Initial Funding Goals

As of now, we have €306.00 in the pot! Since a donor is taking care of the €20.00 MEGA subscription fee every month, that means any money earned can get saved and put towards other things, which I am incredibly thankful for.



The master copy of the library lives on a TrueNAS machine in my living room. The storage pool consists of four 4TB drives in RAIDZ1 (one drive can fail without data loss), which works out at a total working capacity of 10.44TB. For optimal performance, a ZFS pool should be no more than 80% full. Performance aside, we're always getting new stuff in (especially with the raws these days), so it would be good to get some more capacity.

My plan is to get two 18TB drives and run them as a mirrored pool. This still leaves one disk redundant in case of failure, but it's much simpler and faster than striping across a bigger setup. 18TB drives look to be around €300, so there's enough saved for one! I'd like to raise €300 and put that towards the second member.

If we reach that goal and get the two drives going (at a total cost of ~€600), I'd probably take the next €300 (if it's not presumptuous of me to start talking about a second fantasy €300 raised) and keep that aside in case of disk failure.

This would be ~16TB of usable redundant space using only two disks instead of four. That's a lot of extra storage and should be enough for a good while. If we ever manage any more than the €300 for the second disk, and then another €300 to keep for a replacement, I'm not sure what the best plan would be for future money!

There are people holding copies of the library that are kept up to date by Syncthing, maybe I could send some of them drives to help ensure that safe offsite backups continue to exist? Who knows. That's as far ahead as I can plan for now.