Home Media Security
I’m breaking from the regular posts for a moment here to talk about technology. (Although, this does fit nicely within a series of posts I have coming up on T.I.M.E. - Technology Improves My Existance).
Like many, I’ve gradually converted most of my entertainment media in to digital format. With the exception of movies on Blu-Ray, most of my movies and all of my audio are now contained with my iTunes library. And that’s great. It’s convenient, it’s quick, it’s shareable across all my devices, and it’s entirely portable. It also supports my change in purchasing behaviour from tangible product to digital download, for both music and video.
The problem is that data is always at risk of being lost. Hard drives go bad. Users (read ‘me’) can do stupid things with the delete button. Systems can corrupt. These leaves all of us with an important dilemma: How do we ensure the integrity of our media data?
Here’s the solution that I’m using, as an option to consider when figuring this out for yourself.
There are two layers of redundancy to be considered, in my opinion. The first layer is a local layer. That is, keep copies of the data in multiple places on multiple devices on the home network.
I use an Iomega StorCenter ix2-200 network attached storage device to host my entire iTunes library. It sits as a simple share on my network, and I can map to it from any Windows or OS X machine and point iTunes to it to get music, movies, apps, and books. I have that StorCenter configured in RAID1, so I have immediate local redundancy there; I can lose one of the two 1TB drives, and not lose any data.
I have one main home media server; an old PC running Windows XP and iTunes only. This server is the gateway for all other iTunes related devices; AppleTV, iPhones and iPads using AirPlay, and the MacBook Pros that my wife and I own. What about when we’re on the road and not connected to our home network? On each MacBook Pro, iTunes is configured to copy only the music portion of the library to the local disk. Movies can be copied manually if desired. Now, with Apple introducing iCloud, it doesn’t matter what device I purchase music or movies or apps or books on, I know that my media server’s iTunes will download them as well and put them directly on to the StorCenter device.
The StorCenter still introduces a single point of failure, though. If the StorCenter’s logic board dies, or some other non-redundant critical component breaks, both drives could become unreadable. So to remedy that, I got a second StorCenter, placed it in a different room in the house, and set up an Rsync job to copy the content of the master StorCenter to the slave StorCenter at the end of each day. Instant onsite quadruple redundancy. Additionally, in the event of a fire, I can grab either one of the devices quickly and all my data is preserved (since I also use them as TimeMachine backup drives).
The second layer of redundancy is the offsite layer. Offsite backup is incredibly important in my opinion, particularly in California where I live. Earthquakes can destroy hard disk heads in a matter of seconds. Fires can melt drives in moments. Thieves can steal hardware quickly. Local backup, thus, is not enough.
There are plenty of online backup services available at varying prices for varying amounts of storage. The problem is that many, if not most, only support local drives (i.e. not USB drives or NAS drives like my StorCenter devices), and for that reason, I have yet to find a suitable online backup service. When I do, I’ll update this post. Post a comment if you have a suggestion! But for now, for those of you looking for a reasonably priced, highly redundant, highly reliable local solution, this should get you started.
