how much backing up would you do of a media server?
I have a nas with 2x10tb drives. I mostly just have music, movies and tv shows on it.
People talk about raid not being a backup, but is that relevant for non-original data? I mean I can always get the media again if need be. It would just be an inconvenience.
If you lose everything, just download new stuff you want to watch, or redownload a few TV series/movies.
Music? There are streaming services.
Only backup configurations and maybe application data, so that the reinstall will be easy. Those few kB/MB could sit anywhere. I'm using GitLab for this purpose.
Edit: Images! If you have your photos on there, back them up! They can't be replaced!
The streaming services wont work if you have no access to interner lol.
At my last job I had to travel to my work dailly for over an hour in one way, for almost the whole travel I didn't have any network or phone reception.
Will much rather just have music on a media server and a client that allows me to locally download some of my favouritr music for such situations like navidrome and synfonium than pay for spotify premium to allow me to do that.
We're talking about replacing lost content here though. And as such you can use the streaming services as a "backup" by re-ripping your whole collection if you lose it.
I'm actually doing this now as part of a library cleanup. Zotify + beets are a great combo to pull down vast quantities of music and properly sort and tag it.
Then I stream it to my phone in my truck using ampache and ultrasonic, which does have a local buffering option.
However if you have some exotics that you ripped from rare discs, demos or prerelease, live recordings with sentimental value etc. I would suggest keeping those properly backed up. I don't have many of these, but the ones I do have are backed up both cloud and offsite.
Personally I live in a very rural location and I farm, so I can spend a lot of time on the road or in my tractor. 1gb wouldn't get me through a day in the field, so I have a pretty big collection with a lot of variety. We don't even have reliable FM radio here, so it's bring your own music or listen to the diesel roar.