So excited to consolidate my mess of drives and get a big boost to my storage.
this post was submitted on 10 May 2024
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Don't forget to back up to other additional drives!
Consolidating all your data into one drive is very convenient, but if you aren't backing it all up then it's only a matter of time until you lose everything. If you're gonna have a bunch of small drives hanging out you can use them as a backup. You could even set them up into a RAID, but I've never actually done that so i can't vouch for it
So, oddly enough, I rarely ever back things up. I will back up things that I absolutely cannot afford to lose, but other than that my general thoughts are to leave my data in the hands of the HDD gods.
Sometimes it's good to have an unexpected clear out... But only sometimes.
I'm also aware that this could entirely just a "me" thing.
I save hardrives from old computers because "i might lose something important!"
Im a digital hoarder. I back up my digital existence by buy a new harddrive big enough my old collection fits under like 10 percent of the new drive.
And keep all the old drives.
Theorically if the oldest drives are still readable, ill never have to worry about losing the oldest information to ransomware.
But ive been holding onto some data since before ibm released pentium. Im actually afraid to look at what i have from being a 12 year old on the internet without supervision...
To be fair, the one thing I lost that I wish I'd been able to back up was my blog which I shared on MySpace back in the day.
When they refurbished the site and got rid of all the old stuff, I was using a different email address so I missed my chance to back it up.
It was essentially a personal diary of what I got up to every single day in 2008/9. I would kill to be able to read through some of them again.
Alas, they are lost to time 🫡
Man I'd love to see that archive (unless it were anything personal) lol, like a modern day library of Alexandria.
An adrenaline junkie!
No, I do the same. I don't really have backups at all. Some stuff I have in the cloud, but for convenience more than anything else.
I have my Windows drives encrypted with bitlocker, and I put the recovery keys in the cloud. I recently wiped the OS partition intending to retrieve the keys after reinstall, only to find the cloud provider is having an extended outage... So those drives are inaccessible for the time being. Maybe forever. I've barely missed them.
The biggest part of my data by byte is just media that I can redownload. I don't have anything life-or-death critically important.
Kinda same, though I'd like to figure out how to make a raid setup to improve. Atm I just back up my absolute essentials on every drive, and my dotfiles on one (well, two including my install), my totally-not pirated stuff on another, etc. Tbh I kinda use "I can just redownload that" as a back up method lol.
You know what, that would be a perfect mother or fathers day gift every year for any data hoarder. Happy Parity Day!
Or a great idea for a birthday parity!
Oy ha
I second this! I hope you get many years of service from your drive, but I haven't had much luck with Seagate, personally.
Any recommendations for reliable storage? I need new drives but I've put off buying any for years with all the bad reviews and counterfeit products making me weary of any deal that seems too reasonable or model with known issues.
Recommendations are difficult, because reliability varies from model to model (even within the same brand) and there is no useful data until a model is more than a few years old. What we can do is follow the data available from an independent source with large sample sizes:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/category/cloud-storage/hard-drive-stats/
My personal experience over the most recent 15 years:
I just did some reading, and while Seagate drives had problems around 2012 -2016, they seem to work about as well as any other drive now. I'd go for the best deal, personally.
Seagate have always worked perfectly for me (knock on wood). And to avoid counterfeits i only buy hard drives from a physical store of a large retailer chain. You'll pay a little bit more, but really only a very little more, and you'll know that what you're buying is an authentic drive that came directly from the manufacturer
I've had WD since 2008 and have never had a drive die on me. My 2008 drive is currently in my system and has a error, its my torrent drive and I had 1.5 Gbit internet and just thrashed the drive and she's still plugging away. Had bought a 18tb WD Red drive and it was DOA and got sent back a UltraStar.
So no matter what YMMV
So what's the best way to back up a single drive?
"best" depends on the particulars of your situation. Cloud backup is one of the easiest but over time can be expensive. In the long run buying a second same-sized drive is cheaper than online backup, but it requires more money up front, and having the original and backup in the same physical location doesn't protect against local disasters like a waterpipe bursting flood. There are specialized tape drives for backups, which are cheap per mb and so you can make lots of separate backups which makes your data safer, but they're very slow to read and write. And there's other option too, like optical disks, raid arrays, etc.
Best i can really say is to do some online research to figure out what's right for your particular case.
Thanks for the response! I'll have to look up some software for automatic backups.
Cloud cost is pretty cheap, especially if you do cold storage.
Where they get you is egress fees.
Very interesting to know, but i just looked it up and it still seems expensive in the long run. Azure's cheapest storage tier is 1 dollar per TB per month. So 5 TB of backup would cost 60 bucks a year, but a 5 TB drive costs about 120 bucks. So after 2 years of cloud backup it costs you an extra 60 bucks a year every year vs. if you just bought a hard drive.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/blobs/#pricing
Yes I agree! have an TB external drive and a cloud backup on Dropbox (not my favorite but it does the job for now). I definitely need to get some better automated backup processes in place but it's a work in progress.
This bad boy is going to help a lot.
Not everything needs backing up. If it's just your stuff from Steam, you can just grab it again if it fails.