No More Discs
Jun. 16th, 2022 02:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerHow do you back up the data on your computer? Do you backup the data on your computer? I do, though my process has generally been ad hoc.
The point of having backups is to have at least two copies of everything. That's because any one copy of a file may be corrupted. Moreover, you want these copies on different devices because any one device may totally fail.
For many of my files making one backup copy is enough because I still have the main copy on my computer. My photo image files are huge, though. I've only been able to keep the most recent few years on my computer's onboard storage. That means I need them backed up in two places before I delete them from my computer to make room for new photos.
For years I've used DVD-R discs as my secondary backup medium. The primary has been an external HDD; the secondary a stack of DVD-Rs. Using DVD-Rs hasn't scaled well, though, as image file size has increased.
When I started storing secondary backups on DVD-Rs years ago, I could fit multiple years of photos on a single, 4.7GB disc. Then, as image sizes got larger (and as I made more photos), one year of photos would fill a disc. By the late '00s I was filling 4 discs a year. By the late '10s I was filling ~15 a year. The spindle of 50 DVDs in the picture above is just my 2016-2019 photos. In 2022 just my first 6 months of new photos would fill 10 discs. Oh, and burning all these DVDs is slow. Each disc takes about 40 minutes to prepare. Clearly DVD-R is no longer a practical solution!
For years I've been using a traditional, spinning external hard disk drive (HDD) as my primary backup solution. In recent years I've shifted to solid-state drives (SSDs) as they've gotten more cost effective. Most recently I bought a 2TB SSD for $209. SSD is fast, faster even than HDD, and compact. The picture above shows the size of my 2TB drive. Compared to that spindle of 50 DVD-Rs it's tiny... and it holds nearly 10x as much data!
Living in the future is awesome!
The point of having backups is to have at least two copies of everything. That's because any one copy of a file may be corrupted. Moreover, you want these copies on different devices because any one device may totally fail.
For many of my files making one backup copy is enough because I still have the main copy on my computer. My photo image files are huge, though. I've only been able to keep the most recent few years on my computer's onboard storage. That means I need them backed up in two places before I delete them from my computer to make room for new photos.
For years I've used DVD-R discs as my secondary backup medium. The primary has been an external HDD; the secondary a stack of DVD-Rs. Using DVD-Rs hasn't scaled well, though, as image file size has increased.
When I started storing secondary backups on DVD-Rs years ago, I could fit multiple years of photos on a single, 4.7GB disc. Then, as image sizes got larger (and as I made more photos), one year of photos would fill a disc. By the late '00s I was filling 4 discs a year. By the late '10s I was filling ~15 a year. The spindle of 50 DVDs in the picture above is just my 2016-2019 photos. In 2022 just my first 6 months of new photos would fill 10 discs. Oh, and burning all these DVDs is slow. Each disc takes about 40 minutes to prepare. Clearly DVD-R is no longer a practical solution!
For years I've been using a traditional, spinning external hard disk drive (HDD) as my primary backup solution. In recent years I've shifted to solid-state drives (SSDs) as they've gotten more cost effective. Most recently I bought a 2TB SSD for $209. SSD is fast, faster even than HDD, and compact. The picture above shows the size of my 2TB drive. Compared to that spindle of 50 DVD-Rs it's tiny... and it holds nearly 10x as much data!
Living in the future is awesome!
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How often do you plug in the SSD?
Date: 2022-06-16 11:04 pm (UTC)this article indicates you should keep SSD near 72F and it's not long term, need to power it up more than once a year.
I use external 1TB HDD (they were onsale < $100) for my laptop, but I don't have a lot of photos. for my phone I'm relying on whatever default android cloud backup Google gives.
Re: How often do you plug in the SSD?
Date: 2022-06-16 11:38 pm (UTC)