You have 10 more games than me boooooo



Edit: are there no emotes on this forum??

No, this is a very serious forum, full of very serious people. *falls down and dies laughing* :P

well, I have:
- 1 HDD 750 GB
- 1 HDD 2 TB
- 1 HDD 3 TB
- 1 portable HDD 500 GB
- 1 portable HDD 2 TB
LOL I just said 2 with 1 TB to start because he said that he was using usb stick...

I was talking of the smiley faces and stuff that most modern forums have, not manually typing in a smiley :) If I backed up my full steam library (assuming if I could install it all), it would take me 6.9TB *cries*

No that is not the case. The JPEG example is totally different as JPEG format uses lossy picture compression, so that is why it loses some data every time you recompress the JPEG file. Note, copying or moving a JPEG file is not the same as recompressing it, so copying the same JPEG picture from one place to another repeatedly does not degrade it, it is still the same picture.

In fact on magnetic media (like HDDs) I'd say it might be a good idea to rewrite the files once in a while. What people mean by "bitrot" with magnetic media is that the some bits might go the wrong way (due to magnetic fields or whatever), and that way corrupt the file which was using that bit.

My simple solution is that for personal files I want to preserve, I have them on two identical hard drives (their size is 3TB), which I normally keep unconnected from the computer, and connect only if I need something from them or want to add/update something. They have exactly the same files on each HDD.

For both of them, I've used the rhash utility to generate a sha256 checksum for each file (md5 checksum would be fine frankly and faster, but I decided to go overboard with this :)). Then, whenever I want to check whether some file in either hard drive is still ok, I can run rhash to scan that file against its checksum, or even all the files in the HDD for their checksums.

That will tell me if some file has changed somehow, meaning become corrupted. Then I'd simply copy the uncorrupted file from the other HDD to that HDD, and be fine again. (The probability that the very same file(s) would have become corrupted at the same time on both HDDs is very low; naturally having the same files on three, four or more medias lessens the probability even further.)

What I'm really looking for are filesystems that make these kind of checks for file integrity automatically, so that I don't have to scan and verify my files manually every now and then. On Linux there already are supposed to be such filesystems, like BtrFS. On Windows, I don't think there is. Hopefully such "anti-corruption" filesystems would become more common in the future.

Also, once in a while I might copy the whole HDD to the other one, all over again, and I would rotate these (ie. if I earlier copied HDD1 files to HDD2, next time I'd copy all the files from HDD2 to HDD1). This has two benefits:

- as mentioned earlier, rewriting all the files on a magnetic media "refreshes" them, pushing back the possibility of magnetic bitrot taking place.

- the hard drives become also defragmented in the process.

One note: I don't have my GOG games on those two identical HDDs. As I mentioned before, currently I am fine with one local set of GOG installers, because I know I can still redownload any of them (or even all of them) from GOG servers, if needed. So the backups are on GOG's servers.

However, I have e.g. my DRM-free DotEmu and GamersGate games on those two HDDs because with them I feel I am on my own now. DotEmu has already closed its store so I can't redownload my DotEmu games from them anymore, while GamersGate... I simply don't visit them anymore, and I wouldn't be surprised they either close their store as well at some point, or at least stop offering the DRM-free versions, as they've pretty much become a Steam/Origin/Uplay key seller store anyway.

For files that you can't redownload from anywhere and you really want to keep, you really should keep additional copies (hard drives), or also save to the cloud, or whatever. The drives *will* fail at some point, the only question is when (today, or 20 years from now). And even before that, it might be singular files there might become corrupted (due to magnetic fields or whatever), even if the drive itself was still ok (which is why I am using rhash and dvdsig utilities to verify files' integrity once in a while on my important archives).

When one of your drives fail completely, then it is too late to cry. HDDs usually might start complaining if they are getting in bad condition, so you may be able to salvage most of your data before the complete failure... but not all.

And, it is possible for a HDD to break down suddenly as well. I've had a few (three?) HDDs lost like that. One stopped working when I simply put it on top of my PC case for a second (probably static electricity fried its control circuit board which for some odd reason is usualle exposed on HDDs), and another time an old internal HDD on my old laptop started malfunctioning suddenly, I think it simply overheated.

I have 1364 GOG games and I am already at something like 2.2 terabytes (counting only English Windows versions of games, and extras). If I was to download also any additional languages and Mac/Linux versions, it would be even much more.

So I'm keenly looking for 4TB HDD prices, especially as I have other things to save too besides just my GOG games. And my GOG games are not even in the important category at the moment, as I can still redownload them from GOG servers (something that I can't do with e.g. my DotEmu games, as their servers are now permanently offline I believe).

2-3 external HDDs (just in case, that one will break) is good for backing any sort of data, if you wish portable solution. If you have no space - get few accounts on different clouds, encrypt your stuff and upload to them. Otherway - buy 7 HDDs and do RAID6 of them.

And yeah - having spreadsheet/plaintext with hashes of your files (just to verify their integrity manually) is always good idea for ANY sort of backup

Over time there have been various studies done showing that writeable media such as CDR/DVDR etc. starts to deteriorate in as few as 5 years. This means that one might end up with such media gone bad in as soon as 5 years or even less, but it might mean that another disc still works after 15 years. Such scientific results aren't a guarantee of failure after a certain date, but a sign that problems can and do show up in lab conditions in as soon as N year scenarios. Only the value of N may change from one brand of media to another or other factors, but suffice it to say - burned media does not last forever by any measure, and that's no secret.

It is my understanding as well that flash memory deteriorates slowly over time and will eventually become corrupt although I haven't seen any scientific reports on it as with CDR et al, but have read that data can start to corrupt on them in as little as 5-10 years as well.

Having said all of that, I've only had one USB stick out of 9 go bad that I've noticed so far and the newest ones I have are 5+ years old. It's equally important to note that I have not ran software to scan them checking for errors so there could be bad spots on them that I haven't noticed thus "it works for me", where it doesn't actually work and I'm just blissfully unaware as I haven't ran thorough tests on them.

Likewise, I've had CDR/DVDR disks that were kept in very good shape physically which deteriorated in only a few years and started spewing errors, but I also have ancient ones burned in the 1990s that still worked the last time I tried them. Once again, this isn't an indication that the media lasts forever, but rather that there is no hard general rule or guarantee that they last, but it is known that they can start to fail after only a few years - and there's no way to know for a given burn whether it will be the "lasts for 2 decades" type of burn or the "read errors in 3 years" type. It's always a crap shoot.

Everyone's experience will vary naturally because of these complete lack of guarantees and the relative randomness with which failures are likely to occur, not even taking into account physical wear and tear or abuse of the media, dogs thinking they're chewtoys, or children thinking they're frisbees, etc.

Hard disks? I'm not sure about this one. I've got 2 hard disks in a machine right now which are from 1997 and they still run fine. There are some bad sectors on them but no new ones for eons. Way to go Quantum Fireball! Sadly, they don't exist anymore having been swallowed by Maxtor years ago. :) Anyhow, hard disks written to and then kept offline safely in storage away from magnets and other environmental conditions that might affect them is probably the best bet IMHO, and not those cheap "value" or "green" ones either. I'd go for higher quality ones with long warranties as they're most likely to last the longest.

Other than these options though, I don't think there are any other viable long term storage options other than "the cloud" somewhere that does automatic backups and stores data on RAID with fault tolerance. Things I've read in recent years suggest that RAID may no longer be sufficient either though.

We're stuck backing up our data and then re-backing it up every N years if we want to preserve it for the long haul in the end. Unless someone comes up in the future with a better way to ensure data storage will last on some medium for a very very long time. It's scary to think that if we all were put into cryosleep for say... 20-30 years, when we woke up, most of the computer data storage we have would be completely deteriorated and unusable, but hey, that's high tech for ya!

"cloud storage" should only be used as secondary backup.
All major cloud storage providers have some bad record in the past, like deleting files at accident.

Personally, I:

- Use an external hard drive for imaging about every three months.
- Buy a new hard drive about once per year for *cloning.
- "Store" all of my passwords in case I would forget it sometime down the line after running virus, malware, etc checks before cloning even though I always manually input passwords.

Cloud storage isn't a backup at all. It's no different from relying on the storefront to hold your products. I don't understand why anyone would go drm free and then put all their stuff online (save games as well) this just adds drm to everything as someone else is then managing your rights to your digital information.