Editors: There's a better way to store media.

How I finally consolidated my old hard drives into 1 organized system, and made it impossible to lose my data.

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I've been making short films for over 20 years, starting at age 11. I directed my first feature film, Bad is Bad, in 2010. Made for only $6,000, the film went on to reach over 7 million views and garner critical acclaim. More recently, my short film, Will "The Machine", screened and won awards at film festivals around the world. Released online in 2019, it reached over 1 million views in just a month. As an editor, I’ve done work for clients such as Apple, Netflix, and Beats by Dre.

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00:00 Portrait of a Data Hoarder
01:42 My Data Storage & Backup Goals
02:44 What's a NAS and what does it do?
05:45 QNAP TVS-h674T
08:06 Costs & Investing in a NAS
09:23 Setting up the NAS
11:18 Security
11:55 Consolidating all my drives
14:51 The automated backup system
18:25 Cheaper/more simple alternatives
20:21 Dawn of a new day

[Supercon]

14:24
Just a suggestion,
I personally wouldn't recommend having your NAS right next to your subwoofer, that would subject your NAS to a lot of vibrations that would not be good for the drives

I would also recommend elevating the NAS off the ground, this would help reduce the amount of dust it sucks up off the floor, with the fan running 24/7 it acts like a vacuum and can get dirty pretty fast

[zvlmukh]

I am going to sue you for harassment, I feel very... targeted in this video.

[OhanaFilmsMaui]

A cautionary tale concerning the "If my house burns down" scenario. A friend and fellow filmmaker here on Maui always had backups at his home, his office and on the cloud. The cloud seems like overkill because it's not like your house AND your office a mile away are both going to burn to the ground...until they did in the massive wildfires we experienced. So always backup to the cloud at the end of EVERY work day.

[headmetwall]

One offsite backup option I've wanted to implement for years is the 'friend backup', basically your friend sets up a second NAS on your house and you set up a second one on theirs and once in a while they sync up with their respective counterpart.

I convinced one friend and I'm thinking of just setting up a raspberry pi with one large HD on it, after all, it doesn't need to be fast just be there in case anything happens.

[smalldoguser]

$2400-$2900 for a NAS system with no drives is actually insane. You can build your own NAS system using a low spec computer with a case that fits the number of drives you need. You can also run it with all free and open source software.

[coralfishg]

I just did this for all my storage last month. This was hilarious. SCROTUM! LOL Well done :)

[nebukadnezzar]

Great video!
Little hint: just configure your NAS to switch to sleep mode during night time, so it doesn’t run 24/7! Increases life time/health of the drives (around 50%?!) and safes quiet a lot of power 😊

[photorooster]

I think I'll follow your lead right from the get go, eventually buying this NAS. ONE WORD OF WARNING. I saw you putting the NAS beneath your wall/window AC unit. My unit is a fridgidare and it clogged and leaked forward instead of outside, ruining my wood floor. If this NAS was nearby it may have been ruined. WATER AND POWER SURGES ARE THE ENEMIES of the NAS. Great Video!

[JevenDovey]

I had a NAS setup with one in my office and one at another location for backup. Was a pain to work with. I have about 80TB footage for my channel and 150TB+ for my production company. Eventually I ditched the NAS after trying to make it work and went to a OWC DAS. So much easier to work with. The Blackblaze cloud solution seems like a good idea until you actually need the backup. Needs to be tested if you can recover all your data and how that process goes especially when you start getting into a huge amount of data. For me the simplest solution has been DAS for my master. 20TB drives to backup sections of my DAS (organized by project numbers or years) and those are kept in climate controlled storage unit. If a project is active I have a 3rd copy on a separate drive. So far its worked out great and I've had multiple hard drive failures. Easy to buy a new 20TB drive and restore that one backup or replace a drive in the DAS raid.

[mgonzalezperna]

Oh man, I went through the rabbit hole and I can understand your fears and frustration. As a Software Engineer I wanted to use TrueNAS, an OS that uses ZFS filesystem, basically allowing you to travel back in time in case you made a booboo with your files. It also syncs with backblaze using the plugins and a lot of other things.
In the end I save a lot of cash on hardware, but the time I'm investing in building up everything securely is crazy. So far, around a month of research and execution and I'm still halfway through my goal...

[karllautman]

Excellent solution and description, Kent. Thanks. One corner-case you may want to consider is what you'd do if, God forbid, your house actually burned down. Restoring over the net would take as long as uploading, plus you'd have to acquire and set up the NAS all over again first; you'd be out of commission for weeks. Fortunately, Backblaze can send you your files on a drive (or several?), so that can speed things up, but it's still going to take days, especially since the drives won't have the data properly formatted to just plug into the NAS. My point is, you may want to think about what things you'd want access to immediately and treat those differently than the rest of the things on your NAS. You should also try a trial restore of just a folder or two to make sure what you think is being saved is actually being saved, and in a restorable format.

[daoudconsumption]

I have wacthed so many videos on this very topic, but this one was by far the most accessible in terms of actual action steps that I'm going to implement

[bananavirus]

I’m a relatively new editor and I’ve been having trouble storing and organizing files for a bit now, so this video came right about when I needed it. Thanks!

[aidanhennebry]

Ok, the dialogue at 4:40 onward had me rolling. So well written.

Formerly when I was a wedding photographer, I would keep a 1TB SSD in my car as my "offsite backup location". When I'd get home from a wedding, I'd back up all my memory cards to internal drives I kept in the house at all times, and the car-only backup drive. The discipline was walking it back out to the car in an hour when I was done backing up my photos lol. I kept it in a discrete location in my car so that, even if my car was broken into in the night, they likely wouldn't find this unsuspicious black rectangle. I also figured it was very unlikely my house would burn to the ground in the same day my car was stolen. I went my professional career without issue. Saved me from dumping 100GB of raw files to the cloud for every wedding. Maybe not a 1:1 solution for a filmmaker, but it worked well for me.

[danh]

Another option is to build a dedicated network server out of a PC. You can get all of the functionality of a NAS when connecting to the storage over the network, but then you can run Backblaze directly on the PC (access the network storage server directly through a VNC setup if there is no display & keyboard hooked up to it) for remote backup.

[Supercon]

5:00
NAS drives are also designed to better withstand being in a dense hard drive environment, better at handling the vibrations from being next to other drives

[soulkeephl]

TEST YOUR RESTORES! This is the only thing I didn't see covered in the video. Whatever the solution is, whether local or cloud based, make sure that it's actually picking up all the files you think you're backing up, and that it's picking up appropriate new folders/files.

[pointblank]

The best, and I mean the BEST, video on what a NAS is and how to use it for a normal, everyday, not-super-techy person! I've seen a lot of videos about NAS options, but this takes the cake in accessibility, entertainment, and explaining things succinctly without going overboard.

I'm saving this and showing this to everyone I know to encourage a step in the right direction with proper data backup and organization!

[chasereeves]

Dude, this was so great. Thank you. Literally wached this and spent $1400 on that DAS and refurbished 22TB drives. You're fucking good at this, dude.

[yukonica]

Very enjoyable ‘movie’. This is a step beyond a typical YouTube video. It is well written.
- informative as well.