I’ll try to be real quick and simple. My Pastor has been preaching the Gospel for 40 years and has accumulated a vast amount of recorded media varying from cassette, CD, VHS, and mini-dv tapes.
I’ve been tasked with this job because I have a career in IT, but no experience in the Visual/Media realm, LOL.
I tried FreeNAS and although I like it, either my HDD or some OS related crashed on me twice and I haven’t been able to retrieve any of the data!!!
I’m open to something simple and possible that Acronis and later on RAID for the backups?
It’ll be managed in home until I gain the knowledge to build a secure server environment.
Should I just use Windows Pro/Enterprise as the OS and save it that way?
Is this material that he needs to be able to access, or are you just archiving it? I know our video guy archives his videos to large external hard drives that he labels by year. We also keep things uploaded on vimeo, YouTube and Amazon s3.
Yep, storage for archive is a lot different from storage for access or storage for sharing. Archival storage should be to something like M-Disk or Tape that can sit on a shelf for decades without degrading beyond usefulness. Hard drives are Ok for archival as long as they’re spun up and tested periodically, and data is migrated off any drives having issues.
A while back, for a client, I built a 40TB offsite backup NAS using Nas4Free and some good quality drives, and it’s been running fine ever since. Since it’s ZFS, I have periodic scrubs running that verify any bit-rot is detected early and repaired. I think we’ve had a total of 3-4 drive failures since the thing was put in (which isn’t too bad considering it’s been moved a couple times, and there are so many disks).
As Tyler and Alex have mentioned, whether this is purely archival or whether it will be in semi-regular use is an important determiner in what sort of storage configuration you setup.
Assuming that this will be accessed semi-regularly, what sort of budget do you have? You could grab off eBay:
You can also get a free TechSoup membership and qualify for Microsoft’s non-profit program and get a copy of Windows Server 2016 Datacenter Edition for under $50.
Our setup is almost just like Davids and is almost exactly what I am doing for our production infrastructure and a mirror for backup. I’ve got Dell R710 though as a front end. Got mine from Server Monkey because they come with a good warranty as well. Not amazing speed but a lot better than your typical NAS. I run 1 TB Dell NL SAS drives in one and it’s faster than the 2 TB SATA drives in the other. Run them with RAID 6. The only issue is that you can’t really set them to spin down when not in use. So depending on the use of the storage it may be worth investigating.