Follow the 3-2-1 rule: 3 copies, 2 different mediums (second HDD + thumb drive, DVD-R, tape if you’re nerdy, etc) and 1 offsite (cloud, VPN tunnel to someone else’s NAS, etc)
“if it doesn’t exist in 3 places, it doesn’t exist at all” is an adage I do my best to abide by. I lost a 500mb hard drive in the 90s (oh no…all my funny Sound Recorder clips and funny pics!!) and have been paranoid ever since.
Digital storage is just too cheap nowadays to risk it. Cloud storage, too
What are you all backing up? My SSD is just my OS, some programs and Steam, a fresh install without a backup has me back up and running in about 2 hours.
Some people have families and like to keep pictures and videos of said family around. Also, legal documents, academic papers, career and work related documents. Other deranged individuals have collections of rare stuff like music, games and movies that aren’t available on digital platforms anymore. Wild concept, I know.
It was a genuine question tbh. I mean, I have a family with kids and I am a few years out of higher education (technically still in uni, as residency in my country is still university), I still feel no need to keep a physical backup, maybe backing up the photos would be an idea.
Oh goodness… 60,000+ pictures I’ve taken with my camera, my collection of flac files, movies, shows, photoshopped images, screenshots, and random files that might stop existing on the internet!
When I was younger, heaps of hentai. Many heaps.
Sheesh, that is a lot of pics. Got any examples of the random files?
I actually used to have a pretty big music collection back in the day, but these days I cba to maintain my own music, so I just let that go with the wind at some point. Really now I am even too lazy to have my own playlists on my Youtube Music, so I mostly opt for the algorithm playlists / radio playlists or just full albums.
I have 16 TBs of photos/books/comics/movies/shows/games/etc. That’s not even that much compared to some people.
Its the backing up books / movies / shows / games I do not fully get tbh., to me it feels a bit like digital hoarding.
Like if its a rare item that you struggled to get - I can see it, kind of.
The amount of things I have wanted to ever rewatch / reread is absurdly small. I can think of a singular book, maybe a few movies and a couple shows (and those really for a lack of alternatives that I have not seen).
The important things for me to back up include:
- photographs and family videos (literally irreplaceable)
- legal documents and other such paperwork (can be replaced, but it would be a pain)
- various notes on how to accomplish occasional tasks (not too hard to figure out again, but it is convenient to spend 1 minute copying a command out of a text file instead of spending 15 minutes to find all the correct command line arguments)
