Cloud Storage

It takes between a year and ~10 years for unpowered NAND flash to lose its data, so if you do use solid-state drives, remember to pull them out of storage and power them up every 6 months or so, preferably rewriting (or at least reading) every file while they're plugged in.

 

I am working on data sorting and coming up with a better storage/backup system. So far (with the help of this awesome thread), the plan is to have all regular files and drawings reside on my working harddrive/Onedrive mirror. Music, movies, and processed videos and pictures will live on my NAS, with the music, videos, pictures and files/drawings also being backed up locally on an external harddrive (the movies I either have bluray discs or access via a streaming service). Everything, including raw photos and videos will be put into deep storage in S3 (probably glacier) since it is the only place I have seen so far where storing potential terabytes of data isn't bankrupting on a monthly basis.

 

An update on my end.

I went with iDrive thanks to @earnmyturns recommendation. Super easy to use for bulk backup (for me it is my 905 GB digital music collection that is over 13 years old on FLAC), gaming items, etc. Downside is my internet connection isn't great for uploading things. Took me 28 hours to upload up to 30 GB worth of stuff. I did the iDrive Express order, where they ship you a hard drive, you upload everything you want into the hard drive, then sent it back to iDrive so they upload the hard drive files to your cloud storage account. I did the two year plan for a discount for 5 TB. Most of my digital files that I care about is less than 2 TB, so 5 TB is just groovy on top.

I'm still using Google Drive for short term files, including important stuff like copies of my taxes, personal docs for me and GF, and more. I normally password protect them but I never had any issues with Google Security, so for now I'll leave those files alone as is unless I changed my mind. For iDrive these files will be password protected.

I also have two 2 TB hard drives for off-site storage (father's house and safety deposit box at the credit union). I also hooked up a 2 TB hard drive to one of my PI setups since moOde supports samba. Downside is it isn't password protected, so any personal docs with my personal info on it I have it password protected. However, let the hackers steal my music collection since most of my hard drive is just music.

If curious, I'm not a big picture person so I have little storage usage for photos in my Google account. Never was big into photos, even when I go on vaca I don't care for them. I guess the downside when we are moving everything digital I guess, easy to throw away crap.

 

Wow, how slow is your internet upload speed? The one gigabyte per hour that you report is less than 2.5 megabits per second. Max upload speed for basic Comcast is usually 5x as fast.

The low upload speed is concerning because it implies that there may be similar throttling of downloads. Have you tried to restore the 30GB you've already uploaded, to see what that experience is like?

 

No because Crapcast where I live in Jax is pretty terrible. Also, being in an apartment the connection is quite poor. While I am paying for 100 mbps per month, on average the upload speed is leagues slower than that.

 

My Comcast Xfinity is 300mbps download and only 10mbps upload. Kind of ridiculous - even at the very expensive Gigabit tier, I would only be at 35mbps. It will take me days, if not weeks to upload everything I need to to S3 once I get it all together.

MONOPOLY

 

Ugh, sorry, mind was elsewhere while I was typing that last post. Thanks for figuring out what I obviously meant -- I've edited the "5000x" to "5x".

 

And this is why I liked iDrive ships a hard drive to you that @earnmyturns stated. If this works well, I can have everything backed up to one drive, ship it back to iDrive, and have everything appear on my iDrive account. Then when I need to upload something there and there the slower Crapcast upload speeds will be enough. It is super rare if I need to upload something that has 5 GB + worth of junk.

 

For archival data that does not change, this alone makes you much better protected than most individuals.