For me it's all Steam and GOG.com. Mostly because I moved so much in my life that keeping physical things just wasn't practical.

I've never trusted CDs because they get damaged so easily. I remember reading some time ago that, at least with cheaper CDs, over time they degrade. I'm not sure if that's true but whatever the case, I've never done well with optical disc.

I use mostly flash memory for my important files. I also have a few hard drives sitting in a desk drawer; since I had them laying around and they aren't worth anything I copied my important documents and my favorite songs and some of my graphics work to them. I also have a lot of stuff stored on my cell phone and I even have a few important documents on floppy disk that I can access with my old Amstrad PPC. Then I have some stuff stored in my gmail account. Then there's some stuff I have hard copy of stored in a briefcase. Since I don't need much space to store all my needed data, I'm easily able to cover a wide number of bases in my backup solution. Just so long as I have access to a working computer or cell phone I'm good to go.

I wish DL DVDs were cheaper; 4 GB of space just doesn't cut it with 100+ GB drives.

These days I usually just copy everything from one drive to another external drive, but I had a crash a while ago (and lost some unique stuff I foolishly stored alongside my backups) and it's made me feel nervous.

Documents, Pictures, etc I used to have a copy on 2 seperate laptops but was screwed when both walked out the door when the house was broken into.

Lucky most my pics were in a Picasa account so didnt loose many, and have since tried to keep a copy of important stuff online as well as my local PC.

Discs I just create ISO's to try and save wear and tear on on the actual CD/DVD

i've experience faulty USB controller that would corrupt transfered datas if its more than 128KB
(un)fortunately i only lost about 8GB worth of data.

so, since then i've always make extra steps to confirm that hash of backup is the same of original.

Oh, yes, whenever I burn a DVD, I always make an MD5 file of everything I'm burning first, and then check the MD5 sums afterwards. Bit of a chore, really.

have you had a single case when it wasn't matching?

I burn everything I download to dvd's
Each on cunningly labeled "Backup" so i can instantly tell the contents

I have three methods of backing up stuff, all of which I use for different purposes:

CDs: I only use CDs for backing up critical files related to everything I do that's not related to ADG.

DVDs: I've already gone through like, 30 of these backing up ADG stuff. XD

External HD: I keep a regular backup going here. I just have to flip on the drive, double-click a batch file which backs up anything that would be hard to replace, though not necessarily important, disable it and flip it off.

Having suffered a hard drive crash way in the past, losing nine months worth of work on an RPG that was two weeks away from being finished... yeah. Lesson learned. I've never really completely recovered from that event emotionally. :/

I still have the drive though in case it's ever possible to do data recovery off of it.

Isn't there something like a backup day? Where you take the time to think about your (or lack of) backup strategy?

One product i can recommend is LiveMesh from microsoft. Not only can it sync files with the cloud (SkyDrive) but also between machines (even if SkyDrive is full).

I also need to rethink my backup strategy. At the moment it's all over the place. If my D drive craps itself it's not the end of the world but still a huge pain.

At least USBs are getting quite cheap and they are easy to store. Just need some kind of label to write stuff on.

Free shipping! 🤣
(edit: only to US apparantly!)

http://www.ebay.com/itm/310362860422

A single 1 of these bad boys should swallow a reasonable amount of DVDs or CD content...

As for longevity or reliability, I have no idea though.... 😖

well, i live with very slooow internet connection so, cloud-ism is not an options

External hard drive. Of course, I'm also looking for a cheap NAS device.

The other problem with CD/DVDs is that it's so difficult to figure out where you put everything. Before my old hard drive crashed I actually considered copying all the stuff on my old backup CDs back to my gigantic external hard drive so there would actually be a chance I could find it again. Of course, once one starts doing that, one runs into the problem of trying to figure out what one has already burned to disc.

Back in the Win9x days I had a really swell removable-media cataloging program for tracking which files were on which discs. It was one of the finest pieces of freeware I had ever seen... except the developer gave up working on it while it still had a critical resource-consumption bug. 😢

robertmo wrote:

have you had a single case when it wasn't matching?

The day I don't check is the day it will happen. 🙄

I have this "system":
I download everything on my internet computer (or someone elses computer), then put it on an external drive and copy it to my work computer.
On the work computer I sort everything out and then copy it to a different external drive.
Oh and almost everything on my workcomputer is double on 2 internal drives.

So if 1 harddrive fails, not much is lost (except for a load of work to get everything sorted again perhaps).

I just keep everything stored on many hard drives as needed. Got 4TB in just backup file data alone while everything else is just hoarded on drives of different sizes that often end up sitting for years at a time before I decide that I need the drive for a project. It works pretty well with little loss. The downside is that I have to keep one of my modern rigs offline and to house my newer drives.

1 Freenas server 16gb of ECC memory, 8 4TB drives in RAIDZ2 configuration

Offsite via 4 2 bay synology NAS with 4TB drives. Synced via robocopy.

Rotate 1 every week and store at work in a locked drawer.

I have mostly switched to DVD with only one partial CD-R backup. BUt I have begin to wonder how smart that was. I KNOW CD-R's last....I have had some for 10+ years. The jury is still out on DVD......

What REALLY bothers me is that the quality of the disks available seems to have gone WAY downhill...

In terms of $ per GB what is actually cheaper? DVD-R or HDDs?