Ask Slashdot: How Do You Manage Your Personal Data?

New submitter multimediavt writes "Ok, here's my problem. I have a lot of personal data! (And, no, it's not pr0n, warez, or anything the MPAA or RIAA would be concerned about.) I am realizing that I need to keep at least one spare drive the same size as my largest drive around in case of failure, or the need to reformat a drive due to corrupt file system issues. In my particular case I have a few external drives ranging in size from 200 GB to 2 TB (none with any more than 15 available), and the 2 TB drive is giving me fits at the moment so I need to move the data off and reformat the drive to see if it's just a file system issue or a component issue. I don't have 1.6 TB of free space anywhere and came to the above realization that an empty spare drive the size of my largest drive was needed. If I had a RAID I would have the same needs should a drive fail for some reason and the file system needed rebuilding. I am hitting a wall, and I am guessing that I am not the only one reaching this conclusion. This is my personal data and it is starting to become unbelievably unruly to deal with as far as data integrity and security are concerned. This problem is only going to get worse, and I'm sorry 'The Cloud' is not an acceptable nor practical solution. Tape for an individual as a backup mechanism is economically not feasible. Blu-ray Disc only holds 50 GB at best case and takes forever to backup any large amount of data, along with a great deal of human intervention in the process. So, as an individual with a large data collection and not a large budget, what do you see as options for now (other than keeping a spare blank drive around), and what do you see down the road that might help us deal with issues like this?"

Comments

Keep a spare blank drive around

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you already have the answer

Re:Keep a spare blank drive around

[AngryDeuce]

Agreed. I've been gradually rotating larger backup drives in and smaller backup drives out over the last 10 years or so. Right now I have about 2 TB's of unique data in my archive which is kept on the host machine if it is regularly accessed or duplicated on another external hard drive. Everything (I care about) has two copies at all times. As my archive grows, I'm going to have to upgrade my archive device's capacity, but that's a given, no matter what you do, if you want it stored locally, you'll have to add capacity somewhere obviously. DVD-R's and BluRay discs aren't a viable option in my opinion, because I've got a ton of old self-burned discs that I recently had to toss because they were rendered useless from laser rot, even though they were in sealed containers in a cool, dry place.

The cloud is, to me, not a backup solution. I see it as a way to globally access my data and I use it as such. No sensitive data of mine will go to the cloud because the likelihood of needing access to it without warning is completely nil, so in my case, it's limited to media that I want constant access to. Now, the cloud definitely has the potential to serve as a backup solution, don't get me wrong, but there's just too much uncertainty involved in the cloud these days, especially as concerns the government nuking sites from orbit without warning, whether justified or not.

However, I agree with some others that are telling you to do some house-cleaning. I recently went through my backups and found 300 GB's worth of crap that I hadn't accessed or used dating back to the early 2000's that I was saving for some stupid reason. Disc Images for ancient games that don't even run well on modern systems (or require a lot of fucking hassle to get running well), music that I haven't listened to in half a decade, old-ass videos that I'd downloaded from the internet back before there was such a thing as youtube, etc. Not to say that everyone's data is as silly as mine was, but it just added up over the years...

Re:Keep a spare blank drive around

[Jabroney]

https://www.googleapis.com/urlshortener/v1/url?shortUrl=http://goo.gl/rIh07 { "kind": "urlshortener#url", "id": "http://goo.gl/rIh07", "longUrl": "http://www.backblaze.com/partner/af3012", "status": "OK" } Trying to sell cloud solutions on Slashdot? You must be new here.

Re:Keep a spare blank drive around

[xaxa]

Link contains a referral ID, so Shikaku is earning from this, but not willing to say so.

Eventually, it ends up at http://www.backblaze.com/

Re:Keep a spare blank drive around

[JackDW]

Right. Other than buying new disks, there is no good solution.

The asker seems to be looking for some kind of "join all my small disks together" solution. And yes, he can do this. RAID-0 or LVM. But... don't do it! If even one of those disks fails all the data is effectively gone. The solution is cheap to implement but totally worthless. Sorry, your 250Gb SATA disk now belongs in a museum.

RAID-5/6 is, IMO, also a bad idea; there are too many instances where the controller has failed or multiple disks have failed.

The asker explicitly excludes cloud solutions. It's depressing that people have recommended various cloud solutions nonetheless. Apart from not being answers to the question, these solutions are totally awful for large quantities of data. Amazon S3 may be nearly free if you want to store a few gigabytes, but if you want to store a few terabytes you are going to pay through the nose, and all the other service providers are the same. 2Tb would cost $234 per month just for storage, transfer cost not included. For the price of two weeks of S3 storage you can buy a 2Tb external disk. For the price of upload, download and a month's storage, you can buy four or five such disks and have as much redundancy as any normal person could ever need.

Bare Drives and a USB Drive Dock?

[wanderfowl]

One way to save a bit of cash is to buy a USB eSATA drive dock (single or double) with some bare eSATA drives. This cuts the enclosure out, and allows you to buy bare drives, which are often cheaper than enclosed drives.

You could also consider Drobo or one of the Wiebetech multi-drive RAID containers. But encryption + cloud isn't all bad.

Re:Enjoy your delusion

[Anonymous Coward]

It's great that you know how fast his connection is and exactly what data restrictions his ISP imposes. I'm actually rather impressed you can be 100% sure his computer is connected to the internet at all. All I know is that if I had that much data, the time it would take to upload would probably be longer than the time it takes for the HDD to wear down and implode.

Buddy NAS

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a solution I call the "Buddy NAS". Go out and get two cheap computers. It could be a PC or a mini-NAS or a low-end server. Anything that will hold multiple hard drives. You jam both full of hard disks and use them as a backup/NAS server. One PC is kept at your place, the other at your friend's house.

Both computers have an account for you and an account for your friend (it helps if your friend is nerdy and "gets" backup solutions). Both of you now have a backup solution in your own home and a remote backup server at a friend's place. Two copies of your data, one remote. Basically it's like having local and cloud storage for you and your friend and it'll cost less than a grand if you shop around. If neither of you have static IPs you can use dyndns.org to connect to the remote boxes. Bandwidth shouldn't be an issue if you use rsync to backup changed files nightly.

Re:Enjoy your delusion

[burisch_research]

You're assuming that it's encryption that's the problem. In my case, it's a problem with the size of data vs. how much bandwidth I can use. I get an allocation of 20GB a month, and even that's very expensive. Backing up my 5+ TB to the cloud is simply not an option.

Cloud is very trendy right now, but that doesn't mean it's a one-size-fits-all.

I delete stuff

[Amiga500_Rulez]

Seriously. How much crap do you really need to keep around?

Magic

[lucm]

So your disks are full and possibly broken. You don't want to have more disks, you don't want tape or optical medias, and a storage provider (aka The Cloud) is not an option... Then you have three solutions "down the road":

1) Delete stuff
2) Invent a new compression algorithm that will allow you to reuse the same disks forever without losing data
3) Rely on magic*

*might overlap with solution #2

Re:Enjoy your delusion

[AmiMoJo]

I'm actually rather impressed you can be 100% sure his computer is connected to the internet at all.

Well he did post his question to an internet forum...

Use a NAS with backup

[AliasMarlowe]

What I did some years ago was recognize that "manual backups" were not done often enough, and important stuff was scattered around a few PCs. So I got a NAS, stuck a pair of disks into it (RAID 0 for speed), and set up its automated incremental backup to run 3 times per week to an external USB drive. The PCs now mount the NAS at login, and that's where all data files are stored by default (even the kids use it).

We're up to 2 NAS units now, with 7TB[*] of disk space between them, all backed up on schedule. The USB backup drives are rotated every few weeks with another set kept in a secure place in the garage.

[*] One NAS unit doubles up as media server, so it's got a load of movies & music in addition to user files in its 6TB. The other one is our web server and email server with only 1TB of disk space.