CD/DVD or External HD

[FileUnderT]

Although I am new to this forum, I was a member of the old platform before the crash. What I wanted to know was, what is the ultimate way to store all these wonderful music and video files. I have downloaded a lot on the last forum and have them on an external drive but is it now advisable to back them up to another drive or CDs/DVDs. What does everybody else do?

[billylentz]

I use external HD these days, though I still have a lot of the older stuff on CD/DVDs and even a couple of big walls of music CDs. The official stuff I still buy on actual commercial CDs, although I couldn´t afford the most recent ones yet, except for Ringo´s "Let´s change the world".

I first had a 1Tb external HD, then I got a 2Tb, whose last free bytes I´ve recently used. So now I got a 4Tb external HD, copied the full content of the two older ones onto it, and the plan is to keep this method going, so that I´ll always have at least a couple of copies of most of my digital archives.

I still have a lot of great stuff on physical CDs, so in time I´d like to flac them all too, but I don´t see me doing it before retirement, which I´m hoping won´t happen at least for the next twenty something years. But knowing how these medias are a lot more fragile than we were promised when they first appeared, the physical CDs are something that make me very uncomfortable. And there´s still a lot of VHS, cassettes and all that... But we do what we can and hope for the best.

[FileUnderT]

I just cannot believe that I spent a fortune buying bootleg albums, videos from Fenno and today I have everything, in much better quality on a 2TB drive, that cost me nothing.

[yymca6]

External drives are the way to go, especially at the prices we pay for them these days.

There are some excellent 5 Tb portable drives at reasonable price on Amazon. I use Seagate drives and have no problems with them.

I have close to 7 Tb of Beatles stuff (audio only), I could not have that without external drives.

[zaval80]

What does everybody else do?

Buy 2 drives, copy on the 2nd everything from the 1st, and your files are covered.

[Lord Reith]

Two drives. Three is even better.

A portable solid state drive is a good option if you only collect audio because they have gotten quite large now and are immune to many of the things that can upset hard drives ie: vulnerability to sudden shocks while writing/reading, being dropped on the floor, cold, moisture, mechanical failures etc. But they are more expensive.

Optical discs are the worst archive format of all.

[Bazilnerk]

Everything on my computer and all attached drives back up to Backblaze - Costs me something like $6 a month (can't remember exactly, as I pay in £!)
Currently, I have 14gb backed up. If a drive pops, I can just download everything from it to a new drive.

[ianbuckers]

Two drives. Three is even better.

A portable solid state drive is a good option if you only collect audio because they have gotten quite large now and are immune to many of the things that can upset hard drives ie: vulnerability to sudden shocks while writing/reading, being dropped on the floor, cold, moisture, mechanical failures etc. But they are more expensive.

Optical discs are the worst archive format of all.

An SSD is not a good option for long-term storage.

[alphabeatles]

Whatever method you use, make backups!

I started collecting back in the early '90s with cassette tapes, VHS tapes and CDs/DVDs, but now everything is nice and tidy on external HDDs.

My system (Mac):

8TB Seagate (COSTCO version): Main archive for all my crap (audio/video/images/documents)

Another similar 8TB as a mirror of the first

A 5TB Seagate (COSTCO version): Backup of the above without the video archive.
(This drive had been my main traveling working drive until recently when I was dragging a file and the drive suddenly dismounted itself, only to return as read-only... I was unable to repair it with utilities but thankfully the data was readable so I immediately topped off my backups and reformatted it before restoring the original data. It seems to be working normally now, but has been busted in rank to become one of the backups.)

Finally, this same stuff is backed up yet again to a stack of old computer and former server 1 and 2TB HDDs that are now used as externals. A couple of these are in the office, offsite from home. The traveling 5TB will be used to top these off regularly.

No cloud storage right now, but that is a wise option – though maybe not the most private.

[zaval80]

An SSD is not a good option for long-term storage.

That's my understanding as well.