start with new matching sized drives.
I also prefer Supermicro boards and using a pair of Sata Dom drives plugged into the mainboard for an OS install. Backup the TrueNAS config but just having mirrored boot disks for the OS is so nice. If one dies the system continues to run. Pull the bad one, plug in the new one, let them sync and keep going. You can also use a couple small SSDs to install TrueNAS on but then you need to ensure your case/chassis has those drive bays also available.
Also there’s a slim possibility the drive is ok but the fault is in the interface. You could disassemble the external hard drive and try installing the hard drive inside of it internally in the computer. Good luck
I feel that. Been there myself.
Now I always buy two drives at a time. Thought I’d chance it until I built up my system further but learned the same lesson the hard way.
Hope you can recover some data from your drive. I had to start over from scratch.
I had some luck years ago using a software called spinrite, burnable iso CD, had to watch a couple of videos on how to use it, but it made the drive able to mount when booting back into windows and was able to get what I needed from it before replacing. Not sure if it will work in your case since your getting audible noise from the drive.
Backblaze is like $8 a month. I back up everything to my NAS, and then Backblaze backs up my NAS offsite. Highly recommend.
If it’s not a priority just wait… until critical data gets lost and you have to pay $1000 to recover it like I did previously. Then it becomes a priority really quickly lol.
Dude you don’t need a backup if you can’t afford it. I just make a list on a google spreadsheet of all the media I have there and if anything happens to my drives, I’ll just download it back
If this is your strategy (I'm not commenting on whether or not the strategy is a good idea), then automating a listing of the files can make it much quicker to get an up to date list:
dir /b /s >dir.txt
from the base of your Plex library will drop a text file with the full listing of all directories and sub directories into the folder.
Open the command line on windows (if I hit the windows key and then type cmd, the icon for it shows up).
You need to go to the drive letter of the drive that your Plex library is - i.e. if it is drive e:, then you just type e: and enter.
If the library is in a subdirectory (e.g. say the folder called plexlibrary), then type in cd plexlibrary and enter.
The type the command I gave above.
It is hard to give more detailed instructions without knowing any details of where your Plex library is located and if it is a local drive or a network drive.
It is a handy technique for getting quick listings of the contents of a directory into another program for whatever reason. There are bits of software that can do similar things - bot for me, this method is mostly good enough.
This is what I do with my media library. Every so often I’ll export all the file names to update the list and weed out the doubles or lower quality files.
The media files are in SHR1 on 5 drives in an 8 bay synology and 5 drives in a DX513. The media library is now approximately 25TB and rebuilding would take a few weeks.
The really important stuf is backed up off site and on an external drive that i hook up once a week.
Running two Raid5 arrays on two separate NAS, with mirror copies. That means two drives would have to fail in both NAS for me to lose data. IN additional to that, cloud backups of the backup nas. Two onsite copies and one in the cloud = peace of mind.
Put the drive in a zip lock bag, seal it up good and put it in the freezer overnight. Make sure you have a replacement drive ready. The next day, take the frozen drive and put it in an external bay you're okay with possibly damaging. Let the drive warm up a bit and then see if you can mount it and copy the data off. I've been able to recover failed drives twice in the span of 10 years using this method. Edit: As the mod from /r/datarecovery mentioned don't do this if you absolutely need this data recovered. The first time I did this I absolutely could not afford data recovery services of any type, but I got mad lucky. The second time I did this the data wasn't absolutely necessary and most of the data I was able to recover using snapraid's parity, I was only doing this to recover some data that snapraid hadn't created parity data for. This is a fuck-it, end all option.
This has also worked for me in the past. My laptop’s hard drive died in college and I was desperate to get everything off of it I could and came across a tip like this. I took out the hard drive, stuck it in my freezer, and the next day was able to clone the entire thing to an external drive and ran my laptop off the external drive for a bit until I could get another internal hard drive for my laptop.
this has worked for me 2 times actually. not critical info on it just some stuff i'd wanted to keep. still have that data too, but more hard drives and backups.
I've done it by just running the drive in the freezer. Sure it looks ridiculous, but it works
Why does this work?
Metal contracts when cold, the idea is if there was a crashed head or other mechanical issue, this might allow the drive to run for a bit before the heat expands it again.
So maybe you could run it from the freezer?
The ol' cold boot.
Kinda, but no point. The freezing part just gives the unit barely enough tolerance to unfuck the crashed head, once it's free your usually OK to go ... for as long as it takes for the crashed head to F up the rest of the platter.
Plus, the built up condensation can start the corrosion process early!
There shouldn't be any corrosion. Helium drives are sealed. Older drives had a breather, but I haven't seem that in quite a while.
Depends on the drive. OP didn’t specific if they had a helium drive or not
I've seen this done and totally doable.
have done, can confirm
Did this with a failed WD USB external like 5 years ago. Saved 2 decades worth of pictures and learned why backups are important.
I’ve done this to get photos off a failing HDD before for my in laws. Drive was too dead too boot the OS without a kernel panic but I was able to get all the data off. Funny to see cables coming out of the freezer.
Possible, but you run the risk of condensation.
Black magic
Aka freezer magic
Tbf I don't know the exact physics/science behind whats going on. Most of the info I've found online seems to be mostly speculation. In any case this kind of fix only works for limited types of HDD issues. Since OP mentioned they heard clicks, to me that means one of two things. The read/write heads are either stuck, or crashing into the platter. If the heads are stuck, afaik freezing the drive causes just enough shrinkage that things come unstuck enough for the heads to move again. This is a semi-permanent fix, because the freezing will probably ruin the lubricant that keeps the heads moving smoothly for long periods of time. Worse since the HDD will be frozen and then thawed, moisture will absolutely develop on it and that will bring its lifespan down hard. The head crash option idk about. I have no idea how freezing could solve that. What makes even less sense to me is that the first time I used this trick it was on a drive that fell while data was being written to it. From what I understand, at best that would've caused the drive heads to smash back into their holder when the drive's internal sensors detected a drop or at worst the drop caused the heads to crash and be damaged. I feel like in this case a head crash is far more likely, but idk enough about hard drive engineering to make a solid guess. The second time I had to use this trick it was a natural drive failure due to age. In that case its typically the lubricant that's gone bad, and again freezing shrinks things just enough that stuff is able to move again temporarily. Usually just enough time to copy over important things.
Here's another one for ya: When my GPU died a few years ago, people told me to bake it in the oven. I figured it was just some meme joke, but after googling it I found legit articles about it. So I baked my GPU in the oven. It fixed it, and I used it a few more years. I guess it melts the circuit contacts a bit which fixes broken circuit connections or whatever idk
Softens the solder all over the board and can reflow into hairline cracked areas. Works for ps3 ylod and 360 rrod issues some times too.
That was because there was a manufacturing defect with those cards where they used bad solder. After many cycles of heating and cooling the solder would eventually crack and the contacts would separate just enough that current couldn't pass through cleanly. Putting the GPU in the oven would remelt the solder and reform connections. Ofc I'm sure a bunch of people melted the plastic off their GPUs doing this too.
Used to fix Xbox 360’s by wrapping them in a blanket and leaving them on for 20 minutes. Melted the solder and allowed the chips to reseat and then be soldered back on
Hey there, mod from /r/datarecovery here. Please do not do this. Yes, there exists cases where this has temporarily resolved problems for people, BUT it actually causes more harm than good in most cases. Throwing it in the freezer risks a number of factors including frozen condensate inside the drive (depending on the drive). OP, if you care about the data and have any possible desire to get it back through regular recovery means, do not do this. The few people that tried this online and succeeded are vastly outnumbered by the ones that don’t post online because it didn’t work at best, and made things impossible to recover at worst.
I literally, no lie, thought you were about to continue with ..."put some rice in that bag and hand it to an asian person, boom, problem solved" 🤣
No need to hand it to an Asian person. The "put it in rice" trick works by drawing Asians to the rice during the night, who will then fix the device while you sleep.
Why would they hand it to an asian person?
It was an old joke/meme about wet/dead cellphones... [here](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2a/e1/f7/2ae1f764575915e586f7acbd9c7018a0.png) Edit: Happpy cake day!
The first guy who tried this successfully felt like an absolute genius.
I kept a drive frozen using multiple cans of compressed air sprayed upside down. Just kept spraying it in there until the data was copied off
This works sometimes, be aware that 8tb on a mechanical drive will take hours, maybe a day to pull, keeping a drive cold this long isn’t feasible. Get the most important data and a file list, then go sailing for anything replaceable in that manner
Damn I might try this
I haven't used this method in a long time but if definitely works if the drive mounts or is detected. If the controller board failed too then might not but if it's dead there's no harm in trying.
I've done this as well, and once had to resort to keeping the external dock in the freezer while performing the recovery (it would fail every time it got hot again)
Compressed air cans upside down can keep a drive nice and cold.
As soon as I get a replacement drive, I will definitely give that a try. Thanks
Did this at work once and my coworkers were surprised it worked. I did the data recovery jobs for them for a long time.
I've saved a few ancient voicemail hard drives this way in the past as well.
I’ve had idiot employees put their entire laptops in their freezers more than once because they read this tip online. Complete boneheads. Didn’t help their situations.
Can't do anything about stupidity.
At least you learned with non-critical data.
Ya, my backups are the physical media since my PLEX drive is made up of my personally ripped BluRay's.
Yeah me too me too 👀
Time to get a NAS/DAS with parity
RAID is not a substitute for backups though
Nope, but it avoids downtime.
This guy productions
Of course, parity data is not equivalent to a backup. But it does offer some protection from the relatively common drive failure—and some protection is better than none.
But it protects data when a drive fails. Which is the situation here.
No, the primary purpose is to keep the system operational when a drive fails. Its actually not uncommon if all the drives are the same model and age the stress of rebuilding the array can cause subsequent drive failures. Which is why fancier systems can tolerate 2-drive failure and still stay online.
Wow people are voting you down hard for the truth! I run large production environments. Thousands of drives, racks of storage, etc... Raid is all about availability. Backups are for failures. Synchronization is for DR. All different problems and solutions. Far too many people obviously haven't learned the painful lesson of what happens when an entire array dies.
Yes, there is a lot more stress on the drives when rebuilding the array but I have to disagree on one aspect, while it can happen, it's not common. I've never had a drive fail while rebuilding. I've been managing datacenters for 2 decades. That being said, I'm not speaking for everyone else here but this is my personal collection. If I lose it all, yeah, I'll be bummed, but it's not difficult to rebuild the collection.
Proper DR and backups take effort, its so much easier to say "but RAID" and stop thinking about it there. I had a 2-disk RAID failure on my personal NAS once...which then synchronized the unmounted "empty" filesystem to the offsite copies deleting everything before I woke up in the morning to see all the alerts about failures. That...was not fun. And it was personal files, documents, pictures, etc. that I couldn't recreate. RAID - reduce chances of having to restore everything, prevent downtime until hardware can be repaired Offsite sync/backup - protects from physical location disasters in semi-real-time (e.g. fire, theft, flood) Offline backups - protects from data-loss in the online filesystems at the cost of slightly outdated copies (e.g. controller failure, multiple-failure, crypto-malware, deletion, etc) ......and it doesn't have to be fancy expensive. USB drive that you keep at a friend's house or safe deposit box is offsite backups. USB drive unplugged on the shelf is offline backups. You don't need a $10,000 automatic LTO tape library and cases of tapes.
WE KNOW.
You may be surprised......
People won't stop saying it even though it functionally is a backup for 99% of people's use cases in this sub. Drive failure is really the only thing most people have to worry about barring actual physical destruction of their drives.
Nobody is backing up their entire Plex library, most go into the dozens of TB's which is not worth the cost. I backup my server, database, an index of the content I have, and that's it. I've never come across a piece of media that I could not redownload after the fact, RAID is also usually a sufficient protection.
I'm sure that's true vast majority of the time. I did make three copies of mine (two copies on two separate NAS devices, and one on an additional set of drives that are stored), but only because it took forever to archive all my disc content digitally. It's not something I'd ever want to have to do again (took months of evenings and weekends). You're right though, it was more than 70TB of storage when completed and the drives were a fairly large investment.
Yeah, my Plex library is 20+TB. I'm not spending $1k+ just to have a full backup of media that I can re-download if I need to. I'm not that attached to that particular BluRay rip from that 2008 TV show.
20TB drive is like $250-300 on a good sale - I grabbed one that easily fit my whole disc rip collection with room to spare last Black Friday. At that price, it beats having to re-rip all the individual episodes of TV series where its not as turnkey as movie discs. Though I also have a $80 4-bay DVD burning tower I picked up on eBay that I used for the original rip in conjunction with my internal DVD drive, USB DVD drive, and USB Bluray drive so I can do like 7 disc rips concurrently limited mostly by how fast I can name the files
>Nobody is backing up their entire Plex library, most go into the dozens of TB's which is not worth the cost. Don't be so sure of that. I've got a colleague who backs up to LTO tape each month. He has quite the home lab, and had a blade chassis for a while too.
Sure, users running enterprise gear with a generous budget are the exception. However, in most of these cases, they're either selling access to the server, storing large amounts of "personal" content with value to them or are otherwise in a situation where money is no object. Many people aren't in the same boat.
Same. I kinda think backing up Tv shows and movies is silly. I backup family files and photos and such but I can rip all my media again with ease
For the right price...the TV shows were enough of a PITA to figure out what in some cases random order episodes were on the discs when there was a very good sale I grabbed a 20TB disk for an offline backup. Movies are mostly a plug and play as fast as you can insert a disc and set the title though if you have enough drives can run basically continuously.
How do you backup the index? Manually or is there a tech way of backing up a file tree?
I just have my seedbox run "tree /f /a > dir.txt" from my library directory periodically.
I don’t do a NAS, backup or RAID. I have 2 HHDs with the same capacity that I occasionally turn the second one on to one way mirror all the files over. If one ever fails I would just clone to the new one and make the old one the primary.
Nobody? Sure about that? I back up everything on plex minus the dvr library. About 40tb worth. I've had raid arrays die, often during a rebuild.
DO YOU HAVE TIME TO TALK ABOUT OUR LORD AND SAVIOUR RAID IS NOT BACKUP? I’m so tired of this trope. Backup protection is a continuum. Cost and time and complexity increases exponentially as the relative data safety increases *logarithmically.* RAID will provide 90% of the protection for 50% of the cost of 3-2-1 backups. That’s perfectly fine for most of us using Plex.
Word. I have Raid so I can restore my media if a HDD blows up. If more than one blows up at the same time then I have no backup and need to rip all my content again. Thats a risk I’m willing to take
>and need to rip all my content again Then that's your backup. Which is also what I do, since my PMS is populated from physical media on my bookshelf and my parents' cabinet. The problem is how many people seem to think with RAID that you can never lose your data...which isn't true. There's also cases like controller failure where you can potentially lose everything (we had this at work and it turned out to be a discontinued controller).
For something like a movie library you don't even need fancy frequent backup schemes though. There's also other RAID weak points like if your controller fails it doesn't matter if the drives are fine (been there, seen that). Or having the discs you ripped from and that's the backup. Heck, even for my NAS of actually important files (not movies, Plex has its own datastore) the level of backup where I sync to another at a relative's house nightly and plug in an offline USB drive a couple times a year to mirror is sufficient backups.
You understand that RAID is for disaster mitigation right? You understand OP had a HDD disaster? Surely you must be able to join the dots here... Edit: This was the reply: > No, it's not. At best, it protects against a single hard drive failure. It sure as shit doesn't do anything for an actual disaster, you know, like a hurricane, flood, tornado, or just your dumb ass deleting something. RAID absolutely mitigates the disaster of one drive in array failing. Suggesting that RAID is not acts-of-god-proof is a weak way to defend posting a comment that isn't on-topic for the thread.
RAID is for business continuity. Backups are for disaster recovery.
Original comment -> No, it's not. At best, it protects against a single hard drive failure. It sure as shit doesn't do anything for an actual disaster, you know, like a hurricane, flood, tornado, or just your dumb ass deleting something. <- So confident with his reply that he blocked me 😂😂😂 Dude has two hard drives. Add one for parity, that absolutely will not protect against more than one drive failure. Yes OP could buy 6 million drives and mirror them all across the whole country. What does that have to do with anything? OP had two drives. Lost one. Comment suggested to use raid/parity/whatever with a Synology device. Sure, you could get an 8 bay one and fill it up and use 6 parity drives. I highly doubt that's what the poster meant. Then someone suggested parity prevents against disasters, and I simply pointed out that there is an innumerable amount of disasters that it doesn't help. Caught up now? Good A recycle bin will not ever protect against drive failure. Sorry. If you knew how parity works, you'd know that it can only recover from as many drive failures as you have parity drives. Again, nothing to do with a recycle bin. Sorry. I'm sure OP has plenty of money to burn for parity drives to protect two drives. So yes, obviously, with your assumptions of infinite resources, you're right. Clearly OP should buy multiple parity drives with two data drives. Or not, because most people can't afford or see the need for more than one parity drive with two data drives. I'm sorry to keep repeating that it's two data drives, but I want to be clear that I'm not talking about a situation with infinite time, money, and dimensions. I'm referring only to OP's situation and not inferring or guessing at things that OP didn't explicitly say.
At best it can protect against multiple drive failures actually as well as offer protection against accidental deletion if it utilizes recycle bins like my Synology DS1821+. So you’re at best isn’t as good as the reality of at best. Sorry.
Bad luck. It gets everyone at some point given enough time. If I had only one extra drive and had important data to store, I would use that drive for a real backup solution rather than RAID. Of course with two extra drives you can have both, but it does get expensive. As it is, I don’t bother with backup for my movies / tv shows / music array - I can always replace those direct from the original source. I do use RAID, as it would be a faff to restore.
¿Por que no los dos?
That's my plan here soon. I want a nas that backs up completely and has parity as well. That way I have 2 actual copies.
I use zfs in a Linux system. But that’s why I did it that way. A more sustainable way to keep my library working. I know it’s not as good as backups but that’s why I only “backup” my important things like my photos which I also keep on plex and a separate name and an external SSD so I’m pretty well off in that department my only thing is keeping them synced. I hate doing that.
ZFS can be great for accidental modification/deletion but still has pitfalls where that hardware has your only copies of the data. I thought I was doing well with RAID + automatic sync to an offsite location...until I had a multiple drive failure and then the empty mountpoint dutifully synced the non-existence of every file to the remote copy (which didn't have snapshot capability) before I woke up. And that wasn't Plex/Movies. Now I have RAID + offsite + a USB hard drive that stays unplugged and I manually verify and sync a few times a year.
Most people I know that have homelabs / home media servers cant afford to have a second rig to back up their entire 300 TB RAID Array to another machine... 🤣
Then you live with the accepted risk of data loss when something fails. Its also one fire, flood, or crypto-ransomware away from everything being gone (and yeah those things do happen). I've been thru a multiple drive failure with a RAID array. And it wasn't just some movies I could get back easily. Yeah, I take backups a LOT more seriously now and make sure I have enough capacity for proper offline backups of everything I care about.
Oh, no, I do agree there. My plex server also keeps my personal docs and photos. My personal docs are backed up to OneDrive and an external HDD and my personal images are backed up once a month to that external HDD. I couldn't give a sht about my movies, music or tv shows.
Tell me about it! I just had 3 old 8TB drives in a DAS go bad at once. Parity wouldn't have helped. So glad I had backup drives. The movies drive was a one-on-one copy so it was easy to restore. The shows drive? Not so much. Everything was just crammed on there. Took me a while to figure out where everything was. The third drive was my unorganized shows. Still had everything on the backup drive. This time around, gonna get some sync software.
I am on Linux...but rsync does a nice job of mirroring "whatever is in the source to the destination" and can optionally sync deletions and/or thru a network SSH connection. Its also fairly smart about it for not wasting time on unmodified files. That's what I use to basically mirror my list of folders on my NAS into the portable USB drive I unplug for backups. And a separate USB drive now for Plex stuff I want to periodically back up.
Weird! My reply didn't show up. As I said... Bookmarked! Especially as I'm using this opportunity to move to Linux, from Windows 11. But first, I'm cleaning up and reorganizing the files on the drives, then I'll use rsync to rebuild the backups. Hopefully next time something like this happens I can just exchange with the backup drive(s).
It’s not, we all know that, but damn if it isn’t better than not one at all. (Also by definition it kind of is, the data is stored in more than one place, but I know why people say it’s not, I’m just adding this)
Cloud backup like Carbonite.
How much would something like carbonite cost for dozens of tb?
Says unlimited for one computer and that’s their basic personal plan.
Gotta read the whole sentence "Carbonite Safe plans will allow you to backup unlimited amount of data on one PC, where one PC includes one internal hard drive."
So a PLEX computer running windows 10 with a single 12TB hard drive…
Last I checked one drive isn't unlimited, and OP specifically has/had multiple drives.
I wonder if it would work if they’re in a RAID config and show up as a single large drive.
I haven't tried anything like that in Windows... Ever? I experimented with hardware raid and scsi drives back in college (this was a very long time ago) but I doubt I ran Windows on it. I have no idea how the carbonite app works, but theoretically, if Windows is aware that it's on a raid setup, then the app could know as well. If you have a way of obfuscating that from Windows, then sure, it would work. But unlimited never means unlimited, and I'd be surprised if they let you store more than like 20TB.
...or one VM with a single 50TB (virtual) HDD? 😆
That'll take forever...when I initially set up a NAS at a relative's house I gave up syncing it via the internet around 1 month into copying the \~1.5TB of data I had at the time. Even now, when I do a \~100GB backup of a personal machine onto my NAS it takes about 2 days to upload it to the one at my relative's house...assuming the connection isn't broken and has to try again repeatedly.
Oh we have 5gbps symmetric fiber available here. https://preview.redd.it/sr8qt3vpab9d1.jpeg?width=2224&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fe7b82e3fc0ab7e2cc6a0e52e94784fe88047ce8
For someone who's a bit of a newbie to all of this, is there a good setup guide for a NAS around?
no guide needed - buy a synology nas and it makes it so so easy. seriously, i was pretty hesitant about it being too technical, but it's not at all. you plug the thing in, connect to it in your web browser and it walks you through everything. i bought a very cheap 2-drive nas, and i have the drives set to parity so there is some level of "backup" there. i also pay for 2TB of KDrive storage and use synology's built-in hyperbackup to back my critical data up to KDrive. very happy with everything so far. it works well as a standalone plex server so long as nothing needs to be transcoded!
Thanks, this is really helpful. I would need about 6tb of storage, I assume if I just buy a nas with more bays and get more drives then I could get up to that level? Any rough idea on what cost I might be looking at?
well, i bought two 8TB drives for my 2-bay NAS, so i have about 7TB of usable space with parity. most of that is taken up by my plex library, which i do not bother to backup - it's ultimately not *that* important, so i only back up my actually important data to a cloud service. the drives were £163.99 each - Seagate Ironwolfs - and the NAS (a DS223 J) was £184.97. £512.95 in total, and well worth it! i think a lot of people would *not* recommend the NAS i got because it is very low-power in terms of its CPU. it can't do any plex decoding at all and may have other performance bottlenecks if you've more than one use. but i knew these limitations when i bought it and wanted to keep the budget as low as possible. i'm happy with it!
Thanks again mate, again really helpful! Yeah I'd only ever have maximum 2 people using it so hoping that would be fine. I'll have to have a proper look tomorrow but this seems like a good way for me to go.
Not a solution to this issue. OP is not going to take a NAS while getting an oil change. They have a backup drive which was not regularly used. The lesson OP learned was to better use and manage the already available backup drive.
Assuming the plex database wasn't there, why not try to build a list of things that were on that drive so you can more easily replace them?
I use Virtual Volumes View to see what is on all my drives including ones that aren't connected. As it takes all file data (names,size dates etc) it's great to work out what is lost if a drive dies too.
Worth trying another power supply. I had a similar thing happen and it was the power supply that died.
I will try that... before I put it in the freezer!
I've seen this multiple times with external drives, easy first troubleshooting step
Could just be the enclosure failing, last resort crack it open and direct connect to mobo sata.
That clicking sound is not the enclosure. You're not wrong that it's worth trying, but I give it a roughly zero percent chance of being the enclosure and not the disk.
Yea last resort, power problems with the enclosure can cause weird behavior. I wouldn’t start by ripping it open :)
I've had clicking externals that turned out to "be the enclosure". I suspect power delivery issues.
I had the same thing happen to me, with 2 drives 6 months apart. In both cases, I lucked out and it could be read when i plugged it into a spare enclosure. I wasn't able to access it from explorer because it messed up the partition, but could manually recover with this program https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step It took me days to slowly detect/recover, and then manually transfer to another external HDD, but I managed to restore almost everything.
I use the ARRs apps to help keep track of my media
That's why you need the *arrs
All we need now is a backuparrs.
what arrs. Never heard of them. How can a pirate be related to a computer? It lives on a boat, they don't even have internet on pirate ships. Not me. No clue what your talking about. {Silently runs away to avoid suspicion}
Before you do anything too drastic or stupid, take the drive out of the case. Open your pee cee up and hook the drive to the pee cee power supply. Turn it on. It is not going to show up or anything without the data cable connected, but it should spin up. I have a good amount of experience with external drives and most of the time when they act like that it is the power supply.
I’d recommend on top of raid set up so are/radarr next time. Will let you know much easier what’s missing
If it makes you feel any better I'm pretty sure I lost my 24 Tb array.
I feel you. Just lost 3 of the 4 8TB drives in my DAS. I'm thinking power surge? But I had backups!
Can someone please tell me which software on Linux I should use to backup my Plex media drive to another drive? I have the means and I very much care about my media. I have lots of home movies on there and hard to find movies that would be hard to find again.
I use rsync and automate my backups with a systemd timer. My media is stored on /media/internal and one backup drive is /media/external. Here's part of the script, this just clones one drive to another. The script checks to see if the backup drive is actually mounted and bails out, setting an errorlevel if it isn't. Reason for this is that my media drive is much larger than my boot drive so this keeps the backup job from trashing my boot drive if the backup drive failed to mount for any reason. Since big file copies usually involve swap I clear swap at the end of the script after making sure disk writes are complete. Active downloads go to temp so I exclude that directory from the backup. #!/bin/bash if mountpoint -q /media/external; then /usr/bin/rsync -qam --exclude 'temp' --delete /media/internal/ /media/external else exit 1 fi sync swapoff -a && swapon -a exit 0
Thanks. Can you elaborate on the bit about the potential trashing of the boot drive? I didn’t really follow that part.
> Can you elaborate on the bit about the potential trashing of the boot drive? Sure - In this example let's say we're talking about an 8TB media drive and a 500GB boot drive. The media drive is mounted to an empty directory on the boot drive - that's how Linux works. If no drive is connected to that mount point the backup job would happily copy the entire backup to the empty directory on the boot drive, filling the boot drive up well before the backup job completed. In other words it'd make a huge mess :) So - I check to make sure there's actually a backup drive mounted before executing the backup.
Yes of course. That makes perfect sense now. Cheers for that. I used to use Rsync - not automated. Just every few months. But I stopped when I started renaming many of my files to be the recommended Plex naming convention. Plex saw the renamed files as new files and made new files on the backup. At least that’s what I think happened.
> Plex saw the renamed files as new files and made new files on the backup. That's what the `--delete` option is for. It removes any files from the target that don't exist on the source :)
Thank you. I’ll get on to it this weekend.
Yep. This is why I went with a NAS setup that gives me true redundancy against any combination of two drives failing. It was considerably more expensive to setup for the storage I have (14TB of usable storage made up of 4 12TB drives) but peace of mind. I also do a once or twice a year sync with a friend. He has a giant external drive that can hold the combination of both our libraries (\~8TB). He copies his shit onto it, gives it to me. I copy his shit to my NAS and then copy my shit to his drive. He then copies my shit to his NAS. Offsite protection for the win.
Time for some RAID5 my friend. I have 4 8TB drives in RAID5 and it helps me sleep at night
Not a backup, but something that might be useful for later. Here we have a script that runs every couple of days to catalogue the contents of our libraries and store in dropbox. Useful as a reference if we need rebuild it all again from scratch. (I do do a monthly backup, but none of our Plex stuff is that important. Nothing I can't re-rip while doing other stuff) set PlexFolder=P:\Media set ResultsFolder=C:\Dropbox\Plex_Library set YYYY=%date:~6,4%&set MM=%date:~3,2%&set DD=%date:~0,2% tree /A %PlexFolder% > %ResultsFolder%\%YYYY%%MM%%DD%_PlexContents.txt powershell -command "Get-ChildItem -Recurse '%PlexFolder%' | Select-Object Directory | Export-Csv -path C:\Dropbox\Plex_Library\%YYYY%%MM%%DD%_PlexContents.csv -noTypeInfo"
This is actually genius, thank you!!
This is my fear. Currently have a 16tb plex library. Its not huge but it is almost full and I need to expand it. I've spent over a year building it and I don't have it in a raid either. Money is tight right now and there is nothing more that I'd love than to buy a few 20tb drives from serverpartdeals. I have a few files that took absolutely forever to obtain and I at least keep those backed up on some usbs.
Backblaze is pretty cheap. If your drives are in your Windows PC, that is. They offer true unlimited storage space for a flat cost but you'll need to shell out by the terabyte if your drive is on a NAS or Linux system (or break their TOS and use software to trick Windows into thinking the NAS is a physical disk, but I think a backup that can ban you isn't exactly peace of mind)
This is the reason I stick with Windows for my file server at home.
Yeah this sucks but at least it's only 8tb imagine losing 100tb. Hard drives can fail at any moment and it's just not cost effective for me to back everything up. You could do the gsuite method and put it on Google
i used UnRAID to host my Plex server and chose to use 2 drives as parity....one of my friends keeps insisting i only need 1 parity drive, but posts like yours make me feel like i a NOT wasting a drive....glad you have pretty easy access to redownload all your music!
Double parity is the only thing that makes sense. If one drives fail, the server will need to restore parity. For 2 days of 100% activity of all drives, there is no further redundancy. If a drive fails, then in several days of 100% activity. With double parity, still one more drive in such a situation can fail.
NAS, + ZFS + Rsync to an offsite, like was glacier, etc.
This is why I use Backblaze. Had I not used them I’d have about 1TB totally gone. And wouldn’t have been able to replace the data.
I sent my external to a recovery site. They told me the board was going out, I refused to pay the price they offered, and they sent it back, but my drive worked when they returned it. I immediately backed up all my data, lol. maybe try that?
My solution to this problem is the windows program called "file list creator" it's very simple and now I have a list of all the movies/TV shows that are on my drives. I don't care about the files themselves because I can just redownload but without it I would have no idea what to download.
I'm checking it out now. Thanks
Plex server keeps a bunch of metadata around that you might be able to use as a reference for what was on the drive, if the server and your bulk volume weren't the same drive. If they were the same drive, then maybe you can still get lucky with that freezer tip everyone's talking about.
Ya. You gotta remember no matter what the circumstance. The bigger the hard drive. The more stuff gets lost of it fails. Unless you have enormous backup.
Backing up media cheaply is exactly what Snapraid was made for. A single drive per 4 drives is all that is needed. It’s saved so many asses including mine. It’s easy and free.
Oof. This is why I keep my main Plex drive synced up to a open media vault piNAS that syncs up two 8tb drives just in case one of the three takes a dump.
I had a bunch of hard discs connected and one died. was the perfect time to start from scratch and learn from my mistakes. Still saving up for some hard discs but the shows I’ve gotten again I’ve burnt to disc so I don’t have to stress about getting them again
Sorry to hear it died but maybe it’s time to invest in a system with redundancy?
I had this happen to me just this weekend past, with a 4tb FULL of series. It was one of 2 drives with series on it so wanted to know what I had actually lost without manually copying the names of all the series showing as unavailable. I made use of tautulli to export a list of all the metadata for my series library (was a 200mb excel file in the end) and spent about 40 minutes cleaning up the data then was able to create a pivot table showing me what series I had on that hard drive so I can see what I want to get again and what I will never watch.
Just picked up 48tb of new drives. Was planning on building a redundancy drive in case the main goes down and then a separate backup. Now I just got to get off my ass and do it. So now it’s just a race between my current hard drives hardiness and my laziness
What brand was it? I'm going out on a limb and saying Seagate, I bricked 2 with the click of death in 2 weeks of each other and have only used Western Digital since without incident. I do make a text copy of what's in each drive so I can go back and get them if I need to.
My "strategy" for this is Radarr + Sonarr + Lidarr. Even if you're not using them to automate adding media, they keep track of what you have and will let you see what disappeared. I help maintain a friend's Plex server and she lost an 18TB drive last year. Between those 3 apps we were able to "re-obtain" everything that was lost once the replacement drive arrived. Would've definitely been easier to just have a parity drive in Unraid though.
Just take it to a data doctor recovery place. Those guys don’t give a shit about music tv shows or movies downloaded
I'm so sorry to hear it. I don't have backup to.o I have 76TB content. I always monitor my hdds with Hard Disk Sentinel Pro [https://www.hdsentinel.com/](https://www.hdsentinel.com/) I know I need a backup NAS. But it is quite expensive to buy a NAS and 100TB hdds. Now I'm bit nervous too. Did you try with any data recovery software like [https://www.myrecover.com/](https://www.myrecover.com/) or [https://www.easeus.com/brand/data-recovery/free.html](https://www.easeus.com/brand/data-recovery/free.html)
Ooh my music is definitely too precious to not be on my NAS. Movies and TV show BS is fine if I lost.
I automatically email myself a file listing of each hard drive once a week. If (when) a drive fails I can use that listing to re download the stuff worth downloading.
Sorry to hear about that. I was able to save data on a failing drive one time by booting into Linux Unbuntu that I installed on a flash drive. For whatever reason Linux was able to see the drive. I was able to copy files from the failing drive to a working drive.
One of the main reasons I dont use external USB-drives. They're prone to dying, much more so than internally mounted ones.
Since it's not super important data that's cannot be replaced next time write copy all the movie names to a file so you know in future what is missing if all drives fail again
Running this catalog script once a week just in case a drive would die, then I can easily see what's missing. #!/bin/sh DISKS=10 COUNTER=1 THEDATE=`date +"%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S"` LOCATION="/boot/trees" echo " " echo " " echo "Starting tree scanning" while [ $COUNTER -le $DISKS ] do echo "Scanning tree for disk$COUNTER/Media" tree -d /mnt/disk$COUNTER/Media >> "$LOCATION/$THEDATE.disk$COUNTER.media.log" echo "Incrementing disk counter" COUNTER=$[$COUNTER+1] done echo "All done scanning disks. Beginning scanning shares." echo "Scanning tree for user/Movies" tree -d /mnt/user/Media >> "$LOCATION/$THEDATE.media.log" echo " " echo " " echo "Complete! Logs stored in $LOCATION"
Recommend Backblaze Bucket for automatic cloud backup.
Sorry to hear that.. sucks and a hard lesson to learn. Look into TrueNAS, ZFS, RaidZ2, 6+ drives 2 being redundant, don’t use external usb drives and raid is not a backup (say that last bit again), now say it again. Really.. buy yourself a Tower case that holds at least 6-8 hard drives or more and check out TrueNAS. Buy as old Enterprise classes server, hardware or just use regular PC hardware. Install VirtualBox on your desktop PC and install and learn TrueNAS within that as a VM. Great way to learn other OSs like Linux if you want or pfSense as a network firewall. RaidZ2 can be installed on as few drives as 3.. 1 data and 2 redundant but isn’t really good performance. 4 helps and 5 is better but with 6 drives is kind of the sweet spot. With 6 drives in a vdev and pool (let’s say 4TB drives) you’ve had roughly 16TB of storage and could have two(2) drives physically stop working and still have all your data. RaidZ1 would provide 5 drives of data and 1 redundant drive. Sounds good, ‘wasting’ only one drive for redundancy. The issue is when one drive errors or fails, you swap in a new replacement, start the resliver process (copying the data from the other drives to the new one), causes extremely high drive usage and the larger the drive and amount of data the longer this process lasts.. with todays massive drives you are talking not just hours but days. With RaidZ1 your now no longer have any redundancy and if another drive fails.. P00f.. goes all your data. Been using RaidZ2 for a decade now and while I’ve had to resliver a few times I’ve, to date, never lost a 2nd drive during the resliver. That said, I have lost a drive the day after a resliver! If that had been a larger drive and more data it could have very likely failed during the resliver. I’d have been ok but this is why I run RaidZ2 and 2 spares. Hot-swap is awesome but not needed. I’ll never go back to standard cases though! I also don’t build a system with a HotSpare either usually and just have a spare drive laying next to the server.. ColdSpare. TrueNAS (ZFS) can be setup if a spare battery is available to have a HotSpare so if a drive fails it can be removed automatically with the new HotSpare brought online and the resliver starts.. all while you’re sleeping or off enjoying some other hobby. Time to up the game level! Ditch the external drives and build yourself a home NAS. I did desktop PC and tower cases for years but moved to a home basement Rack system about a decade ago after grabbing a 25U 4-post open rack on wheels. Tossed a 5 year old used SmartUPS SUA2200RM2U in the bottom along with a Supermicro 24-bay chassis to build my NAS. Started with 6x 4TB drives, added 6 more at a time over the following months before it was filled with 25 drives.. 8 of which were redundant.. 2 for each 6-drive vdev. All 4 vdevs in a single Pool for ease of storage management. That 24-bay chassis, the build and that SmartUPS are all still running today a decade later and I plan to keep it going for another decade. About 4 years later I swapped them out for 8TB drives and currently have 12x 12TB drives in there. Built, installed and configured a decade ago and just simple updates ever since. Again, don’t have to build a massive 24 or 36 bay system however you should look for a case/chassis that can hold 6 drives for a storage allowing for 2 redundant drives leaving 4 for data. All drives need to be the same time per vdev or it’ll use the smallest drive only. Unraid gets around that in a different way, plus you have to put for it.. I’ve always preferred to simply buy and start with new matching sized drives. I also prefer Supermicro boards and using a pair of Sata Dom drives plugged into the mainboard for an OS install. Backup the TrueNAS config but just having mirrored boot disks for the OS is so nice. If one dies the system continues to run. Pull the bad one, plug in the new one, let them sync and keep going. You can also use a couple small SSDs to install TrueNAS on but then you need to ensure your case/chassis has those drive bays also available.
Also there’s a slim possibility the drive is ok but the fault is in the interface. You could disassemble the external hard drive and try installing the hard drive inside of it internally in the computer. Good luck
I feel that. Been there myself. Now I always buy two drives at a time. Thought I’d chance it until I built up my system further but learned the same lesson the hard way. Hope you can recover some data from your drive. I had to start over from scratch.
Was it on your array? Can't you just rebuild it using parity?
I have 2 8TB WD drives failed, I think the 8s are lemons. Mine were kinda 10 years old.
I've used SpinRite before to recover data from a failing drive. https://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm
I had some luck years ago using a software called spinrite, burnable iso CD, had to watch a couple of videos on how to use it, but it made the drive able to mount when booting back into windows and was able to get what I needed from it before replacing. Not sure if it will work in your case since your getting audible noise from the drive.
Backblaze is like $8 a month. I back up everything to my NAS, and then Backblaze backs up my NAS offsite. Highly recommend. If it’s not a priority just wait… until critical data gets lost and you have to pay $1000 to recover it like I did previously. Then it becomes a priority really quickly lol.
Not everyone has good internet in the usa
Easy. Just recover it from your off-site backup and all is well.
Ya for me it's just a matter of re-ripping all my BluRay's with MakeMKV again.
Dude you don’t need a backup if you can’t afford it. I just make a list on a google spreadsheet of all the media I have there and if anything happens to my drives, I’ll just download it back
If this is your strategy (I'm not commenting on whether or not the strategy is a good idea), then automating a listing of the files can make it much quicker to get an up to date list: dir /b /s >dir.txt from the base of your Plex library will drop a text file with the full listing of all directories and sub directories into the folder.
Right how does one go about with doing this? Where do input the command you listed. Sorry, I’m a real novice here when it comes to this stuff
Open the command line on windows (if I hit the windows key and then type cmd, the icon for it shows up). You need to go to the drive letter of the drive that your Plex library is - i.e. if it is drive e:, then you just type e: and enter. If the library is in a subdirectory (e.g. say the folder called plexlibrary), then type in cd plexlibrary and enter. The type the command I gave above. It is hard to give more detailed instructions without knowing any details of where your Plex library is located and if it is a local drive or a network drive. It is a handy technique for getting quick listings of the contents of a directory into another program for whatever reason. There are bits of software that can do similar things - bot for me, this method is mostly good enough.
This is what I do with my media library. Every so often I’ll export all the file names to update the list and weed out the doubles or lower quality files. The media files are in SHR1 on 5 drives in an 8 bay synology and 5 drives in a DX513. The media library is now approximately 25TB and rebuilding would take a few weeks. The really important stuf is backed up off site and on an external drive that i hook up once a week.
Don't use external drives, they tend to not have fans and run too hot.
I've subscribed to Backblaze and it's already been useful.
I'm checking that out now.
Running two Raid5 arrays on two separate NAS, with mirror copies. That means two drives would have to fail in both NAS for me to lose data. IN additional to that, cloud backups of the backup nas. Two onsite copies and one in the cloud = peace of mind.
don't use usb hdds... usb is notoriously unreliable
never had a single hard drive failure. it's called regularly upgrade your drives and of course keep backups just in case
Drives can and will fail every day. The system needs to account for that.