datahoarder
Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread
view the rest of the comments
Thanks for this! This is a really rundown.
One question on the media though. While things like games and media can be redownloaded, that's a significant effort. And also, how do I know what I've lost once it's gone? Do I backup a directory of what I had somehow? I have a terrible memory, and will forget things ever existed.
If I can get it later, personally I don't back it up. I have lost 100tb of media before and since then I've redownloaded most of it. For that stuff, if I forget about it then it wasn't important. When I care about it, I'll remember and just go get it then.
I agree with this, though if you have something like Sonarr or Radarr, the titles you have (or had) would all be on there, so reaquiring isn't quite as significant a task.
Unfortunately I've recently had to put this into practice because I didn't understand hardlinks and zfs subpools...
I recently lost a media drive and Radarr was a godsend. I've made database backups a priority. It's also much easier to recover from a dead drive with access to a private BitTorrent tracker that allows free leeching.
After I stopped other programs except for Radarr and qBitTorrent, I let those two with for two days and got most of everything back. There are a few more movies that I need to manually recover and I should properly back those up. Besides that, it worked very well.
You're welcome.
Yes, you can create a list of files that takes little space, in linux that's just "tree" to produce a list of directories and files (I don't know about Windows, sorry)
But only you can answer what you need to back up. If you judge the effort to re-download this data is more than the effort of backing it up (especially if you're on a slow link), then backing it up makes more sense. Everyone has their own appetite for risk and their own shape of what they can spend in both time and money in sorting this. The important thing is that you're thinking about it before you need it, that's good!