Gog might consider selling usb sticks made on demand. I am sure there's a business opportunity here, especially if packaged well.

It’s not practical. If you have a library of a 1000 games for instance you have to store all that, postage, not to mention how you would get patches and updates. Then how will you go about backing it all up - you do back everything up of course. There is no way I could keep my information on usb sticks, would need a couple of big houses for storage, even with the most expensive large usb drives.

Really big variety of use cases here. Some have hdd instead of ssd, some limited internet connection, some massive libraries, some use linux instead of windows, some need simple user interface, some advanced, and so on. No universal solution possible, no "one size fits all". Yet it seems that's what almost every provider tries to do: find a single solution. I hope a well developed and implemented automation will allow gog to cater to unique subgroups of users. Because all those needs matter.

Well, look, I do understand that fast broadband isn’t available worldwide as yet. Unfortunately physical media really is not the solution, as evidenced by every single outlet moving to digital purchases or streaming. It is not practical for the individual in terms of storage or use, and definitely not practical for firms to be paying hardware manufacturers and postal firms. Say gog release red dead redemption 2, it’s 150gb compressed, now 128gb usb drives do exist, so two of those bad boys, posted out to you, that will be £60 base games, plus £40-50 for the usb stick, plus £20 postage. Then there is dlc, anothe usb stick for the couple of usbs, how would you like patches?
There are very fundamental cost and logistic reasons why everyone has, not will have, moved away from physical media. HDDs remain the best cost versus capacity size ratio for storage of data, ssds remain as best cost versus speed. Everything else is dead tech or specialised. Shame really as I liked the old console cartridges and Zip drives and such, but there is not way its scalable for my 14gb storage requirements.

Large mem sticks work well for some needs(like 512GB+), and are usually decently priced.

Yes, as I said above, for specific purposes they are great. I have a 256gb fast one with portable apps installed on it. And I use one for moving various files across different computers. However in the main, storage is done on hdds. I have something like 14tb of games, music, pictures etc. All of which needs backing up several times. Now try to do that with usb sticks. First they would take up the space of a house, second I would need to plug each one into the computer to backup, then eject. And finally it would cost me a fortune. Just not practical. If your talking about one or two games, maybe even 10, fine, but anything more than that now way. Heck, with the 6 or 7 changing mod lists for each elder scrolls game that would become a nightmare to manage.

14Tb? Sounds like you're a bigger data hoarded than me. :|

(No offense meant with that, btw)

A house? Maybe if it's a dollhouse. You have a point on cost, though.

I can easily backup around 175+ games on 3 mem sticks(128Gb each stick) or a bit less. :)

And that includes saving other files on the same sticks like family photos/documents/videos/etc. Of course if I did more mod saving that size might grow to a few more mem sticks.

Yes, I never really delete anything. It’s easy to pile it up. Elder scrolls with various mod lists is over 100gb, mount and blade probably a bit more. Not too mention images of each windows version, visual studio versions, office. Pictures, music, game dev tutorials, movies, pictures, a lifetime of documents, email storage files etc. It’s a pretty simple backup process now, boot up one of the 4 raid5 boxes (that several of the same backup for local/external backup), run freefilesync to sync the internal drives and done. How would you sync updates across multiple usb drives? How would you know what each one contains. For me I have one set of drives striped in the machine compared to a block of drives in each of the other boxes, so 1-1 mapping, no need to know what is on it or what has updated, freefilesync does that.
Did look at tape backup some time back, however cost again was an issue, the drives can be very expensive even if the tapes are cheaper.
Apologies here, we seem to have digressed from the original topic. Use what works for you but just bear in mind future expansion.

Not saying this to offend, but you sound like you have a bit of a hoarding problem. I used to as well then I realized that it is pointless to save everything and cut back on some stuff.

I keep a text list to its own backup listing what each one contains and I sync them by plugging them all in at once and just copying/pasting large batches of smaller files when needed to make sure all backups are the same.

Tape drives? Damn...why not just buy a noc/data center and call it a day? ;)

(Again, none of this is meant to offend, and is all in good fun/discussion. Have a good one)

No worries. It is a bit hoarding. However I have had drives fail back when so over compensate now. Also, I have had excel files to keep track of things, and found that some things go wrong. A sort for instance can really break it. I now use collectorz, though mean to write my own dB. As for two much, well the whole of it takes one shelf, virtually no room. And it is all automated now, so no effort. I wouldn’t however want to lose it all :o)

I feel ya....luckily for me I didn't go overboard and swing to the other extreme when I lost data & stuck to just a few backups.

You have my respect for the dedication, at the very least.

Nope, but sadly it'll happen to everything.....us/earth/universe.....it's best to just enjoy what you can while you can(live in the moment) more than worrying. :)

While HDD are a bottleneck, that really has nothing to do with what I said. I'm saying that modern Windows OS are so much better at limiting fragmentation that running defrag on them will not make any real world improvement on a typical system setup. It doesn't hurt, but its not needed to run every week or so either like before in the 9x days.