Learn me digital storage.

I've been collecting videos of races for a little while and the storage on my laptop is getting pretty full. I don't have a DVD drive but I think I could get one that runs off a USB. I think I have roughly 250GB+/-worth of videos. Forgive me for being a little ignorant of this stuff. I think I have three options.

Option 1. Buy DVD drive and write all the races to discs. I could play them on my DVD player or on my laptop thing. Although I don't think that is very future proof at this point.

Option 2. Move them to flash drive sticks. I tested one out and it plays on my TV as well as my laptop. Maybe a good option?

Option 3. Buy an external hard drive. I have no idea if it will play on my TV but should on the laptop I think. My guess is this is what everyone will tell me to do but those things are expensive.

I don't know. What's my best option here?

External hard drive by far. $50 for a 1TB. I have 2 of those ones and paid $100 each when I bought them a couple years ago. Worth every penny. 

USB port powered, so no extra plugs and wires to deal with, USB 3 is way faster than an external burner I've had a few, better data retention than a flash drive. 

My Vizio tv supports an external hard drive, so it's really easy, but you can always connect the laptop to the TV, or the hard drive to a game system. 

In reply to RevRico :

I didn't realize they were that cheap now. Last time I looked into it they were much more expensive. Sorry probably a dumb question. I've never had the need for extra storage before.

Thanks for posting this. I’ve been looking into this as well. I do have a question related regarding the term “solid state” external hard drives. What is the difference between a non solid state drive vs one that is solid state? And is any cost difference justified? 

A solid state drive uses an SSD for storage (IOW, fast flash memory), whereas the regular ones use old school hard disks, aka spinning rust.

SSDs tend to be more performant, but not necessarily in a way that is noticeable when you're dealing with an external drive that's attached via USB, whereas spinning rust tends to offer a lot more capacity for the money. SSDs are also phyiscally more robust in certain cases, like when you drop them when they're active.

If you do need the performance and have the ability to hook the external drive up via a suitably fast interface, SSDs are usually worth the money. If you don't need the performance, go with spinning rust and the higher capacity that comes with it.

drainoil said:

Thanks for posting this. I’ve been looking into this as well. I do have a question related regarding the term “solid state” external hard drives. What is the difference between a non solid state drive vs one that is solid state? And is any cost difference justified? 

A solid-state drive is sort of the R-compound slick of the digital storage world, compared to your everyday hard drive which is like an all-season. Massively faster, and the price can be justified from a performance standpoint if used as the primary drive in a computer. Both my desktop and laptop have them. But unlike hard drives, they tend not to give any warning before they fail, and when they do, the data is usually unrecoverable, so you need to be rigorous with backups of these drives. If speed isn't critical, an HDD is much cheaper in dollars per gigabyte.

SSDs can also fail without warning, and can't be recovered like a good old fashioned spinning rust drive. As much as I love the tech for a boot drive, because they're unrecoverable, I can't recommend them for storage internal or external. But that's just my opinion. 

Edit: I knew gameboy would be along, beat me by 2 seconds. 

RevRico said:

SSDs can also fail without warning, and can't be recovered 

The thought of losing irreplaceable video and pics is not a pleasant one.

I just bout a 4TB external USB hard drive for $100 because my 500GB one that I use to back up my work computer is full.

What format are the videos in? Do you have a fancy new TV that allows you to chromecast to it?

Ask yourself what the purpose of moving the data off your laptop is:

1) I just want to move this data off so that I have more space to do other things later, and if I lose this data I won't be heartbroken. If this is you, buy a cheap external hard drive and move the vids over.

2) I'm editing/changing/working with these files and I'm running out of space on my laptop. If this is you, buy an external SSD drive.

3) These are incredibly valuable keepsakes that I'd be heartbroken to lose (pictures of loved ones, the first steps of your kid), and I want to make sure that I keep a copy. Buy an external blu-ray burner, and a pack of archival quality M-disc blu-ray discs. Write each disc twice, and store them in different locations (one copy of your archive data in your home fire safe, one copy in your safe-deposit-box).

As an aside, if you're a Costco member, it looks like Costco is having pretty regular sales on the external Seagate drives. I think the last one I bought came in at about $120 + tax for a 6TB drive. I've got a bunch of these that I use as second level external backup drives for my home server that the other machines in my home network backup to.

I'd buy two external drives. Keep a separate copy of everything on each. Keep one at a separate location. Drives fail, fires happen. It would suck to lose all of it.

Dave said:

I'd buy two external drives. Keep a separate copy of everything on each. Keep one at a separate location. Drives fail, fires happen. It would suck to lose all of it.

Yup. Have some redundancy. Aux drives have gotten so inexpensive. I'm also a fan of the self-powered USB drives. 

Burning to DVD isn't a bad idea, it tends to be less impacted by the sorts of things that take out hard drives.

However, they only have a limited lifetime compared to a hard drive sitting on a shelf.

As had been said, redundancy is your friend.  Backing them up to a cloud solution that you control (DropBox, Google Drive, etc.) while keeping copies on a local drive and/or DVD is probably best in the long run.

the_machina said:

Ask yourself what the purpose of moving the data off your laptop is:

1) I just want to move this data off so that I have more space to do other things later, and if I lose this data I won't be heartbroken. If this is you, buy a cheap external hard drive and move the vids over.

2) I'm editing/changing/working with these files and I'm running out of space on my laptop. If this is you, buy an external SSD drive.

3) These are incredibly valuable keepsakes that I'd be heartbroken to lose (pictures of loved ones, the first steps of your kid), and I want to make sure that I keep a copy. Buy an external blu-ray burner, and a pack of archival quality M-disc blu-ray discs. Write each disc twice, and store them in different locations (one copy of your archive data in your home fire safe, one copy in your safe-deposit-box).

For me I'm definitely in 1. I saved these because things get taken off the internet all the time and I like to rewatch these races. It's nothing that's valuable.  I have no plans to modify anything only to watch. 

This post was very helpful. Thank you.

My contrarian solution would be to transfer all of your digital video to a permanent and future-proof medium.  Like Super 8mm movie film.

Stefan said:

Burning to DVD isn't a bad idea, it tends to be less impacted by the sorts of things that take out hard drives.

However, they only have a limited lifetime compared to a hard drive sitting on a shelf.

Very limited. The kind of disc you can burn doesn't last long at all compared to commercially produced discs, which are produced with a mechanical stamping process. I used to use towering stacks of optical media in the days of CDs and early in the days of burnable DVDs, but a few hard drives just are so much faster and more convenient and easy to monitor the health of, I only wish I'd switched sooner.

GameboyRMH said:

Stefan said:

Burning to DVD isn't a bad idea, it tends to be less impacted by the sorts of things that take out hard drives.

However, they only have a limited lifetime compared to a hard drive sitting on a shelf.

Very limited. The kind of disc you can burn doesn't last long at all compared to commercially produced discs, which are produced with a mechanical stamping process. I used to use towering stacks of optical media in the days of CDs and early in the days of burnable DVDs, but a few hard drives just are so much faster and more convenient and easy to monitor the health of, I only wish I'd switched sooner.

Regular burnable DVDs have a lifespan of 2 to 10 years. Regular hard drives have an archival lifetime of a decade or two before they can't be read. Archival grade optical discs (DVDs / Blu-ray) has a century plus lifespan. They're also cheap enough that it's easy to stomach making and distributing multiple copies so that you can't lose all your data to a fire.

See here:

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2984597/storage/hard-core-data-preservation-the-best-media-and-methods-for-archiving-your-data.html

How much data can a Blu-Ray disc hold? 

I keep coming back to getting two 1TB drives and cloning them regularly. The process would be, copy files from internal HD to removable HD, then clone the removable HD periodically. 

Now if only I could build an ITX based system with a single hot-swap drive in the form factor of a NCase M1. 

Regardless of how you choose to back up, you will need to migrate everything to the next of generation media as you go along.  I have some college papers on 5.25" floppies... good luck reading them.  I have boxes of slides that my dad took and 8mm film from when the kids were small -  I have neither a slide nor film projector.  Can they be migrated?  Sure, providing you want to invest the funds to pay someone to do it.  In my case (the last I checked) the bill would be close to $1,000.

No storage medium is forever... and just because your decedents happen to a copy of your 'forever' medium, doesn't mean that anyone will be able to actually read it.

CJ said:

Regardless of how you choose to back up, you will need to migrate everything to the next of generation media as you go along.  I have some college papers on 5.25" floppies... good luck reading them.  I have boxes of slides that my dad took and 8mm film from when the kids were small -  I have neither a slide nor film projector.  Can they be migrated?  Sure, providing you want to invest the funds to pay someone to do it.  In my case (the last I checked) the bill would be close to $1,000.

No storage medium is forever... and just because your decedents happen to a copy of your 'forever' medium, doesn't mean that anyone will be able to actually read it.

This is very true.  I find it fascinating to think of the vast storehouse of human knowledge and experience that is being wiped out as libraries throw away old books deemed unworthy of archiving. 

Couple of things:  SSD has been actually proving to be more reliable than initially expected.  Yes, there's a limit to the number of times a NAND can be erased, etc. etc., but in commercial applications flash is requiring fewer drive replacements than their spinning-disk brethren.  Also, while it is possible for SSD to fail without warning and to be unrecoverable, most of the time when a spinning drive fails it is similarly sudden and economically unrecoverable.  While there is a process to remove the platters in a clean room to perform recovery, the cost is extremely high with payment upfront and no promises that it will actually work.

As to cost/GiB, however, I wouldn't bother with flash for this type of archival storage.  

How important is the data to you / how much do you value having access to it?  You don't want to spend $100 to solve a $10 problem, right?  Every data center (or in this case, your basement) is a single point of failure, so if you connect an external hard drive to your system and store a single copy of your video there, you've got risk in that if that one drive has issues, you lose your data.  But that's the cheapest way to go.  I've seen more than one external HD quit working suddenly resulting in total loss of data.  Another option would be to get one of the small home NAS devices that can hold two drives.  You can set up mirroring in the device so that a single hard drive failing does not result in loss of data or loss of access to data.  Those can be network attached and/or USB/eSATA/Firewire, etc. depending on the system.  Network is very convenient -- if you have a Roku box, you can set up the network drive as a media streaming device and watch your videos on Teh Big Screen if you like.  It's also going to give you less I/O performance usually.

There's still a problem with this, though:  anything you do to one side of the mirror will happen to the other and anything that effects the device itself could result in loss of data or loss of access to data.  So if you accidently delete your favorite video, the mirror will happily replicate that deletion or if there's a fire/flood/theft/etc and the whole device is destroyed, you're toast.  The chances of that happening are much lower, of course, but you can mitigate that risk by creating an off-site copy.  Honestly, for consumer purposes, the best bet would be some sort of cloud service, but that's going to be slow and will leave you with a cost per month (usually per GiB or TiB of storage consumed).  You could leverage a cloud backup service to protect the data, but many of them will force you to a "business" plan if you want to protect external devices, so be careful there.

Personally, I keep media like that on a mirrored Buffalo LinkStation NAS (which includes software that I can use to backup my phone automagically and share files like you can with dropbox but from my own storage) and then keep a second copy on my web hosting server of the media that I would really really want to keep.  Legal documents are kept on a USB thumbdrive off site and updated periodically with fresh media as a just-in-case.