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Hey everyone,

Got a quick question I wanted opinions on. My father in-law has 5 different external hard drives all with different photos and videos on them. In total he’s got about 12TB of data worth of Photos and Videos.

Question is, is it better to keep everything separate on the 5 different drives, or should he invest in getting one drive to hold all of the storage?

What are some of the pro’s and con’s in your experience? He’s hoping to move everything over to one drive so it’s easier to keep things organized, but he’s concerned that if that one drive fails everything is gone.

If you would opt to go the one drive route, why and how do you protect against the drive failing and losing everything?

If you would opt to go the multiple drive route, why and how do you keep everything organized?

Interested in your thoughts!

Thanks!

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Me personally 1 drive for all of that since drives are big enough, but the rule of backups is 3-2-1

3 copies of your data, on 2 different storage medium and 1 offsite.

So your live data is one, your external storage is another. Depending on how far away you live, you could always be an offsite backup for him. Have another drive that gets updated occasionally and brought back to you. Obviously that one isn’t going to be synced as often but it protects against ransomware, theft, house fire etc. At least this way it’s not a total loss.

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With home use offsite isn’t always feasible. You could do a cloud backup for your third, but there is recurring cost to that not to mention the amount of time to get all of the data back if it were ever needed. If you have the luxury of close trusted family member or friend, being each others offsite works out nicely.

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Bear in mind, while having 5 drives reduces the risk of total data loss, it increases the chance of some data loss by 5x as you now have 5 components that can fail. This is why multiple copies are best. Even if you did a home nas with RAID you want another detached preferably offsite copy. Ransomware will kill your live data and your connected backups.

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Wow 12TB is rather huge…

The main question is how much does the data worth ?

I only have like 4TB of photo which I stored in 2 Synology 620 slim NAS (RAID 5 SSDs) in HA mode which I refresh like in every 5 yrs (from a pair to 416s to 419s till they went EOL…then to the 620s).
As the years go by, these become more valuable.

Sadly I do not trust online companies as I used to have a copy on the Kodak online storage which went bust…

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First thing I would be doing is using some software to identify any duplicates, and only retain the highest quality/resolution version. Something like: Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder - Find and Remove Duplicate or Similar Images, GitHub - qarmin/czkawka: Multi functional app to find duplicates, empty folders, similar images etc. or dupeGuru | finds duplicate files , in no order of preference.

From there, while it may be time consuming, you could maybe look at either optimising the files for size/resolution/format, are there any image files that are .pngs that would be more efficient as another format without too much loss of detail, are some files too high resolution for what they are an image of etc. I use pinga, GUI image optimizer (PNG, JPEG, APNG), but you can find another here: pngquant — lossy PNG compressor. For files which are rarely access/used, you could also look at compressing them into archives.

As for the actual preservation of data, I would probably use 4 drives, mirror the data on 2 sets of 2 drives, leave one set with your FiL, take one set with yourself or give to a family member. Yes, it’s not the most resilient method of preserving the data, but it’s a little more cost effective. Failing this, you would probably be looking at cloud storage, but that would get costly for a home user with 12GB of data. If you decide the local route, get at least WD Red Plus/Ironwolf Pro or greater, they’ll be a bit more resilient. If you want to go even more resilient, you can always look at tape storage, but unless you’ve got a way of sourcing a second hand tape storage solution or one falls out of a truck, you’re going to have a large upfront cost, even if 12TB tapes can be had for around $65.

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12TB is a fair bit, I expect most of this is video. Perhaps convert it to a compressed format so the total storage (and total costs) are reduced.

a 2-bay NAS with 2x10TB drives would give you a mirror, which isn’t a backup but is a better way to keep all data on essentially a single drive.

I would then consider a 3rd 10TB drive (assuming you can get some compression or deduplication of the files first), as an off-site backup. Use the built-in NAS backup to copy the files to the external drive, then take that drive off-site somewhere.

If he is paranoid (I know I would be with personal files), a 4th drive to rotate with the off-site one could be an option later down the line.

He can always re-use the existing drives to keep split copies of the data as an off-site archive.

Whatever way you look at it, it’s going to cost, however, if this is family videos and photos, this is priceless.

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Western Digital makes single drives as large as 24TB these days. You can get them as external USB mybook drives.

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Alternate Option -
Why not look at the following:

  • Get a large External ( say 14+ TB, depends on how much your the data may grow in next 12 months).
  • Run the suggested deduplicate finders etc.
    Then - Look at say “Backblaze” Backup for PC - and get the data backed up there.
    Notes:
  • It’s about $100/year ( so yes some $$). And does take some time to get initial backup done ( Like Forever ).
    BUT -
    I found this actually more Cost Effective - and less time consuming ( which I have to also take into account costs $$ when Mum is like a day’s drive just to get there ) … should there be a major failure of the local HDD - there are a number of reasonable recovery options.

Up to you how you see costs of Purchase ( Hardware, like new NAS HDD’s plus 2 bay NAS etc.) + second remote Backup NAS - and who’s maintaining this as well as what’s your “Time” worth to you ?
[ We still have not covered a third Backup in different format here, as per suggested best business practice ].

Just different view and option. (Works for me, and is much less $$ that a $300 flight each way, plus Uber to Airport ( another $100+ my end, and a further 2 to 3 hour Train trip that end each way )) … but your milage will vary.

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Thanks everyone for the replies, I greatly appreciate it! I’ll let him know the suggestions and we’ll go from there! :slight_smile: