Storing & Backing Up Personal Media

I've been thinking a lot about storage lately - specifically storage for digital media in the home.

I'm less concerned with storing/backing up tv shows that are on tivo. It's a bummer to lose those content if your dvr dies or simply doesn't do the right thing but it's really bad if you lose your personal music collection, photos or home videos.

So in my case I got a bunch of music. My collection is at about 70 gigs and growing at about 120 megs a month. (The latest iPod from Apple is 80 gigs so I suspect there are millions of people with larger collections).

My digital photo library in iPhoto is now up to 30 gigs and growing at 300 megs per month.

I now store all of my home movies on disk. It's very convenient that way. My home videos are at about 50 gigs and growing fast - even though I convert everything from DV to mpeg4.

i've been using a firewire 300 gig drive connected to a Mac in my house that acts as a server which is accessed from other PCs/Macs in the house and Front Row/mini. I have another firewire 300 gig drive that backs up my primary drive. The software to keep these drives in sync are pretty bad and this set up is inefficient.

It looks like I need a terabyte server that does RAID 5. That will give me maximum data reliability and hot swap flexibility.

My friend Jason tells me I should just get this and I probably will.

But is there a better way? For example Flickr charges $25/year for unlimited storage of digital pix. It would be great if there was an equivalent service for personal music or personal home videos (high resolution network storage, not youtube-esque).

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Comments

[Chris Selland]

Two solutions I use:
a) FolderShare - keep your files in sync between multiple computers, so you've got your files on more than one PC (and synced!). The drawbacks are the limitations on number of files and 'libraries'. Also, while it's cross-platform it doesn't deal well with Mac files that contain 'Resource Forks'. But it's free and it (mostly) works.
b) Carbonite - $5/month 'offline' automatic and unlimited storage. It's PC only (Mac supposedly coming) and the initial backup takes a lot of time, but it does work.

[bijan]

THanks for the suggestions.

you guessed it. i have macs in the house as well as PCs. the search continues...