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External hard drive big enough to hold more than the entire memory of the computer. Keep everything you find valuable at least, or better yet back up the entire computer on there and update it regularly. Leave it unplugged from the computer between updates.
In other words, an offline backup of everything on your main computer.
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
My SOs el cheapo PSU went to heavin in a flash around 1999 and took the hard drive And the backup drive with it.
Same here, there are copies everywhere now.
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.
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.
It IS a whole lot of pics! Mostly cats and pictures of myself and my partner from the last ten years while we’re young and smexy. Hopefully we’ll have more when we’re old and smexy. But 95% cats.
Random files? Sure! Lotta stuff that I feel might get deleted from YouTube. Some of it has. Every banned Disney cartoon. Lots of North Korean cartoon propaganda! Really weird old stuff. Tons of old VHS tape rips of stuff like Toonami with commercials from the early ‘00s. Loooooots of downloads of full threads from /b/ 2003-2009.
Between me and my partner I have almost 150 000 pictures backed up.
Now that we got 2 kids it's growing even faster !
I should probably sort them to keep only the important ones but right now my time is more precious than the cost of few 100s Go so I just back up everything.
I have inherited about that many photos. Old family photos back to 1900. I'd like to know how you manage that many. Scan, sort, search, index, store, etc.
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.
Yeah I don't know why they came at you with so much snark.
I gather you leave all your digital presence to cloud services? If it ain't in your computer, you don't own it. I've seen people deal with all sorts of problems because they only had one copy of whatever digital file. Computers aren't eternal, if anything they are actually more fickle than some physical mediums. Don't trust mega corporations to keep your data safe, some will sneeze, fuck you over and won't care because either you weren't a paying customer or your problems just aren't profitable enough for even a real human to look at your pleads for assistance.
I just have my photos, that are on the cloud, yes, as they are all taken by phone. I hadnt considered needing a backup for those, and I am not sure I will, but it is an idea. I mostly take them to share with people, I am not really the type of person to go back and look at photos. Nothing else that feel worth backing up.
I used to hoard various files like work stuff, uni materials etc, but time and time again I find I never go back to them, so I don’t really keep stuff like that anymore.
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).
I mean, yea you're not wrong but it's not like I have piles off shit all through my house I have to build trails to get through. It's a server and external drives sitting in a corner and it lets me have whatever I want to read/watch at my fingertips instead of having to find it on streaming somewhere. There's probably stuff in there I'll never look at again but there's a lot that sometimes I just get in the mood for and it's right there ready to go or if I can't decide I can pick something at random.
I can certainly see why some would not want to mess with it and I do have a pretty huge backlog of tech debt where I have to sort things out of my "downloads" folder into my media library but all in all I think it's worth it. It's the one thing I allow myself to just go crazy on because it's so cost efficient. Buying actual objects that will take up space in my house is another story, those things get vetted thoroughly before I pull the trigger on the purchase.
The important things for me to back up include:
My backup is the fact I have a general idea of what I'm planning to do and hope I can figure my shit out if I lose all my data