That user likely also meant that ONE copy of your installers is seen as the primary copy, and a second would be a backup. If you only have one then it is not usually considered by some to be a backup.

As for me: I don't have many games and am poorer than some so I buy and use USB 3.0 memory sticks(128GB ones, though I might eventually save up and get 512GB ones and use those more).If you have space you should always keep the current installer and the one version before that. =====================I think there are and they are called NAS.

Currently I'm using two 2TB external HDDs by WD. Until now they have been enough for my needs, but I'm getting close to filling them up. However, I'll have to recognize that I gave up archiving my GOG offline. I just don't the time to maintain my collection, up to my standards. Lately I've even stopped archiving offline installers for the software I use. However at this point, I'd say that if something were to happen to the Internet, access to software would be the least of our problems.

I'm probably the odd one out here, having 4 backups spread over 5 or 6 separate HDDs ... plus a single separate backup for Linux versions. I call them backups, because the originals are at GOG, though a fair point about older installers, so for those I guess I only have 3 backups.

Most will no doubt think me a bit anal for having 4 backups, but I can essentially do and forget, and if one drive fails, I don't have to madly create another, just take my time, especially as I have an awful lot of games ... too much to copy in a few sittings without risking damage to a drive, from over-heating. Don't believe me on that score, read up about it.

My drives are never connected all at once and never connected for long, so it would be a truly amazing event for more than one to die at the same time. That said, copying a lot of data all at once from a drive, especially an older one, is a good way to kill/degrade it.

Drives whether new or old, can die anytime. No doubt due to some factor of mass production.

There is at least once company, that regularly uses a lot of drives from all manufacturer's and keeps a record of their longevity etc. I forget what they are called, but it makes for some good reading.

P.S. By the way, I use TeraCopy to move or copy my files around (MD5/CRC checking), plus a program that acts as a middle man, that pauses for significant periods between limited size jobs. It may take a bit longer, but hell it gives you more peace of mind.

P.S.S. I have gone down the NAS path before, but no longer do so. In theory they sound great, but no escaping all the eggs in one basket. Different in a business scenario, compared to the limits of your regular everyman ... without spending lots of money.

-1) 1 copy isnt considered a backup
you should do 2. So you have the data on your PC and on additional 2 drives

-2) store at least 1 copy out of your house (in case of fire, water, thiefs, ..)

-3) encrypt your harddrives (veracrypt for example). If you store a backup out of your house, you dont want everyone having access to it (or in case it gets stolen).
Also backup the headers of the encrypted drives. I had it once (within 10+years), that I couldnt mount an encrypted drive anymore due to damaged headers. Glad it only was a "transport"-drive (for getting copies of data from A to B). Copy the backuped headers on all of your encrypted drives - if all drives fail, you wont need the backuped headers anyways ,-)

-4) rotatet the drives - means: use BackupDrive1 for 6 months, then switch and use BackupDrive2 for 6 month
You dont want to find out, that your backup-drive died like 8 month ago without you noticing it.

-5) check your drives on a regular basis (hd tune pro for example), to see hardware failures early, so you can replace the damaged drive before one of your backup-drives fail too

-6) dont have your backup disk plug-ed in on your PC all the time. You dont want trojans to encrypt your backup as well as your main drive at the same time.

-7) do NOT (never ever) use drives from the same series. If there is a serial defect, all your drives would be affected. You can also consider using different manufactures. A decade ago I had mirrored drives - both failed within 1 week (glad, that different sectors were affected, so no data loss).

-8) Raid/Mirror is NOT a replacement for a backup.
Encryption trojans, filesystem errors, water/fire/lighning killing all drives in one go, ... Raid is only good to counter the most common problem: Failure of 1-2 disks (depening on your configuration)


FreeFileSync (that's what i use) can help you keeping you backups identical.
As for the money (aka "can I afford this?"): A 4TB drive costs like 100€. Make that 3 times you have 300€. And then ask yourself: Are the data stored on the disks are worth 300€ or not (or the time needed to restore it/download it again)? When i hear people crying "I lost all those unreplaceable data (photos of the children growing up) !!" I can only shake my head. I mean, those people know, that their stove can fail - but they cannot imagine, that their harddrive can fail !?
Remember: It's never about the hardware costs. It's all about the data on it!


br,
someone, who didnt loose any data within the last 25+ years :-)

I have a Synology NAS with 2 different 10TB HDDs in mirror (windows only installers are about 3.5TB :/). If I smell trouble about GOG, I'll double down at my parent's place with another NAS.

I use it more for convenience than emergency preparation. I do keep the latest windows installers and all the bonus materials but the initial idea that using them will speed up the installation turned out to be wrong due to the way the installers are made and work. Installation using galaxy seems to be at least as fast if not faster.

The thing with storage is that you'll quickly find new ways to use it and regret not getting a larger drive. For me I realized I wanted to have complete walkthroughts of the gog games I own. Accessing them locally is faster and easier than on youtube, you get a very good idea of the length and content of the game, and it's a nice way to decide what to play if you feel lost. You can imagine those videos take some space: about 1 Tb for random 60-70 games, some small, some humongous, some in 1080p60, some not. For 500 games it's a 8-10 Tb drive.

More practically a found another use still: keeping mirror copies of massive games from other stores so I won't have to redownload them. Like that gta 5 with 85 Gb, shadow of war with 100 Gb, or assassin's creed odyssey with 95 Gb. It’s better if the games are not too fresh so they won’t have many updates. Copying from external to internal hdd is at 80-90 MB/s for large files (and most of the games don't have many small files anyway) without any unpacking and fragmentation, while downloading is at 23MB/s in the best conditions with additional unpacking and fragmentation, thought the fact that remote files are packaged reduces the download size somewhat. For steam games you can attach buildId (found in properties for installed games, and in general on steamdb.info) to a folder so you can check if the game has since been updated, for newer ubi games there's an ingame version number for that.

Actually there are two types, Direct Attached Storage and Network Attached Storage, DAS and NAS respectively. I have some of each. I particularly recommend Terramaster d5-300 (note not the c version which is different):
https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/page/DECD9845-D8C2-492A-86CF-0F3A95DC7E3D?ingress=0&visitId=19118fa8-e2e8-491c-a418-df53ea5dc4db
I have two of these and one older model and they are compact, quiet, up to 5 bays top capacity 50tb, usb3 connection. And low temp. Am always looking to buy more of these! And you can set jbod or raid 5 on the drives (see wiki for explanation).

In terms of NAS, qnap and synology are the big two. I have:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/QNAP-TS-451-2G-Network-attached-multimedia/dp/B015CDDGZU/ref=sr_1_1?crid=QJ23TL8Y15TZ&keywords=qnap+ts451&qid=1573472072&sprefix=Qnap+ts45%2Caps%2C149&sr=8-1
It was easy setup, and connects to your router with connection programs on phones and iPads as well as browser so you can access files anywhere there is internet. More useful for having music streaming or pictures, not really as a backup as cost is higher.

So best to identify what the purpose is, what the sensitivity is, then choose something most appropriate to the task.

It's always good to be prepared. If Steam and GOG's server headquarters get nuked in WW3 then having a backup would be essential. That way as society devolves into barbarism you can still take it easy and play video games.

No worries, me too. Terra opt is a get file copy tool with the checking. For bigger volume however freefile sync can analyse changes to whole volumes, copyingover only what has changed, so can save hours in copying/admin of what has changed.

A ton of good info, but a few nitpicks if I may:

Tip 2(above): You mean another house or deposit box? Not everyone can afford these sorts of things or has another location to store such......although cloud storage for offsite might work.

Tip 3(above): Encryption is only necessary on private/sensitive info. If you just have a ton of g-rated non-personal(internet/etc saved) pics/game installs/etc on such and nothing else one can usually leave such drives unencrypted(but of course encrypt the other stuff/drives).

Also one can store personal stuff on memory sticks(picture usually take up much less space) as well...although as with drives one should make sure to buy good ones that are dependable.
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Galaxy is faster I guess but they cannot be counted on if the service ever went down for some reason.

That is why one should be very selective with what they keep, and only keep the most important stuff(personal pics/documents/most loved games & media/etc) on the main drives and everything else gets saved on other drives(to be added to/removed from as needed).

And as for walkthroughs....video walkthroughs ARE nice for some, but often(it seems) they miss some stuff(depending on who made them) and as you said they take up much less space.

My suggestion: DL text walkthroughs OR html copies of those picture filled guides some sites have, so you can use those.

I am so glad I use console for such newer games(for the most part), then.....those sizes would eat my drives alive.

Nice find(I might look into the 2 bay model later on).....but you need MORE of them? They hold up to 50TB!

(Hoarder or just have large amounts of game/etc data or many copies?)
================================

Unless we get return of the living dead style/28 days later style zombies. o.0

Depends what drives you put in them, max up to 50tb. Mine run, 4*6tb, 5*6tb, 5*8tb, and are all clones of the main machine. I got one cheap off eBay. They are a good product, and a power supply for one died after several months and support was quick and sorted me out with a new one. Pretty solid construction, nice solid feeling aluminium case which remains pretty cold.

Still, they could go UP TO 50TB, and I thought you needed close to that much(my bad if I made a mistake and assumed incorrectly).....I could barely see using above 8TB at most on each backup, and I also hoard a ton of data. o.0

glad you like it :-)
Experience collected over a period of more than 2 decades.
And "overkill" is my 2nd firstname - which includes my backup strategy

parents, work, friends...
Not a special rented room/box. That would be overkill and if someone tries to really go for your data+all backups, they would search the rented rooms too (linked to you via payment/credicard/etc).
You can call me paranoid :-)

I disagree. I have a backup at my parents house and i know, how my parents act with their data (careless). I do trust my parents, but they could corrupt my backup by accident and i have little chance to find out, what got damaged (other than always doing a full sync with another working backup).
Encryption ensures, that the backup didnt get changed. Nobody can switch a single file (replace an installer with a trojan for example) in a backup consisting of million files (yes, there are million of files in my backup). Paranoid, i know :-)

Also if you have (for example) 5MB of sensitive data and 1 TB of uninteressting (i.e. gog installer) and you only encrypt those 5 MB, everyone knows, that you have 5MB sensitive data. And I do have sensitive data (from my point of view) in my backup, health infos like blood-pressure history, registration infos (for websites), ...
If you encrypt everything, you can say "I always encrypt everything... /shrug"
This falls into "plausible denyability" (important for encryption). This is the reason you fully encrypt empty/new drives, so noone can find out, how much sensitive data you have on it.
It's also suggested that, if you plan a hidden container (with really sensitive data), that you put something into the "normal" container, that is embarrassing.
But this is not relevant for backup, more for security


/edit removed typos

I use about 14tb currently, the rest is raid 5 redundancy and space to grow. So 5*6= 24tb space plus one drive fail fall over. That’s about what I need, and 6tb we red are reasonable price for what they store, 4tb is £154, 6tb is £182, 8 is £223, so £28 diff for 4-6, £41 for 6-8 and 10tb is way more. So overall 6tb drives are about right for the job. If you have less, just use smaller hdds. I had 4*2tb in my first one.
So in your example, 5*2tb drives, raid 5 (effectively drop one drive to allow the fail over) would give you your 8tb storage plus if one drive failed you could rebuild the array. That is of course only one back, you would want other copies in case the whole device broke or all the drives went at the same time. As stated above raid is not back, just a safety net for one drive failure. If your never going to go particularly high then you may be better off just getting usb drives at the size you think you need , e.g get a few 8tb we elements, and make multiple clones (you would want more as a single drive failure=total loss in this instance).

As a final note, as mentioned size is always going up, if you plan on making videos available (I have all my old dvds on there) these take up a fair bit of room, and obviously blue rays are a factor larger in storage, and the latest 8k films will be a factor more. Not too mention games are factoring up in scale, RDR2 is 150gb compressed!