Saving my precious data

[solace]

What would be the cheapest and safest way to store data?

Does anybody make two copies of the data they want to store?  Ie, two external hard drives each with the same data?  two sets of discs?  Or cloud back up and disc copies?  What is considered to be the current best strategy?

 

Thanks,

The Perseverator

[Flutterz]

It really depends on how precious it is. Anything that you don't mind losing you don't have to back up. If you do mind losing something make a back up of it on a separate hard drive so that if one dies you still have the other. If you need to be absolutely sure you always have that data put a back up on a couple more hard drives and put them in a safe deposit box. But in the vast majority of cases a single back up on a separate storage device is sufficient.

[Eclipsed]

Backup everything onto an external hard drive and then back that up to another external hard drive; repeat until paranoia is eliminated~

~~

I have one external hard drive that contains essentials(docs, music, pics) and non-essentials(games, VNs, anime); I also have several flashdrives for the essentials as well.

[SilverLi]

External HDDs absolutely. They can store a lot for a cheap price. I never backup anything. I must reinstall Windows at least once a year anyway. But I recently got a Cloud storage. So maybe I can at least save my movies and animes. I should probably backup a lot of my games too. Such a big collection of things I hardly can collect anymore. such a shame to lose it sometimes.

[krill]

i use a mix of flash drives and sd cards along with burning it to DVDs and storing essentials in my wife's cloud storage account. it all is accessible on multiple platforms that way, if i want music or art for my phone i put it on a micro sd after taking a copy of my backups, games and save files generally are saved to the flash drives or the regular sd cards and about 2 times a year i gather my game saves and burn a copy to DVD just in case. the portable storage is also useful for fast transfer between machines and carrying a few anime series on my back log around in my laptop bag so that i can watch them if i get bored.

[EldritchCherub]

You can never have enough external hard drives. It wasn't too long ago that I got a 1 TB external hard drive and it's only got about 30 GB left. I figure it's better to invest in one of those 4 TB stationary hard drives, but they're like almost $200 so I think I'll wait for a price drop. I usually keep my saves and word documents in several flash drives and anime/movies/VNs in the external hard drives.

 

I'm going to be middle-age before I can experience blazing fast internet and perhaps the advent of a petabyte drive, one can only hope...

[kyrt]

I have 5 external hard drives and typically buy one additional each year if I am able. I usually buy them when they are ridiculously cheap around the holidays.

 

Also you can save the lifespan of your hard drives by not playing/watching/doing anything directly off of them; nothing kills a hard drive like watching anime or playing a game off of it. If you wanna do one of those things copy it and move it to your current device and then unplug the device...they will last a lot longer this way. Also take care not to drop them and make sure they don't get too dusty. 

[Kosakyun]

I have one external hard drive that contains essentials(docs, music, pics) and non-essentials(games, VNs, anime); I also have several flashdrives for the essentials as well.

 

Woah. I think you have your essentials and non-essentials backwards.

 

Anyway, I have a back-up for my games and anime.

It's hard downloading with a 15 GB bandwidth limit, y'know.

[zoom909]

I copy unchanging data onto optical discs, and changing data onto flash memory

[Snowtsuku]

I just store my important files in the cloud. If there is a large file that I usually use however, I also keep a copy in an external hard drive.

[sub-zer0]

Backing up data means you have at least 3 copies of it stored in different and separate locations, I have copies of stuff that I count as important on my portable hard drive, my desktop, and my laptop, 3 locations.