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

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.