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

DVD

[Planesdragon]

Your solution is to move things off of a hard drive. Correct. But you don't need a long-term professional solution--especially not when there's a long-term (or, if you want to be anal, medium-term) archival technology already tasked for the home.

Spend $100 and get yourself a DVD burner. Don't just use it for backup, but actually move things that you don't reference all the time--ESPECIALLY those ISOs you almost certainly don't need live--off of the live storage. For things that are important / irreplacable, make several copies. Distribute them far and wide to friends and family if you want.

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

Prioritize what you absolutely need

[tomlouie]

Replace "hard drive storage" with "space in my home", and you'll see that it's not a matter of getting enough space to store all your stuff, it's a matter of deciding what's important to you that needs to be kept.

Where it's electronic bits or physical items, some things are more important to you than others. Take a long hard look at what things you absolutely need, and toss the rest. Will your life be that must worse if you didn't have "______" within easy reach at any given moment? Probably not. And you'll feel better knowing that the things you do keep are the important ones.

And don't think of it as parting with things you'd rather have kept. Think of it as making room for more new stuff.

Good luck.

Tom

Re-evaluate.

[ColaMan]

Re-evaluate what's on your storage. You sound like me - a bit of a hoarder.

Firstly, get a good catalogue system going. Put all your crap in one area. Get a sorted listing of creation time,last access time and categories. Get some hard-and-fast rules going as to when it should be archived offline. Go through once a month (or more often) and work out any new stuff that you need to backup. You do backup, don't you? Of course you do.

Then go through and check the last access times of your categories, and move to offline storage as appropriate.The advantage of getting this sort of regime going is that you've got more chance of having a backup offline somewhere when the inevitable happens and your drive wakes up dead one day.

For example, once you've got categories and last access times sorted:

- Digital Photos, family movies , documents - anything more than 12 months - Offline to DVD. Use par2 for archive copies (sent to distant relatives for storage), but make another set without par2 for normal, semi-random access.

- ISO's of distros? Got a broadband connection? Ditch them.
No broadband? Get them all offline, regardless of age.

- TV Episodes? If it's later than say, 3 months - off to DVD they go.

- Web Site content? 3 months.

And so on. Work the times out for yourself.

You really need a good cataloging system to help find out where the offline files are. Everyone's idea of a good catalog is different - Hell, I just label DVD's and keep them sorted by catagory - so I'll leave it to you.

If you organise your data and find that you still haven't enough drive space to keep all your current data online, then (and only then) go and look at the expensive options.

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:I took the easy way out

[karnal]

RAID5 will fuck you if you depend on it to be your only failsafe on your data.

Repeated again:

RAID5 will fuck you if you depend on it to be your ONLY failsafe on your data.

Your motherboard/controller could screw you. You could delete some files. 2 drives can fail at the same time (power surge,etc.)

There's just no excuse for not backing things up. I personally have a DDS3 tape drive in my file server for once yearly backups. Every 6 months I do a set of rewritables (DVD+RW). Every year or so I make a permanent copy on DVD+ or -R, and I buy decent burnables for that.

I've had instances where controllers, cables, and my own screw ups have lost data. But the cost to my time is minimal since I have backups in place. The way I figure it, the time I spend safeguarding my data is worth its weight in gold WHEN I have to depend on the backup for critical data.

Besides, Corporations back up their data - why can't we? :)