I don't have that much, only one filled 1tb USB-HDD and a 256 gb USB-HDD.
After a couple of years, I just buy a new, copy the stuff onto that and store the old drives with all the data.
I have never lost any data from harddrives, though many of my oldest cd-r's have corroded/oxidated.

Never store most valuable data on optical disks. Unless you copy it to new ones every 5 year's or so.
Depends on the quality though. The oldest cd's I have that still works, are Kodak Gold ones.
Just a shame that they are not produced anymore. Most awesomme CD-R's ever.
They have really stood the test of time, with 5 star's +.

I started with floppies in early 90s, learned the unreliability of them hard way, continued with QIC 120 tapes, then with CD-Rs, then directly with external drives skipping DVDs almost completely.

Today, this is the situation:

2TB WD Mybook Essentials x 2 (1 real, 1 backup) - Backing up my main rig F: drive (1TB x 2 RAID1) and WD Live Hub (1TB):
- Personal Files - 30 GB
- Family photos (including several thousand scanned negatives and prints) - 170 GB
- Family videos - 165 GB
- Licensed software (including bundles) - 40GB
- GOG games - 395GB
- WD Live Hub backup (cult/bad/public domain SciFi and SW / ST fan films) - 510 GB

1TB WD Mybook Studio - Backing up my main rig G: drive (1TB x 2 RAID1):
- Old software, driver and reference document collection (including good old warez of 90s, tactfully named as "abandonware" these days 😊 ) - 560GB

1TB WD MyBook RAID Edition - Backing up boot drives of active PC's :
- Drive images of 7 active computers - 750GB (all active PC's have their C: drive Ghost (pre XP) or TrueImage (XP and later) images in their second/third HDDs, too).

So, in total, my backup set has 4 HDDs, with 6TB of total capacity, and about 70-75% of them is full. Including the RAIDs, everything importatnt has at least 3 and in some cases 4 copies at any given time.

I don't backup my original movie DVDs (2100+), original movie VCDs (500+), original game CD/DVDs (100+) and old magazine/etc. CDs (1000+). I don't have time and patience to rip about 5000 pieces of optical media of all kinds. 🤣

As I am currently reduced to my backups of backups, I can give a pretty good figure. I am one of those people who never deletes anything. All backups are just made by copying the entire contents of my old PC onto a new one when the new one is first set up aside from a few special cases where I have external backups such as my cartoon and my music. My book is also backed up on floppy disks and optical medium.

At least 8TB (Yes, Terabytes) of data, some of which is duplicates but not a lot. Missing from these are a few drives, all of which were pretty much full;

> 1x 250GB drive with a broken connector. Was working before the connector broke off. Will be fixed and backed up when I have space.
> 1x 250GB drive from the same time period. Contains nothing important to me but I would like the data backing up when I have room.
> 1x 80GB ExcelStor, Contains the partition from one of my old Athlon XP systems. Has an incarnation of my cartoon on that wasn't around for long and currently has only a few images surviving on other drives.
> 1z 10GB ExcelStor which is broken, probably never get it working. Sucks, because it had the last remaining copy of an episode from my old cartoon series among other things.
> A bunch of old 2GB Seagate drives that aren't working. In use circa 2000-2001
> Whatever is left on my crappy IBM as there isn't a feasible way to get the data off it and it really isn't important past the fact it dates back to 1997. All the good stuff was on floppies I backed up anyway, so only crappy paint pictures and word documents I couldn't care less about are on there. In fact, the drive could have failed for all I know as I haven't started the machine in years.
> A 512MB memory stick from college. Was college property and I was meant to hand it in, but fuck them, I got keyboards and mice that belonged to them too... oops. Anyway, that stick has some scripts I made to compromise restrictions on the college computers. Interestingly, they are packaged into a word document. Some were never used, one allows modifying most aspects of the network connection's properties, thus allowing you to connect to different gateways and DNS which would bypass a lot of the restrictions if you knew what to connect to. There is also a "Patch" folder which fixes the holes I exploited in the system and I was going to hand this patch in on the last day. Unfortunately, IT Services were looking for the person who had caused major havoc with their system (I am saying nothing) and I thought it unwise to appear with a patch for the very security issues the prankster had just used. Also on that stick are a few prank programs I used to deploy regularly, one of them makes the screen look broken. They actually replaced several screens at college because of me bypassing Deep Freeze and making it start with the system, one tech even replaced the motherboard in the computer because he couldn't figure out what the problem was and assumed the video adapter had broken.

I am resigned to sort it out when I get a new machine, because there are nested directories on top of nested directories and it is becoming a headache. Large portions of what I have backed up are either music, my own music or my own videos. Very few photos. Bunch of word documents, mostly scripts I will never use, including a shitty film I scripted in one night when I was 15 years old and under the influence of both cannabis and alcohol. A massive collection of MIDI/WRK files. Bunch of SysEx for various synths. Stack of ISOs of software I backed up. Bunch of VHD and VFD images to make life easier when other machines break. All YouTube videos, some of which were never uploaded. One was shot in the home before the channel was set up and followed a spider's-eye view as it crawled along the ceiling and dropped onto my face with weird camera effects - was a bitch to film because I had no camera man and it turned out shit, hence I never uploaded it.

Oh, also, I just checked and my porn folder is at 114GB, 3520 files, 91 directories... Probably more as I have a directory missing from this backup... Yeah... Umm... I live on my own. Some of it dates back to the dial-up days and you can't really make out what you are seeing, it is just a pixellated flesh colored blur and the audio sounds like it is happening under water, might delete those as they aren't worth watching anymore really. Wonder how many hours of my life I have wasted that I will never get back.

5.28TB, wish my NAS supported disks larger than 2TB.

16TB (HP Microserver, 4x4TB disks in RAID-Z1...yeah yeah, RAID-Z2 is better....i'm working on it!)
-Games (xbox, psp, psone, ps2, PC, retro, etc)
-Old ancient misc files and backup sets
-FTP/HTTP site rips
-redundant backup sets from ~1994 onward to about 2004

I have a separate 12TB NAS that covers all of my current photos, videos, archival sets (documents, etc) that is filling up fast with my HD cameras, phone, etc. I swear, by the time I'm dead I'll have well over 10,000TB of videos, photos, etc.

I also have a few static backups on a dozen or so 500GB 3.5" hard disks that are safely stored away, each having a redundant copy on another hard drive. Yeah...I have issues!

I lost my 10GB HDD that had all stuff from my 486/K6-2 era. I remember it was working one or 1 1/2 year before I stopped using that machine, but when I tried to plug on my current system of that time I just received clacking heads 🙁

Learned to change my HDDs periodically. Went from 80GBs (had 12+ of them) to 500GBs, then 1TB/1.5TBs and now almost everything is on 2TB internal/4TB external drives.

Very little.

PeterLI wrote:

Very little.

~S~eekers need no backups, they just find it all over again like nothing! 😁

Pre 2000 I probably have only 20 or 30 gig total. But for later stuff about 4TB. Mostly music in flac format, compilation CDs really start to add up in MB. Some games too, about 300GB.

It's frustrating though, I never feel like the data is 100% safe. The more you have the more time and money you need to put into keeping it. I've got a basic backup system but I don't make fresh backups very often.

I'd say about 2GB worth of obscure shareware games and old family pictures from the late 90s/early 2000s, backed up off of a pair of Maxtor 40GB HDDs that were in my family's K6 system, on my main rig's 1TB storage drive. Not much, but some of the stuff I do still have from the old days is kinda sentimental to me. I probably have more stuff on other drives from my old main rigs that's worth backing up, but I'm too lazy to do it at the moment. 🤣

You have no idea ...

About 25 DVD folders, holding 240 discs each (but I don't ram them, it creates too much pressure on the discs, so around 160 Dual Layer DVD's in each) filled with DivX movies, ISO images of games, Emulation stuff, old applications, rips from the "scene" of the 1990's, art packs and demos / prods.

Then theres two 4TB external HDDs with around 7200 1080p movies on (I'm into film... or collecting - or both). A single 2TB external with game images on, more modern stuff though, although 500GB is dedicated to "The Game Tapes" from the 1990's, and the Old Dos Archive of games.

Then another 2TB external which is basically every MP3 I ever had from the days of Napster onwards. Lots of stuff I have ripped myself as my CD collection got out of hand. Also on that drive are about 450GB of nature documentaries, which fascinated me since childhood.

I think that's ... pretty much it.

Wait ... where do I keep my eBooks?

Had a lot youtube content from 2009 through to 2012 along with tens of thousands of articles, games, and everything else only to get wiped out by a house fire (arson by retarded neighbor) so learn from this by having at least some of your most important stuff backed up offsite somewhere safe.

Woooow, you guys are Proffesionals compared to my old skinny 2k CDs collection. Do you use any kind of File Manager for taggin/classify that huge amount of files?
I mean,plain WinXP files n' folder naming conventions are too rigid and time demanding, I've tried Elyse, Life Tools, TaggTool ,waste lotta time in them and they were not useful ....TaggTool worked the best for me in its old Java-version, now they've made it browser-html based, and loss WinExplorer integration..:@ . Which File/Tag manager do you use or recommend me? (for large amount of text and images files) Thanks.

I "collect" many things from 1996 till today. I have stopped using CD/DVDs in 2007 when I went all-in on HDD's. Firstly with 1TB and later replaced them with 2TB - that I still use today. Haven't really bought new 2TB drive in about two years. All-in-all I have around 400CDs, 400DVDs, 30BR-DL and around 30TB on HDDs. I use HDD Dock and HDD's just sit on the shelf.

Sometimes I wonder what's the use? I rarely need anything 😊

My "data files" directory is about 400GB. It includes everything other than video, but part of it is installers for pretty much every program I've ever used. Once I download something, I keep it.
Some of the largest portions of this space are web site mirrors of sites I was worried about disappearing, and pictures from my camera.

This is still on my desktop. I have a NAS set up, but it only has videos on it at this point.
The NAS runs SnapRAID, which gives the video files some parity based redundancy and bitrot protection.
I'd like to get my general data files directory in there so it can benefit from the bit rot protection. However, SnapRAID isn't efficient with lots of small files, it was intended for big files that hardly ever change (videos pretty much).
Just because of bit rot, I might try putting the data files under snapraid, but even if I do that, they will still also have a conventional full backup.

A couple years ago, I trimmed out the most critical part of my data files archive and zipped it. I think I got it down to about 600MB. I encrypted that and uploaded it to my email provider, which has a simple file hosting service. That upload is out of date now, but it's a lot better than nothing.

I'm holding on to some random CDs and DVDs of backups I made years ago, but that's not really how I do backups anymore. I prefer a hard drive based system nowadays.

kixs wrote:

I "collect" many things from 1996 till today. I have stopped using CD/DVDs in 2007 when I went all-in on HDD's. Firstly with 1TB and later replaced them with 2TB - that I still use today. Haven't really bought new 2TB drive in about two years. All-in-all I have around 400CDs, 400DVDs, 30BR-DL and around 30TB on HDDs. I use HDD Dock and HDD's just sit on the shelf.

Sometimes I wonder what's the use? I rarely need anything 😊

We collectors just do it for the purpose of... collecting! We rejoice on having stuff rather than using it 😁

All for all, I'm pretty standard-fare considering that are some crazy collectors with HUNDREDS of TERABYTES of untouched scene releases (games, apps, etc) - I've managed to take a peek at one's list... that file alone was 10+ MB and was just one category 😵

Back in the early days of collecting (pre 2000) I had around 100 CD's and my friend who was really into it had around 500. So I can image someone having around 5x my collection (200TB) 😲

Do you guys use any Tag based File Manager to organize that huge amount of files? (Windows based). Thanx

I have everything sorted based on HDDs and directories. All CD/DVD/HDDs are TXT indexed (dir /s/a > label.txt) and put in one directory. When I search for something I use Total Commander for text search in that directory.

Not the best thing but this is how I started sorting and indexing way back in 1993 (with floppies). I tried different cataloging software through the years but always came back to basics.