Reviewers Recommend Big Wet Asses 34 - review by Captain Jack Director: Pat Myne Starring: Vince Karter, Zac Wild, Summer Vixen, Lilith Grace, River Lynn, Victor Ray, Tessa Thomas, Jay Romero. Read review
I have a 34tb NAS running Stash that I use to store my collection (20 years of downloaded scenes and backed up DVDs)
Storage amount is obviously overkill for most people, but it works really well and allows me to revisit stuff as I fancy. The NAS box is a 4 drive Synology disk station - didn't cost much and is very reliable if a little noisy.
A couple of years ago I bought a refurbished 8 tb hard drive that I use to save the porn I like. Totally separate from the 1tb boot drive. I don't think I'll ever fill it up. Most of what I have are clips instead of full movies but I have those too. So far of the available space I have used juse under a terabyte with porn.
By no means am I criticizing an NAS solution, but it's likely too complicated for a lot of average users. Heck, after about 5 explanations, my sister still can't grasp the concept of folders and storing files in different folders, based upon their topic. I'm itching to set up an NAS myself, but just don't have the time right now.
For the average home user, a 5TB or 8TB external drive would work just fine. For the small price difference, I'd suggest going with an 8TB drive. You ALWAYS wind up storing more stuff than you think you will. Right now at Staples, they've got a 5TB drives for $150-160. 8TB drives for as low as $180. The Seagate 8TB USB 3.0 HD is currently 10% off.
Don't have enough USB ports? Buy a USB expander. It converts 1 USB port into many. How many just depends upon the model you buy. I use the expander for my mouse and keyboard, saving the USB ports built into my computer for 2 external hard drives. Also, I use thumb drives quite frequently. I plug them only into the expander, because I've heard of USB ports physically failing due to overuse. Much easier to buy a new expander than to replace a USB port on your motherboard.
Worried about a drive failure? Buy two drives and periodically copy everything from your active drive to your backup drive, then unplug and disconnect the backup drive until the next time you copy. Basically, a poor man's RAID.
I also suggest an external hard drive as this is by far the easiest method and quite cheap as well. The only thing I will add is that you make sure that your drive doesn't require some kind of stored key to access the data because I made the mistake of once getting a drive that needed that and when my internal drive where that key was stored died then I lost access to all the data on the external hard drive. I keep it as a reminder of what never to do.
I have 4 8tb external drives. They store mainstream and porn, broken up by the half the alphabet on one, half on the other. Two drives hold it all with room to spare. The other two are back ups of the original two.
I've toyed with the idea of a NAS but I won't store anything on hard drives without offline backups (no matter what kind of data) and off site (i.e. online) backup solutions for NAS can be very expensive. For this reason I use a 24TB external hard drive connected to my Mac and backed up with BackBlaze. The basic BackBlaze plan has no storage limit but it only works with drives connected to a computer (i.e. not a NAS system). In case of a disaster they will break your data up into 8TB zipped chunks and mail it to you on however many hard drives it takes. You have to pay for the recovery drives but you can return them for a refund.
Agree with you wholeheartedly. ALWAYS create backups of data/media that you use. Hard discs do eventually fail. Overly humid conditions, data rot, rotor/spindle wear, magnetic fields (EMPs for the truly prepared), knocks, shocks and drops of the actual component etc even physical theft.
So it is of utmost importance to have a backup (or two or many) of data and media that you cannot replace or restore.
Factor in the price of hard discs which may vary by location, it is a small price to pay for peace of mind knowing that your media/data is backed up locally. ie not on some dodgy remote server ("cloud" never understood the deliberate misuse of that word in relation to computing) that you don't have access to, especially when your internet connection fails.
I've used a RaspberryPi 4 to host two 8TB drives, each drive has 8 x 1TB TrueCrypt containers. I mount the TrueCrypt containers and then script Linux Symbolic links to make all folders appear under one root. Finally I mount the root as a network folder.
Kind of a poor mans NAS but has served me well for years :)
The problem with local-only backups is disaster recovery. If you get broken into and your stuff is all stolen or god forbid a natural disaster or fire consumes everything you're out of luck. Backblaze is very affordable for backing up external connected drives and is anything but dodgy. Ive been using them for over a decade not just for my "stash" but for all of my personal and business backups. I've never had a disaster scenario thankfully but it also has a 1 year history and that's saved me many times for smaller issues like individual files I may have accidentally deleted or lost somehow or deleted intentionally and then later needed. My local backups sync constantly and only have a very limited history so the 1 year history on backblaze means I can recover something you deleted a year ago. If you don't want to use a third party service I'd recommend at least keeping your backups in two different physical locations if you can. You could even keep the remote copy online and sync it if you have the ability to do that. Basically your own "cloud" backup.
Yes completely agree that there is a risk on any backups being entirely on one location. Would love to consider a cloud approach but where I live only has 1MB up and 20MB down, soon will be on 900MB fibre though when its installed this year. So will check this out thank you for the advice.
Not my intent to rehash the "local vs remote backup" discussion. Just an FYI only. I see that Micro Center has a 20TB external hard drive on sale, for $10 off. Of course, the resolution of your videos would have a major impact on how many videos you could store, but that seems like a life-time supply of porn!
Big Wet Asses 34 - review by Captain Jack
Posted - Feb 2 2025 : 6:12AM
