datahoarder

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Who are we?

We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.

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First steps on data hoarding? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm thinking of backing all of my family's digital assets up. It includes less than 4 TB of information. Most are redundant video files that are in old encodings or not encoded at all and there are a lot of duplicate images and old documents. I'm gonna clean this stuff up with a bash script and some good old manual review, but first I need to do some pre-planning.

What's the cheapest and most flexible NAS I can make from eBay or local? What kind of processors and what motherboard features?
What separate guides should I follow to source the drives? What RAID?
What backup style should I follow? How many cold copies? How do I even handle the event of a fire?

I intend to do some of this research on my own since no one answer is fully representative but am appreciative of any leads.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

Check how much of that stuff is actually needed to physically back up. Odds are it's on the cloud already. I got a house calls for this kind of thing a few times a day and almost always the answer is "your Apple/Google/Microsoft storage has all your pictures and videos already.

I get people that ask me about setting up network storage arrays pretty often, but almost none of them want to go through with it.

I don't know what your time is worth, and I would still set something up just because I felt like it or was curious, but almost nobody needs a home network storage system. Just figure out what people need to sync, set it up, and plug a hard drive into your router. Odds are once you try to figure out what they are trying to sink, you'll realize that it already has automatically synced to their cloud storage.

If you really want to do it as a project and are near Maryland, I will give you some closed box Network storage arrays from 2012 with hundreds of terabytes between them in unused fiber optic hard drives.