So, I’m rebuilding my movie/TV collection. I didn’t realize how massive TV shows were. I should have, but…here I am. I just finished ripping Star Trek: TNG from blu-ray and it’s at 1.5TB, and that’s with one of the discs (Season 2, disc 4) being warped to the point that I can’t even safely put it into the player.
Ripping from optical is so slow that I would really prefer to only ever do it once. I don’t have or need a NAS, but I do want to keep a copy of the movies on idle rust. “You mean spinning?” No. Idle. You’ll see.
What I want is a sanity check that this isn’t a bad idea for some reason that isn’t obvious to me.
Workflow:
- Rip optical to SSD as a backup format (whole disk, all extras, every byte)
- Extract and encode tracks I care about. Save to ‘live’ folder for consuption.
- Tar backup files (it’s a directory, not an ISO) and run par2 on it with 10% parity to resist bitrot. The PAR data is split across 5 files, in case one of the recovery files gets bitrot.
- Copy tar and par files to HDD, building an index in a text file on my PC.
- Remove backup from working SSD, enjoy encoded movie in ‘live’ folder.
- HDD is moved inside an ESD bag, inside a plastic bin in a closet and left alone.
- Once every year or two (I’d set a calendar reminder), get HDDs out and run sudo e2fsck -fccky /dev/sdX1 as well as par2 verify /mnt/point/*tar.par2
Note for step 4: The disks are labeled externally, so I know disk 4 has The Matrix on it, and Disk 6 has Inception, etc. In case I ever need to re-encode from source. I REALLY don’t want to have to go back to optical unless I have to. It’s so slow >.<
The purpose of par2 is to avoid bitrot. Because I am treating each HDD as a single unit, ZFS would not afford me any benefit. I don’t need the files to be accessible ‘online’ because I expect I might not ever access them, or if I did it might be once in a decade if a kid wants to watch a commentary track or special feature.
For 4k movies, I plan to store 2 copies on two different HDDs. 4k discs are so fragile that I feel it’s worth it to pay the extra money for another hard drive just in case a drive decides not to power on after 5 years.
I did the math on LTO-9 tape drives, but I’d need like 700TB for it to be break even with HDDs. Maybe other forms of LTO are far cheaper. I need to look. As it stands, I probably don’t have more than 20TB of movies and TV shows once I have everything I want.
Am I missing some vector? I know a house fire could still destroy everything. I don’t own a home yet, but once I do I would totally dig a small cellar and store one of the two 4k HDDs in said cellar, just so I’d have something in case of a house fire (letting the ground keep it cool).
I’ve got bitrot covered, I’ve got drive loss covered, and I’ve got optical loss covered. So…did I miss anything?