I still have a couple in operation, but mostly it’s for ingest. These days all my backups go into a NAS, including my GOG installers. Honestly, given the increasing waves of (sigh) enshittification it’s becoming more and more justifiable to keep your own home network services, storage included.
I personally have a NAS at home for various media with 8TB capacity, but that’s mostly because I want to stream from it. If I just needed data storage like games, I’d use a cloud host.
A home NAS should also have redundancy. At the price you’re quoting Backblaze would become more expensive than my current NAS setup in about what? 8 months?
Your home NAS being at your home means you don’t have redundancy for many things that can happen to your home PC (electric issues, fire or water damage, theft,…).
Yup, at minimum you’d need another NAS off site (say, at a friend’s house) so you always have a copy. I have my NAS in a mirror to ensure I can recover if a drive fails, so that would mean 4x the cost of whatever storage size you need if you want to ensure your data stays safe.
Just some quick math, a WD Red Plus 10TB drive costs $190. So that’s $19/TB, and they have a 3-year warranty (used to be 5), so let’s assume they last 3-5 years. I need four drives minimum (two sets of mirrors), though if I have a lot of data and drives, that’ll go down (e.g. if I can use RAID 5 or RAID 6, I need less parity):
19 * 4 / 3 = $25/year
19 * 4 / 5 = $15/year
So $15-25/year, or $1.5-2/month, which comes with a few caveats:
can’t easily expand storage (e.g. can’t just add 1TB), so need to overbuy; I have 8TB storage, but use less than half of that, so probably double the above cost
ignores PC costs, which can be hundreds every few years ($5-10/month) to replace aging components (esp PSU and RAM),; ideally get ECC RAM to reduce risk of bit rot
There is a crossover point at which self-hosting is cheaper, but if you only need 1-4TB of storage, something like Backblaze is probably cheaper. But as you get bigger, the NAS looks more attractive.
Alright, so you’re telling me I should invest year 2 of a Backblaze sub in having a second NAS set up off-site?
That still pays off pretty quickly.
Alright, look, in all honesty, what you want is to mix and match. I’m not gonna sit here and break down my entire data storage strategy, but you do want multiple solutions in parallel. The point of NAS is that you get mass storage you fully control, so it’s most cost effective for things that are huge and that you want on hand. Like, say, backing up your physical media or your digital purchases. That’s pretty close to good enough, since you probably retain access to your disks or your subscriptions and the NAS acts as a backup anyway.
Sure, despite my UPS protection and data redundancies my NAS could be nuked froom orbit and all of the stuff in it could die. And Google Drive could at some point decide to just poof six months of user data into the ether. What you really want is two separate backup solutions. Just don’t go nuts and acknowledge that your source media is also a copy of your media. This is an expensive rabbit hole. I still wouldn’t pay thousands of dollars a year for somebody else to run my mass storage. It’s more cost effective to keep the huge stuff in a NAS and perhaps a backup in a DAS box somewhere. Unless you’re curating a museum or doing life and death research that’s probably more than enough security for your media files.
Degradation can be handled by using filesystems (ZFS, BTRFS) and hardware (ECC RAM) to catch and fix degradation. Any cloud storage system worth paying for will do that for you. I trust something like Backblaze far more than DVD for data storage.
Digital media has a shelf life of 5 years before damage, even sooner if the hard drive sits unrun. CDs have 50, and thats just the rewritables.
If you are trusting a for-profit company to maintain your preservation attempts, youre as dumb as those poor bastards stuck with discontinued and unsupported eye and ear implants who suddenly lost vision and hearing when the company stopped maintaining the software.
Especially if you are trying to preserve any data you legally do not own. They arent your friend, youre barely their customer, and they will dump you and your data the second it might make them more money or cause them less legal trouble.
Digital media has a shelf life of 5 years before damage
Again, citation needed.
This really depends on how the data is stored. If it’s on a crappy USB drive, 5 years is generous. If it’s on a ZFS or BTRFS drive in RAID with ECC RAM and hardware is replaced as it fails, it’ll last potentially indefinitely.
And 50 years is really generous. I’ve lost, broken, or damaged most of the game disks I’ve ever owned, and I’m far younger than 50yo. Yeah, if you don’t touch it and leave it in a box for 50 years, it’ll probably survive (assuming you don’t have a fire or something), but I’m guessing that’s not going to be the case.
data you do not legally own
If it’s pirated, you can probably just re-pirate it in 50 years. If you just lost the license due to a company going under, you’re unlikely to be sued.
Regardless, it’s easy to encrypt your data so scans don’t pick it up. Just store the keys (and instructions so you remember) in a few other places. Many services offer a free bottom tier, and keys are unlikely to be more than a few kilobytes.
I know you can google “X media option degredation.” You do not need me to link you to a search engine. If youre advocating methods of preservation, you should already know this information.
But if you think paying a company for cloud storage is “potentially indefinite,” I dont think you should be giving preservation advice.
Especially with a sentence like “you can probably just re-pirate it in 50 years.” Thats so completely nonsensical.
How so? I can still pirate games from 20-30 years ago, probably further back. If you’re going to pirate anyway, let other people store the files for you.
But if you’re not going to pirate, you shouldn’t have to worry about storage services taking down your files. If there’s a claim against it somehow, you can show evidence that you purchased it legally and you’re good. If you’re worried, just encrypt it and their scanners won’t find it so they’d need to be tipped off that it contains illegal content (and likely need a warrant to attempt to decrypt).
Any why would paying a company to store things be poor advice long term? If you’re worried about the company going under, duplicate it across services (doubles your costs). You can also keep local backups as well, like DVDs, but I certainly trust the company more than my personal storage solution.
I should really start pirating copies of games that I buy on Steam. Servers and licenses don’t last forever.
I keep meaning to buy a dvd writer…
I still have a couple in operation, but mostly it’s for ingest. These days all my backups go into a NAS, including my GOG installers. Honestly, given the increasing waves of (sigh) enshittification it’s becoming more and more justifiable to keep your own home network services, storage included.
You’ll probably be better off paying for a backup service. Backblaze sells 1TB for $6/month, plus $0.01/GB for downloads. DVDs can be lost, get scratched, or simply snapped, whereas cloud storage is usually redundant so it’s unlikely to fail.
I personally have a NAS at home for various media with 8TB capacity, but that’s mostly because I want to stream from it. If I just needed data storage like games, I’d use a cloud host.
A home NAS should also have redundancy. At the price you’re quoting Backblaze would become more expensive than my current NAS setup in about what? 8 months?
Cloud storage is not worth the money.
Your home NAS being at your home means you don’t have redundancy for many things that can happen to your home PC (electric issues, fire or water damage, theft,…).
Yup, at minimum you’d need another NAS off site (say, at a friend’s house) so you always have a copy. I have my NAS in a mirror to ensure I can recover if a drive fails, so that would mean 4x the cost of whatever storage size you need if you want to ensure your data stays safe.
Just some quick math, a WD Red Plus 10TB drive costs $190. So that’s $19/TB, and they have a 3-year warranty (used to be 5), so let’s assume they last 3-5 years. I need four drives minimum (two sets of mirrors), though if I have a lot of data and drives, that’ll go down (e.g. if I can use RAID 5 or RAID 6, I need less parity):
So $15-25/year, or $1.5-2/month, which comes with a few caveats:
There is a crossover point at which self-hosting is cheaper, but if you only need 1-4TB of storage, something like Backblaze is probably cheaper. But as you get bigger, the NAS looks more attractive.
Alright, so you’re telling me I should invest year 2 of a Backblaze sub in having a second NAS set up off-site?
That still pays off pretty quickly.
Alright, look, in all honesty, what you want is to mix and match. I’m not gonna sit here and break down my entire data storage strategy, but you do want multiple solutions in parallel. The point of NAS is that you get mass storage you fully control, so it’s most cost effective for things that are huge and that you want on hand. Like, say, backing up your physical media or your digital purchases. That’s pretty close to good enough, since you probably retain access to your disks or your subscriptions and the NAS acts as a backup anyway.
Sure, despite my UPS protection and data redundancies my NAS could be nuked froom orbit and all of the stuff in it could die. And Google Drive could at some point decide to just poof six months of user data into the ether. What you really want is two separate backup solutions. Just don’t go nuts and acknowledge that your source media is also a copy of your media. This is an expensive rabbit hole. I still wouldn’t pay thousands of dollars a year for somebody else to run my mass storage. It’s more cost effective to keep the huge stuff in a NAS and perhaps a backup in a DAS box somewhere. Unless you’re curating a museum or doing life and death research that’s probably more than enough security for your media files.
Digital degrades faster than physical, and if youre trying to preserve things you do not want to be leaving it in a digital rental storage.
Especially files that you license, not technically actually own, like almost all digital games.
Citation needed.
Degradation can be handled by using filesystems (ZFS, BTRFS) and hardware (ECC RAM) to catch and fix degradation. Any cloud storage system worth paying for will do that for you. I trust something like Backblaze far more than DVD for data storage.
Digital media has a shelf life of 5 years before damage, even sooner if the hard drive sits unrun. CDs have 50, and thats just the rewritables.
If you are trusting a for-profit company to maintain your preservation attempts, youre as dumb as those poor bastards stuck with discontinued and unsupported eye and ear implants who suddenly lost vision and hearing when the company stopped maintaining the software.
Especially if you are trying to preserve any data you legally do not own. They arent your friend, youre barely their customer, and they will dump you and your data the second it might make them more money or cause them less legal trouble.
Again, citation needed.
This really depends on how the data is stored. If it’s on a crappy USB drive, 5 years is generous. If it’s on a ZFS or BTRFS drive in RAID with ECC RAM and hardware is replaced as it fails, it’ll last potentially indefinitely.
And 50 years is really generous. I’ve lost, broken, or damaged most of the game disks I’ve ever owned, and I’m far younger than 50yo. Yeah, if you don’t touch it and leave it in a box for 50 years, it’ll probably survive (assuming you don’t have a fire or something), but I’m guessing that’s not going to be the case.
If it’s pirated, you can probably just re-pirate it in 50 years. If you just lost the license due to a company going under, you’re unlikely to be sued.
Regardless, it’s easy to encrypt your data so scans don’t pick it up. Just store the keys (and instructions so you remember) in a few other places. Many services offer a free bottom tier, and keys are unlikely to be more than a few kilobytes.
I know you can google “X media option degredation.” You do not need me to link you to a search engine. If youre advocating methods of preservation, you should already know this information.
But if you think paying a company for cloud storage is “potentially indefinite,” I dont think you should be giving preservation advice.
Especially with a sentence like “you can probably just re-pirate it in 50 years.” Thats so completely nonsensical.
How so? I can still pirate games from 20-30 years ago, probably further back. If you’re going to pirate anyway, let other people store the files for you.
But if you’re not going to pirate, you shouldn’t have to worry about storage services taking down your files. If there’s a claim against it somehow, you can show evidence that you purchased it legally and you’re good. If you’re worried, just encrypt it and their scanners won’t find it so they’d need to be tipped off that it contains illegal content (and likely need a warrant to attempt to decrypt).
Any why would paying a company to store things be poor advice long term? If you’re worried about the company going under, duplicate it across services (doubles your costs). You can also keep local backups as well, like DVDs, but I certainly trust the company more than my personal storage solution.