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Hello,

Our church records some videos in 4k and we upload select ones to YouTube, in 4k. I am helping out my church and I am using one of my personal NASs (QNAP 4 bay, 4-2TB drives inside). The pic below is a picture of the NAS and drives. I currently have it as drives 1 & 2 mirror each other and drive 4 has everything copied from drives 1&2. Drive 3 is ready as a spare drive. Attached is a picture.

I have everything for the church backed up onto this NAS, all music, power points, documents, video files, etc. This is the backup of the church backup. I keep a local copy of the videos themselves on our church laptop and a local copy of power points and music etc, on the church PC. On my personal pc, I keep a local copy of church docs, flyers, etc. because I do all of the flyer/doc creation for it.

On a separate 10TB external drive, I have everything from the NAS drive copied over. For a total of 3 copies: 1 local, 2 NAS backup, 3 TB external that gets updated once a yr).

The issues I want to bring up are, from the above mentioned is it a stable enough backup solution or should the NAS drives be set to function a different way/order?

The video file sizes is beginning to be an issue. Everything is recorded in 4k and it will always be in 4k (not my choice nor preference). The issue is the church laptop is 500gb, its quickly filling up and has less than 30gbs free. I compressed a folder of videos we had on the laptop, it was 112GB total and after compression it still said 112GB and I didn’t delete the original folder after I compressed it because I was expecting to see the compressed folder with a much smaller file size than the original but that didn’t happen. Why did compressing the folder not shrink the file size?

I have never compressed the videos before because I don’t know if we’d ever need them ASAP and I wouldn’t have time to wait and uncompress a huge file. I was going to just store and start compressing the video files once they get uploaded to YT and keep them compressed on the laptop as the local copy and then keep them compressed on the NAS drive and if ever needed just uncompress it and grab what we need. Now that I have seen compressing them didn’t seem to work I am wondering if its another issue I am not taking into consideration or aware of. I am also semi-concerned about compressing the files if there were to be any corruption within that file due to it being compressed so it makes me want to keep at least 1 copy of the video files NOT compressed.

Please any advice or thoughts on this topic is appreciated. I am not an Audio Video person by nature but have some background in it (very little) and am learning as I go.

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Video and audio files are already compressed. Therefore, you won’t gain anything by compressing them further.

I’d suggest you put a bigger driver in your QNAP NAS. For backups, you could use another QNAP on a remote location with similar disk space and either use QBackup or something like Syncrify to move data to offsite location.

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@dannyh2 ​ I was under the impression that programs like Handbrake could compress video files but I am always uncertain about the quality and want to make sure I compress it w/the same quality it has instead of downgrading it.

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Handbrake is a compression tool, but as you now realise with video files you can’t compress and keep the same quality. The question that I ask is who is ever going to look at all those hours of video recordings and do you actually need high quality videos for all the old ones? I suggest you try handbrake on a couple with different settings (keep the originals) and see if the compression is acceptable. If it is start compressing and deleting. I think that the practices of ever increasing demand for video storage needs addressing either now or later as you run out of capacity on newly purchased storage.

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The backup method seems okay to me. What I do for my backups is Veeams 3-2-1 backup rule ( What is the 3-2-1 backup rule? ). I put one copy on external drive, one copy on NAS, and one copy in cloud (Azure in my case). You are doing 3 backups which is great. I would separate the backups to different buildings or at least rooms/closets. The “cloud” one should be in another zip code if possible (depending on how crucial the video is).

As for compression, not really. I’ve shrunk videos by re-encoding them to lower bitrate & FPS. But that is very time consuming. I would just make sure your storage is enough to keep as many videos as desired.

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@peterw2300 ​ Thank you for your input and confirming the compressing but not able to keep the same quality. I figured that was the case but wanted to verify. Raelistically, probably no one will go back through and watch those videos and regardless if the high quality is needed or not, that wasn’t my call that was a this is what i want/how i want it done, even after suggesting not to record at 4k. The thing is, these videos get uploaded to YT which is 1 reason why I’d rather keep both copies original, if not all 3. In case something were to happen I could always have at least 2 copies of the 4k versions if one got messed up. I think I will have to draw up a diagram with a price sheet and kind of visually show them as a reference point so they can actually see the issue. It is one thing to talk about it, its another to talk about it with a somewhat visual example. I’ll also have to do the price cost because the NAS’s that I am using are out of date as far as patches and security updating which they were fine for just general backup and storage but if we had to get bigger drives and or a different NAS id want to price point that. The storage and space and price issue is something I bought up before when it was mentioned about recording in 4k and i advised not recording in 4k because people don’t even really watch stuff in 4k. I tried to get them to move to just doing 1080 instead of always recording in 4k but that wasn’t what they wanted, heck i’d even say 720 is still decent quality depending on the kind of camera one has and we have a really nice camera. I am the only IT/AV person so I have to make sure everything is done right. If I follow your advice about compressing and deleting, i’d still have to keep at minimum 1 copy of the original uncompressed which would still be an issue because eventually, the space would fill up. If I recall hard drives usually need to be replaced every 5 years and I think the NAS’s usually 5 yrs depending. This is also something I’d have to consider. It may very well be I get 1 NAS just for video file storage. Realistically thinking, I use our church laptop as 1 place to keep the original videos as a local copy, then my personal NAS as described in the original post but now I’ll have to look at possibly having a different local copy as the HDD of the laptop is only 500GB, unless we want to get a bigger size hard drive to keep that laptop as the local copy. The reason I keep that hdd as the local copy is because that is our video editing/uploading laptop. If i have to edit the video in DaVinci I do so on that laptop because it can do it without choking, where as my own PC lags a little using Davinci let alone trying to edit it w/one of those videos would be a nightmare. I have good PCs but I personally don’t have an editing one where I could edit w/ease and do other tasks w/out it getting choked out.

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@ericchastain Thank you for confirming the backup method and for the advice. I always like to double/triple-check the process just to make sure I am not missing something. ​You mentioned you have 1 external, 1 copy on NAS, and 1 cloud copy. So, do you even have a local copy equaling 4 total copies or just delete it from local?
The thing on separating the backups to different buildings/rooms is that realistically everything is ran to my basement and both Nas’s (1 personal, 1 for church) literally sit side by side because everything is cooler in the basement and the only other logical spot. They were in a bedroom at one point but it got too hot (89-95 degrees), in a closet on a top shelf so I made the decision to move everything to the basement since its always cool down there year-round. I have thought about moving 1 NAS to an offsite location, my concerns are in that other offsite location, it would have to be setup on the network to I believe NAT the IP so i could have the capability to transfer data to and from if needed which also means i’d have to have the bandwidth to do so at either location, also always having power to the device and having it on so I could access it would be something i’d need to keep in mind as well at a said offsite location. Currently, I don’t have the bandwidth to support an offsite backup as I currently have a 250GB data cap. Honestly, I am not a fan of cloud storage, I am trying to move my personal photos from using google photos to just my QNAP NAS (but that is another story lol). As far as cloud storage I know others may not be fond of it either due to hacking, even if it is encrypted the other issue that poses is a price tag, which is something that would have to be taken into consideration as well. Currently I believe the goal is to do a few YT videos every quarter (We are a small church), and I just looked at the file size total for Q1 & Q2 for this yr and its a total of 229GB of video storage out of 2TB drive which yes this drive is housing many other things aside from Video for the church. I have 1.36TB free so def enough free space but the current videos I just got (and is the reason why I posted this originally) is because those new videos total 216GB. which obviously our church laptop can’t handle. Which adding those new files (216gb) would def take up some space and that was a special occasion so that 216gb video at one time wouldn’t be a regular thing unless we start filming more often than a handful of 10-20 min. video clips, which again is another reason for the post. I am trying to be proactive and do preventative maintenance.

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Correct, I have 3 backups, plus 1 in production. I am doing full system backups, not just files.

The thought behind separating backups is for disasters like fire/water leak/meteor/etc. If something crazy like that happens at a location with more than one copy, you will likely loose them both from same event. Maybe put an external on laptop (I’m assuming this isn’t in the basement as well), and the second backup to basement NAS, then make another backup occasionally (weekly/monthly?) you take home or to another site. I agree regarding cloud storage. I’m not a fan of it either, but not because of the price. I want to control my data, not another company. I’ve heard of google deleting files off multiple personal Google Drive accounts because of it’s contents (not illegal, just political)…! That is scary! Needless to say, I use cloud services for business backups only, not personal.

Luckily hard drive space has gotten a lot cheaper. You could always upgrade those drives to 8TB (or whatever max the QNAP supports). Then get a 16TB external for laptop, and offsite location.

This is all just my 2 cents. Good luck!

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If you can get around the data cap, you can backup your QNAP to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage​ for $5/TB/month, so your 216 GB of video data would cost $1.08 a month. We don’t scan or otherwise examine your files and, in any case, you can encrypt the data so that’s not even a possibility. We have many churches as customers backing up their video - here’s one example: Case Studies: What Are the Advantages of Cloud Storage?
All the best, regardless of which route you choose!

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@ericchastain ​ Good points. I concur, I want to control my data, not another company is why I do not like cloud solutions. It is not necessarily a price thing here but price is something that I have to consider since its for my church. I did not know of Google deleting things due to political views, I’ll def have to dig more into that!! Yeah, I’ll have to see what the Max is that my current NASs can hold right now and then look at an upgrade plan. I also think I can coast on what we have for now as long as there isn’t a security or firmware update, if I don’t connect them to the internet and I just keep them on my internal network then using them for backups should be fine. I have the port numbers changed on them as well so it isnt the default NAS ports. I appreciate the 2 cents!

@pat-backblaze Thank you for that information I might be able to get around the data cap (we currently found out that another ISP is coming in w/Fiber) so I hope I can get fiber then a lot of the issues w/the data cap will be solved! Good idea on encrypting if we do the cloud storage I will look into that example. Thank you for the help.

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On the other hand, you can use a backup tool which has the option to compress files with keeping quilty and backup files like Good Sync and GsRichcopy360 .

you can just select the source and the destination and just select compress/backup to any destination (NAS,Local drives, servers, clouds …etc ) , it will save your time and your backup. contact both or try th trial visions first .

Also I would suggest to save your backups to clouds like Azure or AWS , both are more secure