Data Storage For Home?

kuom asks: "Every couple of years, I face the same problem: running out of hard drive space. No matter how big of a hard drive I get, I seem to find ways to fill it up within a few months. The size of my hard drive grew from 2.5G to 13G, to 20G, to 40G, 80G, 120G, and most recently, 200G. Today, I have a combined hard drive space of 280G, but I again find that I only have about 2G of free space left. My collection of family photos, web site content, TV episode captures, music files, and my archive of ISO files for various operating systems, they just eat up my hard drive space so fast. I could get a 400G hard drive, but I figure maybe it's time to think about something long term, something like EtherDrive or StorageWare. But the price tags are definitely out of my range. Slashdot readers, what do you suggest for home data storage?"

Comments

what works for me

[Eil]

It sounds like you may be a digital packrat. If you are, I sympathize as I was one too after I got broadband. I stopped after realizing how much time/money I was wasting on crap that really didn't improve my quality of life. Now I buy new hard drives for my file server once every three years instead of every three months. Following are some of the things that helped me.

1) Download less porn/warez. Or put off downloading more until you've watched/run/played what you have. If you're just one person cranking through that much space that quickly, then you're downloading things just to have them. Stop that.

2) Go through and 'rm -rf' files and directories that you haven't accessed in a year. Don't keep obsolete versions of operating systems around, because you won't use them. As soon as you download a CD image, burn it and rm the ISO.

3) Archive on external media anything that's sentimental but rarely accessed.

4) Make it a routine to burn stuff to CD/DVD at least once a week. Eventually, you'll get tired of wasting time burning crap that you don't use and this will help you realize that you really don't need it at all.

5) If you do a lot of video editing or webmastering that requires huge amounts of data, and you're making money at it, then you need to invest in a proper server to keep all that. Be sure to make backups too. If you do this for a company, have them take responsibility for this.

6) Take a page from Linus's book: Upload it to an FTP server and let the world mirror it.

Re:DVD

[Phreakiture]

When you write on the silvery label you're actually writing on the back of the recording medium.

Of CDs: true. Of DVDs: False. DVDs sandwich the recording medium between two layers of substrate, rather than having it sprayed on the one side of the disc. This has several benefits:

• You can't scratch the data off of the disc accidentally (you can scratch the disc, but the data is still there and can be rescued)
• You can create 2 sided discs (can't do that with a CD, because the focal point of the laser will be wrong)
• Solvent properties of labeling materials won't directly affect the data layer. They can dig into the substrate a bit, but have to dig really deep to get to the data. (On a side note, I have at least two commercially-recorded CDs that have gone bad because the black paint used in labelling them cut through to the aluminum reflective layer. Such a thing would be far less likely on a DVD.)

On labels, we have a problem here at my workplace in that we receive data from a certain other department on DVD. Regulations require that the DVD be labelled in a particular fashion (doesn't say use a label, does say $wordy_legal_boilerplate must appear on the disc) and the other department refuses to cease using sticky labels to do this. Our department all use laptop computers (because we all have to work weekends from home occasionally) and the sticky label causes the disc to warp slightly as it heats up in our machines, thus causing it to stop being legible after about 15 minutes unless you keep it 100% spun up the entire time. Labels on optical discs are evil