I don't pay for storage online. of the 15GB I've used up 13. Over 9 is just photos. I need to do some weeding but it seems pretty daunting.
Advice or suggestions greatly appreciated. I don't wish to pay for storage. Should I down load to a hard/thumb drive?
In reply to vwcorvette (Forum Supporter) :
SSD hard drive. 1T is not all that expensive. I see on the great south American river, you can get 1T for less than $50.
In reply to alfadriver :
I would recommend HDDs over SSDs anywhere that speed is not a priority. HDDs are much cheaper per GB and tend to fail in much more gradual and recoverable ways.
In general if you don't want to pay for cloud storage, your options are to save it locally or to self-host.
In reply to GameboyRMH :
At some point, the volume of data makes the HDD unbearable. But in general, you are right.
One thing I would also consider doing if you get an external hard drive is if you can plug one into your network. So you have a real network based hard drive.
In reply to alfadriver :
Thanks. This is very useful info. Hadn't considered a network based hard drive at home.
In reply to vwcorvette (Forum Supporter) :
Do you use your own router? I know using an Xfinity router is tough to use- they don't activate the USB sockets. Although I understand if you have a computer on all of the time, you can connect the drive to that, and make it viewable to the network.
I looked into a bunch of options. I want backup in case the drive fails catastrophically, and I like the cloud access to photos and auto backup from my phone. Ultimately rolling my own would be very time consuming and also expensive. $20/year from Google is actually a pretty good deal compared to the headache of doing it another way.
In reply to prodarwin :
Can I ask why you think it's hard? I have always been suspect of "cloud drives" for my stuff, when getting a USB hard drive is pretty cheap. But maybe I'm missing something.
In reply to alfadriver :
Our communications company (Waitsfield Telecom) just upgraded us to fiberoptic. I'll check the router and see what inputs and so on are there.
alfadriver said:In reply to prodarwin :
Can I ask why you think it's hard? I have always been suspect of "cloud drives" for my stuff, when getting a USB hard drive is pretty cheap. But maybe I'm missing something.
When you say "USB drive" I'm thinking HDD plugged into a computer/router/etc.
If you are suggesting there is a more plug and play solution I am not familiar with that doesn't have the above downsides, I am all ears. In my previous research most options fell short of Google for my particular wants/needs.
In reply to GameboyRMH :
I use RAID [1, not 0] platter drives as a redundant backup with Time Machine. It's maybe not as robust as also having an off-site backup, but it keeps lots of incremental save points to restore from, and there are duplicate copies if one of the drives goes bad.
[edit] RAID 1, sorry.
In reply to prodarwin :
No, that's what I use- it's just a different acceptance of bad things. Given how cheap they are, I actually have two USB HDs. One is small, so I just use the "backup" function. The other is big enough I use for the real files.
Appreciate your point of view, though.
alfadriver said:In reply to prodarwin :
No, that's what I use- it's just a different acceptance of bad things. Given how cheap they are, I actually have two USB HDs. One is small, so I just use the "backup" function. The other is big enough I use for the real files.
Appreciate your point of view, though.
What's the difference between "just the back up function" and "for the real files?"
In reply to vwcorvette (Forum Supporter) :
There's a system backup function in windows that does it- and given the size of the file, it's compressed in some manner. "For the real files" it's a direct copy of all of the files onto a hard drive.
Microsoft offers a family plan for 6 users with 1tb data each and access to office365 for $11 a month.
In reply to Duke :
RAID0 or RAID1? RAID0 splits pieces of the data onto each drive for combined speed and capacity, but it actually multiplies the risk of failure by the number of drives. RAID1 is the mode that mirrors the same data on multiple drives for redundancy.
I used to have a pair of 10krpm HDDs in RAID0 on my gaming PC back when SSDs were still too expensive, the speed was pretty close to an SSD at the time, as SSDs got cheaper I moved to an SSD for the OS with game files on the RAID0 array, and now onto a single NVME SSD.
In reply to GameboyRMH :
Wups, sorry, RAID 1. The redundant smaller volume one.
For photo, music files and document backup I own a QNAP NAS device with a couple Western digital red HDD. I think 2TB each. Configured in RAID for redundancy. Then I have a portable 2TB external hard drive as a backup that I keep at work in case my house burns down.
But I haven't used either of those in more than two years because Google Photos and Spotify are just easier. I pay $1.99/mo to the googles and then I don't have to think about it at all. Spotify family plan is about $15 and that does irritate me but my whole family uses it constantly so it's worth it.
TL:dr pay google
Note: I thought google told me I could save unlimited photos but they seem to have changed policy now I have a cap on storage space for Gmail and photos docs, etc - still worth it even when I (soon) have to double my available storage for $2.99/mo
In reply to OHSCrifle :
It was unlimited for years, but if you upgraded phones in the last 3 or so it changed it to 15GB free, more is a monthly charge.
I got burned when PhotoBucket deleted all of my photos. Never again. My computer guy informed me that solid state memory (SDD)? degraded just like hard drive memory (HDD)? only different (idiot guy here). I have a 1 terabyte and 2 terabyte HDD hard drives hooked up to my laptop. I still don't back anything up in time.
In reply to VolvoHeretic :
I used to back up all the time. Each time, it was right after someone called the help desk saying they'd lost everything they'd ever owned and hadn't done a backup recently.
I preferred RAID 10 for speed, but no matter which way you do it, remember to routinely leave a copy off-site. We used to visit my parents regularly and I'd swap out the outdated copy in their basement for my fresh version.
As much as I hate using cloud (i.e. "someone else's computer"), I am starting to get how it's just easier, Prodarwin spells it out pretty clearly. For convenience sake, the last thing I needed to backup went to a cloud server, which admittedly chapped me, but was so convenient.
In reply to VolvoHeretic :
SSD and HDDs have a similar overall failure rate, but with SSDs it's usually sudden and unrecoverable - if you're lucky you might get some mysterious performance and stability issues as a warning (saw this once on my cousin's gaming PC). With HDDs you usually get lots of warning, and if you know how to interpret raw SMART data you can see a hard drive failure coming a mile away.
vwcorvette... before you invest, try getting your photos. I have been trying for two years (got to 98% full) and I can't do it. Google has a takeout service that zips them all and sends you about 50 download links. It can take days, and when you're done, you'll find that it's only about 1/10th of your photos, and half of them are in a .json format which isn't anything that can be read. My zip file for 2022 had 32 photos in it despite my google folder showing 755.
You can shift-click to select multiple photos, but it only does about 15 at a time so you have to be very aware of what is selected. You'll have to do it in 15-photo batches which would be thousands of downloads in my case. My photos date back to 2009. I bought myself some time by copying my drive documents to MS Onedrive, so I'm down to 84%, but I need to come up with some solution.
If you can find a way to do it, please let me know. I have an 8tb NAS that I bought with this project in mind, and it's sitting mostly empty because I can't get my photos.
GameboyRMH said:In reply to VolvoHeretic :
SSD and HDDs have a similar overall failure rate, but with SSDs it's usually sudden and unrecoverable - if you're lucky you might get some mysterious performance and stability issues as a warning (saw this once on my cousin's gaming PC). With HDDs you usually get lots of warning, and if you know how to interpret raw SMART data you can see a hard drive failure coming a mile away.
You can also recover some physically damaged drives if you're patient enough. I had mice piss all over an HDD circuit board and was still able to recover the contents, over about a week of constant restarts with an $8 USB to SATA adapter. One or two files at a time, for a couple hundred gigs of video files. My last drive failure actually, 2013.
The only unrecoverable HDD issue I had was with the one with my old bitcoin wallet on it. Because of course it would have been that one. One of the arms that holds or reads or whatever it does living between the platters got loose inside the drive. That was 2012, that was my second to last hard drive failure, and maybe only the 4th or 5th in a lifetime of cheap, often obsolete computer collecting.
As for picture storage, I strive to have phones with sd cards slots still. When that fails, I just do an annual backup to my PC with a USB cable, like a heathen. Occasionally, read if I think about it while copying other files, I'll copy it onto an external HDD that lives on my bedroom TV. No Internet storage for me thanks, and I've got stuff going back to 04-05 with my first digital cameras and camera phones.
It's amazing to go through old photos with modern equipment. Half the time the thumbnails are bigger than the full size image itself.
While I LOVE cloud storage and the flexibility it offers, it does get expensive. I am also in the camp that would recommend a high capacity, high quality HDD over a SSD for this purpose. When a SSD goes, it's like a switch; it just stops working. There is little to no warning, and usually, there's little in the way of recovering the data when it goes. Physical HDD's have components that can be swapped/replaced that give a better chance of recovering data when the device starts to fail.
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