Where do you keep your movie files?

[jason2811]

I had about 300 movies (around 500GB) on my external hard drive (Western Digital Passport). I used to keep this connected to my laptop and stream movies off of it to my ATV2. Well I accidentally dropped it and now all my movies are gone. So I wanted to know how you guys keep your movies? External hard drive? Mac Mini? On the actual computer? Do you back up your movies twice? I ask because keeping all these movies on an external hard drive seems pretty risky especially after my experience.

Also, what kind of external hard drive do you most of you use?

 

[ashman70]

I have over 1600 movies, I keep them on a 6 bay Qnap NAS that runs 24x7, I stream them over my wired network at home using my Boxee box and WD Live player. I also have another NAS with over 200 tv shows, it also streams over my network to my Boxee Box and WD Live player. If I was going to put any on an external drive I would certainly back them up. As it is, I have an Antec 1200 case with two four drive bays, each bay contains 4x2TB drive, both bays are connected to a raid 5 controller, this is my backup for my movies and tv shows. I am not particularly a fan of the WD external drives that contain two drives in raid 0, while there are certain performance gains with raid 0, there is no redundancy, if one drive fails you loose everything, I prefer raid 1 or raid 5.

 

[andymodem]

The only PC I have in the house is a Windows Home Server box running iTunes that serves up movies/music to my ATV2's.

 

[slothrob]

So I wanted to know how you guys keep your movies? External hard drive? Mac Mini? On the actual computer? Do you back up your movies twice?

I use an external drive and keep a second one for backup. You should only need to backup once, but my buddy does backup twice and keeps one locked in his desk at work, in case his house is robbed, burns down, or is hit by lightning while both of his drives at home are plugged in.

 

[KevinC867]

I use an external drive and keep a second one for backup. You should only need to backup once, but my buddy does backup twice and keeps one locked in his desk at work, in case his house is robbed, burns down, or is hit by lightning while both of his drives at home are plugged in.

Yup, that's pretty much what I do as well. There are lots of fancy solutions that could be used, but two $100 external disk drives works as well as any of them for moderately large media libraries.

I use ChronoSync To keep the two drives synchronized as I add stuff. I exclude these drives from my Time Machine backups.

What kind of hard drive? I like the 2TB WD Green drives for this purpose. Before the flooding in Thailand, they sold for as little as $70. Right now, they may be double that. You can buy a good enclosure for $20 or $30. If you want Firewire 800, they get more expensive. I like this one: http://www.amazon.com/Macally-Hi-Speed-FireWire-Enclosure-G-S350SUAB2/dp/B003VTZFN4/

It's very easy to assemble the bare drive and the case, but if you would rather buy a package, I would probably stick with WD or Seagate so you have a good idea what drive will be inside the package. I've been burned by a couple of Samsung drives inside off-brand external drives.

 

[whitegoodmen]

I use an external drive and keep a second one for backup. You should only need to backup once, but my buddy does backup twice and keeps one locked in his desk at work, in case his house is robbed, burns down, or is hit by lightning while both of his drives at home are plugged in.

That's the same thing that I do. All my movies (about 400) and 400Gb's of tv shows are on an external HD for my Boxee box and I also have an external I keep at work in my locker. About once a month or so I bring the hard drive home and update it.

Is their a better way?

 

[Darien Red Sox]

I keep them on my Mac Book Pro as well as a backup on an external drive (although with iCloud this backup is not as important). All together I have collected about 200GB worth of stuff (Moves and TV Shows).

 

[charlien]

I have an old Mac pro with a few 1 & 2 terabyte drives serving as my media server. I use cronosync to copy anything new over to a windows server in another part of the house.

 

[Apple OC]

I keep them on a couple of external drives ... I am careful not to drop them though

 

[snowwhite007]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

Keep mine on my external network drive stopped ripping now tho as it takes to long

 

[chiefpavvy]

Under my pillow.

I have a 1TB 2.5" portable usb-powered drive I take on the road with me. I keep my favorites as well as whatever new-ish stuff I want to peruse.

For home I use a pair of 4TB external Seagate to store my 750+ movies and hundreds of TV episodes. Plenty of free space yet, even with many of my movies being updated to HD encodes. These are backed up twice: locally to another pair of same drives and I use CrashPlan to keep the same data backed up remotely to 2 different locations. Can't be too safe with all the time and money invested in this stuff.

I've pondered throwing a home server together but just can't be bothered at this time. I find a pair of external drives of sufficient capacity to be a better solution for me at this time. Cheaper, more energy efficient, and takes up very little space. Every situation is different though, I know folks with thousands of dollars invested in various storage solutions.

EDIT: Just to add, I'm an all-Apple guy. That makes a difference too. iTunes is my world, and I use iEverything. I don't have any need to run other transcoders or media servers, so I don't need the flexibility that some of the more expensive solutions would provide. YMMV.

 

[ashawley]

Backup Solution

I have mine on an external hard drive and I back those up via Time Machine and then I back up to the cloud using BackBlaze. $5 a month and it's all you can eat. Works great....no need to shuffle drives around

 

[qwasedral]

I usually keep them on my computer until I watch them and delete them when i'm done with them.

 

[miklovo]

I use a 1TB time capsule as my main media server but I use a 1TB external HDD to backup every few months that I give to my dad to store in his gun safe.

Going to have to upgrade both soon as I am almost out of space......

 

[rebby]

The only PC I have in the house is a Windows Home Server box running iTunes that serves up movies/music to my ATV2's.

Ditto. The iTunes library is living on my (Solaris) NAS and is mapped to the Windows server via an SMB share. One of these days I'll replace that old Dell with a Mac Mini.

 

[jaynone]

I've got a 2tb western digital drive on my airport extreme that I keep my media on and use for a time machine backup. I've got a 1 gig western digital passport that I backup the media to.

 

[imahawki]

I have a Drobo with about 3.5TB installed currently and a Seagate GoFlex 3TB as a backup. I don't rotate my drive off-site right now but I have a Crashplan account and have uploaded 1.1TB of my 1.8TB total storage used. It would be a bitch to restore from Crashplan but I would only need to do so in a total catastrophe.

 

[sulliweb]

Mine are stored on a Drobo, with Dual disk redundancy... Then, I have a couple of external drives that I keep at work with a backup of all my files on it (encrypted, with the only copy of the key at home....) That way, even if I have to show my boss why I'm storing them at work, it's nothing that he'll worry will distract me from my job. It's been a good solution so far.

Though, since the majority of my files are TV shows... Since you can redownload iTunes purchases at this point, I'm really only worried about the non-iTunes purchased content and movies for my backups.

 

[Cliff3]

I used to have a Windows Home Server box (HP EX490) running an iTunes client. A key additional role for that machine was to host time machine backups, but HP has discontinued support for the machine and I found that reliability degraded with each successive release of OS X until Lion broke it completely. I recently replaced the WHS machine with a Synology 4-bay NAS, and I have an x86 Windows 7 client running as a Hyper-V guest on a dedicated Windows server that I use to serve up content to Apple TVs and other iTunes clients. My video files consume around 1.6TB of disk.

The Synology NAS is running RAID 5. I back up the shares to external disks via an eSATA drive dock, and these drives are stored separately from the server.

FWIW the iTunes service on the Synology servers only works with Windows or Mac iTunes clients - my gen 2 Apple TV could not see the shared library.

 

[CylonGlitch]

Currently I have an AppleTV1 (40gb) running OSX. There is a 2TB drive connected to it for all my movies, music and pod casts. I also have a FreeNAS server with 2TB of space running ZFS along with 1 drive for redundancy / rebuilding. Nightly I have a cron job on the ATV1 run that mirrors everything on the external 2TB to the NAS.

As soon as the drive prices recover, I'm going to expand my NAS to at least 6TB and potentially pick up a Drobo for NAS backup.

 

[tyche]

I have 2 ReadyNAS units that have 4x2TB for about 5.4TB usable after raid 5 (x-raid actually) formatting. One is rsync'd regularly to the other as a backup. Back when 2TB drives were < $80 this was a cheap backup solution. Any data that isn't video is further backed up several other ways including one offsite and I use svn quite extensively as well. I'm big on protecting my data.

 

[sampdoria]

I use a 1TB time capsule as my main media server but I use a 1TB external HDD to backup every few months that I give to my dad to store in his gun safe.

Going to have to upgrade both soon as I am almost out of space......

Ditto (sort of)...

I have a 1TB Time Capsule holding iTunes media for various Macs, a PC, and ATV2 in my house. The Macs and PC with their own iTunes Library with home sharing on and all authorized users on all machines. (The TC Disk is also a NAS for documents and photos too).

I back up the TC disk to an external 1TB WD MyBook every couple of weeks manually, which I then store in a locked, fire-proof safe.

So far no complaints, but I will eventually upgrade to an "always on" Mac Mini iTunes server with a 2TB external hd for media & NAS, and another 2TB external hd for off-site back-up.

 

[Steppy]

I store all of my movies in iTunes on my iMac. They are backed up with Time Machine via an external 1TB buffalo USB drive.

Usually I delete them after I have watched, unless they are really good then I may keep them.

 

[visual]

Apologies for going slightly off topic

I’m just moving over from a mixed OS environment to Apple only at home. I’ve bought a 2011 base level mac mini to be the head of my media distribution (it was previously a HP media smart windows home server).

I was thinking that the best approach was to invest in some Direct Attached Storage to store my media on, however I’m interested in how people are getting on with (specifically) windows network shares+Lion+media sharing.

How do you ensure shares are mounted at log in and do you ever get any issues? I’m planning to at least have PLEX and iTunes on the mini serving clients (MBA, Apple TV and several iOS devices), and with the mini being headless I really don’t want to be plagued with connections dropping or media being inaccessible.

 

[cjb287]

Apologies for going slightly off topic

I’m just moving over from a mixed OS environment to Apple only at home. I’ve bought a 2011 base level mac mini to be the head of my media distribution (it was previously a HP media smart windows home server).

I was thinking that the best approach was to invest in some Direct Attached Storage to store my media on, however I’m interested in how people are getting on with (specifically) windows network shares+Lion+media sharing.

How do you ensure shares are mounted at log in and do you ever get any issues? I’m planning to at least have PLEX and iTunes on the mini serving clients (MBA, Apple TV and several iOS devices), and with the mini being headless I really don’t want to be plagued with connections dropping or media being inaccessible.

You can add disks or volumes as log in items if you go to user preferences. The Mac Mini also supports wake on demand over the network (wireless as well if you're using a Time Capsule, Airport router etc). All you have to do to make shares compatible with windows based machines over the network is check SMB in the sharing preferences panel (Click on options once in the Sharing section of system preferences).

I have a similar set up at home but my main server is my macbook pro (PLEX > ATV2) so it needs to be plugged in with the display opened to support Wake On Demand. A Mac Mini would work wonders though. It also works wirelessly for me since I'm using an Apple router (2TB Time Capsule with movies and TV Shows stored on it). I can also see my shares on our old XP desktop usually with minimal fuss. Seems to work better on Vista or 7 though.