Reaching shelf Drive

Off-topic
1

What’s a shelf drive? All that shit you got on digital. I suppose even non digital crap you could make into digital if you tried. The important shit you should have saved. The good stuff. Your life record. Plus all the cool songs.

I think one has reached shelf life when you need 2 more drives. One for all the shit, and the other as back up. This is as obvious as writing, like wow!, now I won’t lose all this shit, I wrote it down. The beginning of Holy Shit. Holy Shit !I just need to write this down, claim God wrote it, and sell a best seller that will inspire…

Sorry, I got distracted a bit by a wisp of thought of what could inspire people to send me money. The actual subject of this thread is thoughts. You know, that shit you want to preserve.

What medium are you guys using? I have lost so much stuff over the years, shifting from cassettes, to cd, obsolete HD’s, now DVD. I had a 2 Terrible Bite hard drive. Then it died, and with it, a lot of shit I wish I could of saved.

They will laugh at us old folks. Soon, having a digital back up of all your shit will be as normal as toilet paper. I still remember the look in my grand dad’s face when I interrupted his story to ask what a “whip socket” was. You see, what a “whip socket” was, was important to understanding my grandfathers story. He had used the term " rattled my whip socket", as if we would say, “get to working, I am the boss.” You don’t need to whip the horse you see. A smart man knows you just need to rattle the socket.

2

Somewhere in there I think was a serious question about how to preserve your digital – stuff. You already have part of the answer, which is “Not all in one place.”

Hard disc drives don’t last forever. They have finicky moving parts, and can die without warning. Solid state drives, with no moving parts, will probably be a lot more reliable over time, but one should never keep all of one’s digital eggs in a single basket, it’s just asking for trouble.

My own current method is to have a plugged-in backup drive behind my computer, which uses Apple’s Time Machine software to do hourly, incremental backups. Many versions of things are kept on there, and easily accessible. But beyond being on separate drives, they are right next to each other. They could be taken out by an electrical surge, a flood, or (on much more likely on Windows) malware. Such happened to my dad by one of those Crypto Locker programs, that got his attached backup as well as his main hard drive.

So I also do an incremental “clone” of my hard drive onto a second external drive. This drive should ultimately be stored elsewhere; not near to the main computer. But then you have to remember to do those backups. I use a product called SuperDuper, which updates the previous backup only where files have changed. But it still takes a couple of hours to run the backup, because I have a lot of digital “stuff”.

An improvement to the above system would be to add a second SuperDuper drive, and take turns updating them. Store them in separate places, like one at the opposite end of the house, and the other one at work. Then you should be pretty well protected from most disasters.

In addition to the above, I keep my most immediate, and frequently accessed “stuff” in my Dropbox account. You can get a free Dropbox account with 2GB of storage. This is less than Google Drive and some of the others, but much easier to use. Also if you recruit enough friends to sign up, you can build it up to 10GB or more, still free. That won’t hold a lot of photos, songs or videos, but is more than plenty for a huge amount of text-based information.

Most of my media is photos, which are still not practical to back up online due to the huge amount of gigabytes they take up. But if you only shoot JPEGs and don’t take a crazy amount of pictures (and don’t keep most of them), online backup is also a viable option.

Some companies offer unlimited online storage for pretty reasonable amounts. Dropbox has a business account for $15/month per user, but requires some minimum amount of users. You get unlimited storage, but only if you have enough people.

Hard drives keep getting cheaper and cheaper. Right now you can get a 4 TB external drive for $149 on Amazon. Crazy. And that’s not the biggest size on the market. That being said, don’t buy the cheapest hardware you can find. Aim for a higher-end model; something that should be more reliable. You’ll still need to replace it at some point, but the hope is that you’re paying extra to help ensure that it lasts beyond when you choose to retire it.

3

I use an NAS drive attached to my router for backups and to hold my music library, given that I have multiple computers, non automated backup would be a pain.

Ideally I would want the NAS to clone onto a drive or be sited at my parents house. Unfortunately my internet speeds are shocking (2mb in 2015???) so that is not possible.

Dropbox and virtual storage does not look worth it to me. With repeated proof that even the best prepared companies can lose their user info to a persistent hacker, I simply am not willing to trust my backups to ‘the cloud’. While things like photo, video and music may be ok, most people have far more sensitive data that also needs backing up.

4

I have not yet deluded myself into thinking that anything I do or have done is important enough to be preserved digitally or otherwise. The important stuff I need to remember is written on a small piece of paper that is discarded once I purchase all of the recorded items at the grocery store.

5

Oh come on Harper

We are all eternal digitized bits of creation now. No one said your shit had to be good, we will save it anyway. This is a test, it is just a test… of the emergency broadcast system. In the event of an actual emergency , you are fucked without back up.

What’s the difference between stuff and shit ? Stuff is stuff you are still paying money to take care of. Your shit is all that stuff you thought was stuff, but it is really shit you can’t hold onto or afford. Most ships sink because they are full of shit, not the right stuff.

Digital shit turns into stuff rapidly. Why throw any of this shit away? Let’s just stuff it on this 5 TB drive.

6

I keep it in the cloud, so I can access it anywhere.

7

Definitely a “first world” problem. Especially when life is so precious that you keep a 24/7 log of it in HD video.

8

And then you get a TV show like Storage Wars. People put their stuff in storage lockers, then give up on it, and default on the rent in there. The contents are sold at auction, to people who aren’t allowed to do anything but peek into the unit before bidding.

Yes, this is all first-world problems. For now.

9

:astonished:

elpueblo PAWNED you!!! :sunglasses: :D:D:D :sunglasses: :sunglasses: :smiley:

10

I love the idea of mirror drives, with a few TB on each side. When you back up to it, it backs up itself in case one of its HD crashes. Brilliant!