Best practices for storing family bytes?
 

Circa 2005'ish, we had a 60gb external drive that we put all our pictures and videos on. We left it plugged into the computer and I just double-copied stuff onto the computer hard-drive and the external. Along comes lighting... computer and external fried... there goes a couple years worth of family history. Lesson learned.

At some point, I bought a pair of 250gb Simpletech externals. Quarterly or so, I download everything onto them... desktop stuff, phones, cameras, GoPro's, media cards... I just blanket copy/paste a ton of stuff and then unplug them. They do not stay plugged into the computer. One of the externals is kept in my gun safe and the other is in a go-bag. They are twins... same stuff on both of them and now they're full. We are only talking about family pics/video, PDF scans of documents, and other family stuff.

I don't want to use the cloud. Period. Dot. NFW.

The point here is permanent long-term storage. 500gb WD or Toshiba externals are $50... just buy two and keep doing what I'm doing? What say you?

IMHO


In a fire proof safe, in a gun safe.

All it takes is one good drop with a physical drive for it to be trashed.

I think I have a 500gb or 1tb external. unplugged when not backing up stuff. No issues. No need to overthink this

How many devices do you want to backup? Buy a WiFi external HD and you can connect with all your devices. I’m assuming you don’t have a “network” in your house.

If you have a new enough router some have a USB3 port you can connect a HD to accomplish the same thing.

You can get more complicated if you like.

If it's just pics/vids, why not take advantage of the "cloud."

Going forward obviously.

Look up xpenology. It’s synology NAS software that will run on any extra PC you have laying around. I put it and a 4tb drive in a ~10 year old AMD box and it’s been wonderful. I back that box up to an external drive. It has its own App Store for torrents, plex, you name it. I do photo editing, and with a gig network in my house it’s as fast as a local spinning rust drive. I can even VPN from my phone and use the official Synology apps to view photos, videos, and I don’t have my stuff on someone else’s computer - oh, they call that “cloud” now.

if you don’t want something that can be a little hacky you can plunk down big money for a real Synology.. avoid the ARM based machines, though

This is exactly what I do. 500GB external HD. Cheap, simple, everything Vlad said.

Must follow 3-2-1 rule
https://www.veeam.com/blog/how-to-fo...plication.html

My recommendation - Cloud backup with Backblaze or similar and off-line to a portable drive stored in safety deposit box. If this seems too extreme, then Cloud backup + online local (separate device from computer, like a removable drive or NAS maybe). But it has to be multistage if you care about the data. I'm in IT business and I've seen it all, you have to do it right if you care about it.

Stop being stubborn, basically. Cloud storage for things like family videos and photos has basically no risk and very high reward. The storage is outrageously cheap and no hacker cares about your summer vacation videos. Continue your current procedure for sensitive financial docs or anything that you wouldn't want in the ether someday, except use a Drobo or some other device that lets you hotswap drives to expand space as needed and retain redundancy without having to hand-copy to two separate drives on your own.

At a certain point, if it's so sensitive that you feel the need to put the data in a safe, you should probably just print hardcopies and get a safe deposit box.

Screw that progressive bullshit. As soon as they take my guns, they'll take all the pictures of me with guns!

OK, so lets say I want to upload 250gb to the cloud now and periodically add more. I won't need to access the data unless my multiple backups at home fail. Who offers this service?

I don't see that it would hurt to have backups of backups. What I mean is, multiple 500 gig external drives of the same crap. 1 in fire proof safe, 1 in safe deposit. Cheap. I think I paid $50 for my 1/2 terabyte external like 4 years ago.
I'm with you on anti cloud. "They" don't need to see my personal shit. (<- This doesn't happen...only in my mind it does and COULD.)

This is not actually true - cloud storage and hosting companies are target for crypto extortion hackers. It's reasonably easy to penetrate those systems (effort vs reward) and company will pay under pressure from the large client base. They also can enumarate files and pull anything down that says "Tax/taxes, credit card, bitcoin, bank, passwords". Those documents will have your address, social security, credit card numbers, passwords, bank account numbers, etc. Juicy stuff. If you go with cloud - make sure they give an option to use private encryption keys. Don't just use their own.

1. Summer vacation videos don't contain your private banking information

2. Anything backed up to one place isn't backed up at all. I believe the phrase goes something like "Two is one, one is none"

Screw the cloud, not doing it.

Problem now solved... new hotness:

Hard drives fail. A single external hard drive is not a backup solution. What if the house burns down, or gets broken into. Everything gone.

I lost a 1 year old hard drive a few weeks ago. Thankfully it was just torrents that I lost, but could have been backups.

I have a local network drive connected to time machine for our laptops, that drive gets synced to another hard drive every few months, and then that other one will get copied to a safety deposit box drive if i ever have anything important enough to care about that much.

All my "family" pictures go on Facebook. Or auto backup on Google drive.

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Not good enough, what happens in a fire? What happens if your files get corrupted and then backed up without you even knowing it ? Do you know that modern encryption ransomware will encrypt any local and network drive that it can get access to? Or that it can delete backups made by known backup applications, remove Shadow Copies and also use other tricks to make data unrecoverable? I work in IT - business continuity and disaster recovery is one of my specialties. I've seen companies lose terabytes of data and rebuild their networks from scratch because they didn't follow simple steps. I've also seen companies shrug off system corruption, data deletion and failed systems as if nothing happened because we thought ahead of time how to prevent data-loss and ensure system up-time.

Listen to 2slow, he speaks truth.

Its a somewhat antiquated concept now, but I've always recommended that people follow the 3-2-1 rule because its fairly easy for the layperson to understand:

3... complete copies of your data
2... different types of media (external hard drive, tape, usb stick, optical)
1... copy stored offsite (cloud, DR site, Iron Mountain, etc)

The idea is to build a robust enough system that should you lose any 2 parts of the system, there is always a backup to save your ass.

Sam, let me put this in perspective for you: Once you manage to successfully egress an E-2 Hawkeye, how many redundant systems are in place to ensure that your parachute actually deploys? ;)

xpenology nas can absolutely not be beat...
1. run it on some old PC
2. Put as many HD as you want. I have a pair of 4tb drives in mirrored raid, It's super fast, and if one drive fails I can swap it
3. your choice of backup apps, back up to external how ever often. Leave external at the office during week, bring it home and back it up during weekends
4. I can VPN in on my ipad, android or iphone and look at all my movies, cat pictures, whatever
5. fuck the cloud.
6. I can stream all my stuff to all my rokus, still works if internet is down, and the kid can watch movies.

https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...aa07f7c621.jpg

I realize I'm a little late - I'm on a Netgear ReadyNAS. Goal is to eventually put it "in a firesafe - inside of a gunsafe".

I'm in RAID 5 - if a hard drive fails, I take out the failed hard drive, replace it with a good hard drive, let the system take care of everything else.

Currently no redundancy for cryptolockers, but there's enough drive space that I have it automatically back itself up periodically to a self-hidden location.

Currently using 4 of 6 bays at 9.0 TB of storage space...I don't think I'll ever come anywhere near filling that fucker up - but if I do, I'll just go out and add a...whatever size drive they have at that point - WD is apparently releasing it's first round of microwave tech for up to 40TB drives.

I "backup" all of my blu-rays / dvds, and can play them directly through my TV, also accessible from offsite

I hate cloud stuff too. I haven't even put 1 picture of my 2 y.o. son on social media. I like my privacy. I was thinking about getting some SSD for backing up stuff vs the 1TB internal drive I have on my tower especially since I don't play games pc games or spend much time online anymore and am starting to value space (microtower or all in one).