It's a tricky choice, but usually I try to get more storage space.

I don't back up things that I could get my hands on easily if the HDD died, just the important stuff.

You know Muz, you tend to ask a lot of hard drive questions. Just get more storage, get an additional external hard drive or something. Maybe do what I did when I built my own desktop PC, add both a hard drive and a solid state drive, I heard that's pretty convenient for desktops. Or maybe just stop downloading a bunch of crap onto your PC.

Muz wrote:

You downloaded tons of media, films, for example, but you also like to make backups of it. However, the hard disk is starting to overload as you download lots of films, what do you think I should do? Just reformat the hard drive and re-download the films? Or burn every film to a DVD disc that might take days and hours and so on.

Data that can be sourced from elsewhere doesn't need to be backed up, but I do store it on a ZFS array to provide a fair amount of resiliency against corruption and hardware failure.

Just ZIP it. And then ZIP that ZIP file. Then ZIP that one, and so on, until it's a 0-byte file. The side benefit is, once you've compressed it to 0 bytes, the resulting archive contains all the possible bit combinations of the source files, so you can effectively extract any file ever made, ever to be made, or ever could be made. That's pretty handy.

Anyway that's what I would do. I have every file I've ever used on one 3.5" floppy disk, with 1.44MB to spare still. Here's hoping I don't get a bad sector in the FAT and lose that 0-byte file though. You can't come back from that.

Backup everything to tape.

keenmaster486 wrote:

Backup everything to tape.

Nah, back it up to punch cards.