My brother is a teacher and he sent me a text and a pic of a broken 500gb external drive he uses for simple backups. \u00a0He was asking the questions a lot of us are asking these days: how to store all of our data, short term\/accessible and long term.<\/p>\n
When I think about the question, for me, the big issues are:<\/p>\n
Here is\u00a0my reply as a developer:<\/p>\n
I use a few solutions and its not there yet. \u00a0It’s complicated for me because of my needs.<\/p>\n
Google Drive and DropBox; I use these for all my local daily stuff — up to date bills\/finance, scanning (my scanner goes directly to google), sharing. \u00a0Both dropbox and google require local cache\/storage. I might be storing 10 gigs max on these — also I have accounts on a few others (i.e. that server I uploaded business\u00a0vids on). \u00a0I don’t do big storage on these because network\u00a0isn’t there — its slow — THEY are slow. \u00a0Even over cable. \u00a0These services like them or Carbonite recommend sending in large data drives. \u00a0With 500 gb you probably could just put it up there yourself.<\/p>\n
I have a lot\u00a0of data. \u00a0I have two NAS servers, and old on that had a total of 3 TB accessible (6 terrabytes of drives raid 1 mirroring over 4 drives) — this device is 10 years old so bought a new one:. \u00a0 5 TBs mirrored (10 tb total) on two drives. \u00a0I use these for long term storage and media streaming. \u00a0 I have all of my extensive music collection, my movies, and digital photos, finances, important docs all digitized dating back to the late 1990’s. \u00a0Total data I actually have is probably about 3 tb but will grow with photos\/media. \u00a0I also have old software libraries and work files, that take up a ton of space. \u00a0Will probably archive these on old external drives and dump over time. The data is too large to stream up and back at times for today’s services.<\/p>\n
I keep several old hard drives around, enclosures and cables. These are good for small tasks — bare metal backups, moving larger files between work\/home ‘puter; you just never know. For the 5 TB raided NAS I have a matching external drive I backup to. \u00a0Mirroring isn’t a total backup because rive errors get propogated; the other I keep in a fire case. \u00a0Also I have acronis that I keep live on my Win machine that backs up in real time when the NAS are on, automatically. \u00a0A licence is super cheap.<\/p>\n
You can probably pop out that drive and buy new enclosure or a mutli-drive cable, I have one something like this for a while — good in a pinch, not for travel though:<\/p>\n