If you care about your data, don't burn at maximum speed. Drives lean into the error-correcting codes to offset the lower recording accuracy at higher speeds. If you want to still have your data in 20 years, write at 2x. Also, store them in a cool, dry, dark place. Sunlight is really bad for optical media. Constant temperature changes can also cause de-lamination, so you really don't want to leave your stack of backups near a heat source. Computer tower, heater, black storage case that may get left by a window...
You care... I care...but the majority doesn't care..they're impatient and burn at the highest speed, they try to save money by buying crappy optical media, and can't be bothered to store them properly. It's like talking to a wall with those people.
@@bigtitmaster LOL. I'm certainly not going to have three backup sets of 15 x 90 GB disks sitting around. I would rotate three single 4TB or 5TB 2.5" HDD. The hardware is cheap. It is the software that is expensive.
Back in 1999. My apt got broken in to. They grabbed my brand new 21” CRT, my gaming rig, my secondary gaming rig, my DVD player, my 32” TV. But here’s the thing. They took the time to EJECT my JAZ cartridge in my second PC and leave it on the table. The JAZ cartridge was labeled “My Files” Because of that, I still have some of my oldest most cherished data to this day.
At 12:25, it appears that Acronis gave Quinn 5 TB of included storage for his backups…but the $50 a year version includes no online storage. It also only backs up one computer. If you want 5 TB, Acronis is $285 a year. So…WTH?
This Video is sponsored by Acronis, so they propably gave him the 5TB Subscription. Look in the Video Description, there is a Affialiate Link for Acronis.
@@elevatorz89 This is highly misleading. S3 is not cheaper if you're needing to share files OR access your files. If you never need more than 100gb a month for ALL of your AWS stuff, let's say you need to recover 1TB of data, you're out 90 dollars. If you need to recover that full 5TB, it's like 500 dollars. Already over the yearly cost of Acronis for 5TB. I'm not saying Acronis' product is good (I haven't used it.) If you need just storage but don't need to share it, there are cheaper alternatives like Wasabi that is S3 compatible (and allows you to transfer out unlimited but they'll TOS if you try to use it primarily to share, their rule of thumb is the equivalent amount of storage to transfer per month) that's $5/tb OR you could use something like Hetzner's Storage boxes (be warned that speeds can be sort of slow from US -> EU, but it is very cheap and reliable). But don't advocate for S3 for stuff like consumer storage of backups. It's terrible for that unless you're using it deep glacier as like, a third back up of all of your very very important stuff and hopefully never, ever have to recover it.
(S3 is great! I've used it a ton for work in production environments; or for small files, or for stuff I need to access within AWS. but cheap it is not. There is MUCH better options for cheap, object storage if you're a small business that's not super vested into AWS or if you're needing it for non-business use cases, like Wasabi, DigitalOcean, Linode, etc. And they're all S3 compliant. Not trying to be like "you're wrong lol" but I don't want anyone to get absolutely wrecked by Amazon's insane egress data bandwidth costs)
Colleague: hey I have this HDD with my whole life's digital pictures on it. It's my backup but it broke down. Can you repair it? Me: sure man! Glad you have a backup so you haven't lost anything if this doesn't work. Colleague: But this is all I have!.... Me: but you said it was a backup! Colleague: Yeah I put all on that drive and stored it in a safe place! My backup! Me: Oh dear...
It's always difficult to give a broad information video when you've got a sponsor urging you to hit their talking points and make their product seem good but I feel you threaded the needle well. Didn't feel any different than any other snazzy labs video. Much better than that gimbal webcam video from last year.
@@snazzy I think it's 50/50 i'm more concerned about the fact you didn't explain the bluray being more expensive part to people and that's extremely important before they end up investing on that then realising they made a huge mistake due to the cost per TB being so high.
@@dashtesla Blurry seems like all the hassle of floppy disks, modernized. I don't think I'll ever go back to removable media. I did my time backing up my HDD to a few hundred floppies, then 100MB Zip disks, then CD-Rs, and finally external hard drives. HDDs win.
yea, literally half the video is just an advertisement for the sponsor's software. i feel like snazzy labs should've made the sponsored segment far shorter and on a less related video. this massive sponsored segment makes the video overly biased towards one single product when the rest of the video is kinda shrugging off entire mediums of storage in order to make the sponsor's product look like an amazing option.
If you think a NAS could be useful for you, it can actually handle a couple of those points. I use a Synology NAS (The 4-bay version of what you showed) both to story my files in a sort of personal cloud that I can access anywhere as well as to backup my entire computers to (Time Machine Mac backup and the Synology Active Backup app on Windows PC). Backup number 1 done! And being a NAS with multiple drives, it also has that disk redundancy. I then have the NAS configured so that whenever I plug a specific USB hard drive into it, it automatically copies my most important data to it as a differential backup, so I always have another copy of the most vital data that I can share in a lock box until it’s needed.
Another thing is that if you lose a primary copy you want to create extra backups, not just switch to the backup as your primary. I lost 3-4 years of my personal programming projects waaay back in around 2007 or so. There were backups but they managed to all get destroyed due to a comedy of errors. Primary copy on the flash drive was lost when the drive got corrupted and truncated every file to 4K. I was able to get all the other parts via chkdsk files but realistically I wasn't going to be reassembling those files. Second copy of the data was lost while trying to fix the Flash Drive because I somehow managed to delete the wrong partition. And the final copy on another hard drive got lost when I accidentally injected CD Burner firmware into it instead of the CD Burner.
*_"Primary copy on the flash drive"_* Sorry, but then you're asking for trouble when you store your primary copy on something as unreliable as a flash drive.... ~sigh~
BD-R is NOT a format you want to use for archiving I've learned this when working at an advertising agency where I was doing daily backups which I stored in a huge heavy fireproof safe. Guess what? 3 years later: read errors all over the place.
I’m curious about this. Were you able to read the backups right after burning them to Blu-Ray disk? Was there a change in the backup software that would’ve made the old backups unreadable (I.e. not backwards compatible)?
@@CapCrunch45 Yes, the data copied fine right after the backups were made. I always did random tests. After about a year or two a co worker came to me and told me a disc he got from our regular archive couldn't be read anymore (it had been used many times without any problems). So I thought it got a scratch or whatever. I went to the safe where I keep the backup discs and was going to make a copy for him. To my surprise that one had read errors as well. I then started testing all the discs (a few hundred) and several were showing read errors. We used different brands over time and there was no logic in which dics were affected. Always stored in the dark. I don't trust optical media for archiving since then. The discs were written with iso standard so no compression or software dependency. They could be read on all platforms.
One big Problem with LTO Tapes is that the read/write heads can become dislodged meaning only the device that wrote the tape can read it and only if it is already dislodged too. Getting a second tape drove for checking is prohibitively expensive and just makes it even more unpractical for home use that it already is
I use only MDISC media because (allegedly) its longevity far exceeds media that uses either organic or inorganic dye. If you don't use MDISC discs, you should check out whether the media you are using has organic or inorganic dye and choose the one that won't fade in just a couple of years, making your backups useless and unreadable.... I use a simple USB 3.0 portable BluRay writer just like the one Quinn shows in the video, it's pretty quick and I keep the burned discs in one of those CD binders like you would have used with your home theatre DVD movies.
Good advice. We back up our workstations windows and mac to our synology NAS and then it backups up to a local 12 tb usb hard drive and to backblaze cloud. Protected in all avenues.
Whoa, just come from Luke Miani's house and he's doing an Acronis sponsored video as well. The Acronis marketing dept must have just woken up! 😂 All joking aside, backup is a super important thing that's way too often overlooked so thanks for this video 👍🏼 I run daily, weekly and monthly backups to separate local NAS devices, I clone the boot drive every night plus to an external SSD and I do change based backups to the cloud (CrashPlan). You can call me paranoid! 😄
One thing I really like about backing up to a BD-REs is the fact that you don't need to spend lots of money upfront, or lots of money if you run out of space. That's why I used to back up my data to DVDs back when I was a broke teenager.
Mannnn, I was so pumped because I've been looking into long term backups, but I'm not looking for an ad. I'd rather just have the different pros and cons laid out and left it at that.
He literally did give you all the pros and cons. You realize people have to make money in order to make content right? You think people should have to work for free to give you information? That's insanely childish, naive, and selfish.
One addendum to using SSDs, especially if the use-case is for archival storage: because flash memory is dependent on a stored electrical charge to retain information, they do need to be periodically powered on to retain data. This isn't as common an issue now as it was on earlier lower quality flash memory, but It's still enough of a concern that I would recommend anyone using an SSD as an archive drive to access the drive annually as a precaution. According to testing performed by IBM, Samsung, Micron, etc, most higher end MLC drives theoretically may be able to hold their charge for around 10 years but TLC and QLC drives cut that theoretical time drastically. This in no way means that flash is too unstable, there are many times that I've found an old flash drive that I've not touched in years only to find the files still perfectly intact, but the chance is still there and should be considered if long-term archival use with flash media is being considered. Mechanical HDD also run the risk of losing some of their magnetism over time which can lead to data corruption or loss but this may be upwards of 20 years for modern drives manufactured by reputable brands, especially if those drives are designed with archival in mind and designed for long term archival storage. Also, unlike flash where once the charge on a flash cell degrades that bit is gone forever, for HDDs its generally a gradual weakening of the magnetic field which means if the data is really crucial following magnetic degradation, it may be possible for some data recovery firms to recover that data by transplanting the platter to a machine that can read weaker magnetic fields.
Does this also apply to USBs, namely that they should be powered up once a year or so for data retention? As for QLT flash drives, whats then theoretical longest for it to last, if its below 10 years so unlike MLT? Also, would it be possible to increase the data retention (and so amount of time the data can last) of either SSDs or USBs by only writing your data to them once, and then storing them properly? I've also heard ppl recommend to recopy your USB data once a year or so to increase the longevity, but that seems to violate only writing data to it once as one would be erasing it all and writing nee copies of the same data back in.
7:59 Those brilliant engineers at LG figured out how to make the cupholder useful for backing up data! Seriously, though, "Ain't nobody want your blu-ray" is why I don't like the single-write optical backup idea. Even the recycling centers don't want them because they don't have a plastic resin ID code. They're just plastic waste. It would be nice if you could simply drop them into a blue bin after scraping away some substrate and breaking the disc in half (a secure enough destruction for the average person, since it makes the disc unreadable to anyone without access to forensic level data recovery hardware).
@@gblargg Or just snap it into 4 pieces, no toxic fumes, and easy enough my 4th grader can do it, and throw the pieces away in different locations (like half at home and half at work or even Starbucks)
What I would say about backups is that the best backup is one that actually exists, and while everyone is going to lecture about doing routine backups, it isn't going to happen. It needs to be automatic, which means a Timemachine backup to the NAS, and then the NAS backs up the TimeMachine dataset to your offsite provider. Or, if you have a home and office, or two homes, then have NASes in both places, and have them back up to each other.
This is actually perfect for me - I've wanted a backups service with bit-for-bit drive cloning, but OneDrive isn't designed for that, and services like BackBlaze don't allow you to backup system files. Obviously this whole video is an advert but I found it super useful.
I came to this video hoping to hear about an affordable consumer LTO solution, and am leaving a Bluray disk appreciator. I'm sold and I'm buying some now 😂
I always keep a bootable copy of everything on three medias. I use a cloud storage for my data. I learned a hard lesson in 1978 when my team lost six months of development on our mainframe. I’ve not had any loss of data nor more than a little downtime due to hardware failure.
Is Bluray really dependable? I'm asking because I used to backup to CDs and over years have read error for several disks. Not sure how much more reliable Bluray is compared to CDs
Acronis, just give me your old imagine software. No cloud, no security scanning BS. Just a good disk imaging tool. And let me buy a PERPETUAL license! Zero interest in a subscription or software as a service business model
If you just need a disk cloning tool, you can't go wrong with Clonezilla. Free, fully open source, can save disk images to either local hard drives, a network share or a Clonezilla server, uses a somewhat standard format to save your disk images that are supported by other competing softwares such as Rescuezilla and is an overall amazing tool! It doesn't have a GUI per se - which does deter some people - but something more like a really easy to use text-based system of menus that takes your hand through out the whole process.
@@RogerioPereiradaSilva77 Is it possible to image a disk with clonezilla and output to a single image file? Like a single .img or preferably an .img.gz? The normal output it gives me is a folder with different images for each partition and a bunch of other files.
@@Tony-xf8dx I haven't really looked into it so I can't tell for sure. Those files are a bunch of metadata about the disk image that Clonezilla needs to do its thing so I assume that they're needed. But that never bothered ME anyway; there is no difference in storing a file or a directory. When I need to restore a disk, I just point Clonezilla towards that directory and that's that. If that's important for you then maybe you can create a tarball of the resulting disk image for archival purposes...?
@@RogerioPereiradaSilva77 Is there a way to burn a clonezilla image to a disk without needing to boot into clonezilla? That's my main reason for wanting a single image file, because they can be written to a disk more easily
@@Tony-xf8dx Not sure I understood what exactly your are looking for or your requirements. The way Clonezilla works is: you boot your system off a flash drive with Clonezilla, it starts the wizard that walks you through the process to either save a disk image somewhere (attached external drive, network share, what have you) or to clone a disk onto another (e.g. if you're replacing a mechanical HDD with a SSD). If you need to restore the image, you boot off that same flash drive, start Clonezilla, point it towards the image you want to restore and then sit back and let it do its thing. Isn't Acronis required to restore a disk image created with it into the system disk as well? As for copying the resulting image somewhere else, I dunno... I really don't get what's so different between storing a single file versus storing a single directory. But if that is a dealbreaker then maybe Clonezilla might not be what you are looking for...
I was just watching a video from Luke Miani that was also sponsored by Acronis. Seemed like it had a lot of potential until I got to the end. Then I was like “… that’s it? Did I just watch a long commercial?”
For anyone with an old-school tower or more recent offering including quarter-height front expansion bays _and_ the dosh to spend on it, ICY Dock and similar brands offer 6-slot adapters for 2.5" media. So you'd install that, attach data cables to motherboard _or_ insert a 6-port SATA PCI card and hitch 'em together for building a NAS-like device in your desktop PC. Some virtualization setup later and you can keep your first backup _directly attached_ to your PC with a separate Linux distro to manage the backup for quick and easy migration to another PC in-future. Pair that with a UPS tn ensure the power isn't interrupted unexpectedly (as when it is, you can just power off gracefully) and at least your first backup like that should be bullet-proof Of course, _three copies; two backups; one off-site_ right? But off-site isn't in the scope of this writ.
100GB BD may be cheap in your area but here in europe it's at LEAST 20/each on amazon and i've never seen them that much cheaper anywhere in the world so would love to see those $1 100GB discs :) you're way way better off looking for a used tape drive on ebay LTO 6 can do 6 and 5 tapes at 20-40 each, drive it's about 300-500 so that's 35 EUR (in my area) for 2.2TB vs 22x 20 EUR for BD-R that just 2.2TB will already put you at 440 EUR it makes 0 sense as far as i'm concerned unless you're only backing up very very little data 100GB or so and you already have a BD drive. but at 22TB of data you'd be looking at 4400 EUR just for optical media plus all the space it takes and how not practical it is to split data in smaller chunks and makes recovery a lot harder and slower anything newer than LTO 5 also supports LTFS which basically can mount any tape with a drive letter and you can copy/paste stuff without any software just needs the LTFS binaries installed, you can use third party software to organise and manage if you prefer that but it's not required, LTO 6 also stops making sense at over 100TB where you'd be better off with LTO 9 (unless you already have an LTO 8 drive or can get one for very cheap). So BLURAY = absolutely NOT super cheap don't tell that to people do math instead per GB and your own research before making any decisions. Also one more thing BD-R is also WORM (Write Once Read Many) if you go for BD-RE you'd also have to account for that extra while tape you can get special WORM cartridges but it's obviously rewritable as standard.
I love your intro and the time you took to make it very complete and not pushing the sponsor too early on. You really set the table very well for the main topic.
I do my local backups on portable SSD's and it's great. They're tiny, super fast and easy to hide somewhere in your home. I use Apple Time Machine which keeps full system backups, so in case my laptop dies or gets stolen, I can simply replace and restore it. Time Machine also gives reminders if you haven't backed up in a while which is great.
Portable SSDs are okay if you are not using a lot of data. Some days I record up to 200GB even more sometimes so those SSDs just don't work in the long run. No point to spend thousands on a bunch of SSDs when I can create a 50TB drive for way cheaper that can be accessed anywhere in the world.
@Snazzy Labs Nice video! As stated numerous times, backups are important. But even more important is periodically testing those backups and restores, especially from tapes.
For Acronis, if you encrypt your backup to be stored on an external media, are you required to be in a valid subscription when you need to decrypt the backup files after, say, 10 years?
Use your brain: No. If you still have the old installed software, or can install/activate it again, or have the boot disk/image and can still boot it, etc. Yes. If you only have the backup files. (Trial version may help but will have restrictions or limit max amount of restore).
Great overview of 321 backups and for most people cloud storage is definitely the easiest option. Though I wish you would have discussed some of the other options available for of site backups like synology remote server snapshot replication or less expensive cloud, backup options like backblaze b2 which allows you to back up your Nas to the cloud.
I remember in a job back in 1999, it was my first job maintaining a web app written vb6 and vbscript, they backed up the data in tape but it wasn't square like that, it was rectangular like half the size of a beta with a ratio closer to a VHS, I think it w was a 2TB tape. comparing the cost of tape vs M-Disc, cost per GB or TB, tape is a lot cheaper the problem is the tape recorder it will take a lot of tape to compensate the cost of the recorder vs the M-Disc. This is something that is really exclusive for a business and not for a hobbyist.
Great video! Having a reliable backup power source is crucial, especially during camping trips or family outings. The Segway Portable PowerStation Cube Series seems like a perfect solution. With its massive capacity, fast recharging, and waterproof technology, it's definitely worth considering for outdoor enthusiasts like us. Thanks for sharing this recommendation!
Thanks for the recommendation! I completely agree that having a reliable backup power source is crucial, especially when you're out camping or on family outings. The Segway Portable PowerStation Cube Series sounds like a perfect solution with its massive capacity, fast recharging, and waterproof technology. I'll definitely consider it for my outdoor adventures!
I do like that you mentioned the option of using BD-Rs for backups, which I did to make an "archival copy." Also on the note about a multi-bay NAS system or similar, I've come to stop using RAID, especially since I only use a 2-bay unit. Since I can't really access the other drive conveniently if it was configured for RAID and I'd really like to in case say the NAS itself blows up, I just have the NAS do a nightly backup of the primary.
Tape drives can be bought pretty cheap these days, as long as you don't go for the newest version. Usually LTO-5 or even LTO-4 is is usually more than enough and you can get the drives for a couple hundred bucks and the tapes, as long as they are still available are sold for roughly €20,- for on LTO-4 tape that hold 1.6 TB compressed.
LTO-8 tape is AWESOME!!! It's already saved my butt a few times. Yes, the initial cost of the drives ARE expensive and the original cost of the tapes were about the same as a HDD, but the cost of the tapes have come down and on a $/GB basis, the more storage space you need, the cost/GB starts to go down (because the price of the tape drive is a fixed cost, and not a variable cost like HDDs). And then if you compress the data (the system that might be doing the backup might not be very great at doing the compression AND writing the compressed data to tape), so if you compress the data "manually", and then write the compressed result file to the tape, you can get pretty good compression ratios onto the tape, depending on the data that you are trying to backup. (Videos doesn't compress very well at all, but text files compress VERY well.)
It is mentioned that cloud storage companies tend to severely throttle you when uploading gigs of stuff. I wonder of Acronis throttles you when doing a full backup? What is max throughput they will allow?
@@dashtesla True, if you’re storing large amounts of data it is cheaper but most people are only backing up photos, text files, etc and don’t need all the extra storage that comes with the scale of tapes
I remember when CD-RW was DA BOMB - _and_ prohibitively expensive. Come to think of it, I've probably heard the old modem sounds more often than I have actually burned a CD-RW...
@@snazzy totally gotcha. Just felt super super markety with the pretense that the “ad” segment was the short segment. Feel like the whole thing was an ad but using the sponsor as a crutch.
I use Time Machine, and iCloud from Apple. $2.50 a month is worth it, as your get 200 GBs of storage space, you can access and modify the files of your choice.
I use Time Machine backups. One of them I keep here, and another I keep at the storage unit. And…yes…hard drives DO fail. It’s happened to me; some of mine have failed. They ARE very cheap, though. Mahalo for the reminder; today is a good day to backup and take that drive to the storage unit. It’s a good day to swap the backups and leave the home backup at the storage unit and bring home the storage unit drive. I don’t trust the cloud AKA “Some other clown’s computer.”
I use SuperDuper to make a local disk image copy and iCloud for remote storage and a NAS, so, already have overkill. SuperDuper is not that expensive to buy a lifetime license. It runs fast and I can boot from the local drive if my SSD was corrupted. Not sure what Acronis would provide me differently. I guess the cyber portion, but I already have security software and would be concerned they would step on each other. So if you have a new system and don't have any of the components then I guess the Acronis solution is pretty cool. Am I missing something?
Great stuff, but some actual disclosure of the costs would be SUPER helpful. The 5 tb storage level shown in the video, for 3 computers (not an uncommon situation, especially for a couple... and not actually enough for me personally), is a whopping $350/year. Unless you have primarily computers with tiny drives (a possibility these days, but not how I roll), multi-terabytes is really essential. But at that price, it's far cheaper (and arguably better, since 5tb is laughable in my situation) to pay for multiple Backblaze accounts instead, which include unlimited amounts of data backup.
The problem for me with using Discs is that I would be creating a lot of trash as the data is always changing. So, file 1, is now trash in a day or so. It would be replaced with file 2, and so forth. I think you get the idea. What is your suggestion with files that always change.
Flash storage would make much more sense to me than discs. There are also many free software solutions that allow auto backing up selected folders the moment you connect that drive
Most of the relevant data should be quite small, so you can easily append to the same 50GB disk many many times. I mean, my whole documents folder ist barely 100 MiB. And the data that's big (e.g. photos, music, or videos) is very unlikely to change at all. If you're still running into an edge case, you could also think about making incremental backups, i.e. only storing the changes between versions. However, this comes at the cost of a massive risk increase, as ALL involved disks would need to work for a proper restore. But that's the same as for a hard drive etc.
Setup Veeam to backup to a NAS or an external drive, then once every 3 months or whatever you deem reasonable, write that Veeam backup to the Blu Ray. Slap a date on it with your favourite ink pen and you're good to go.
I would recommend cloud backup. If you have a personal Office 365 subscription - then you have 1TB of OneDrive to go with it. If you don't use Office 365 then 2TB of iCloud is very good value at a couple of $ less per month than a personal M$ O365 subscription. It's not that hard.
Love your videos and always get so much out of them. unfortunately, this video completely lost me the minute you discussed Acronis. Although it seems a decent backup, why wouldn’t you mention much better services? I understand they are a sponsor but you should have been a bit more objective.
Because it’s a sponsor. You answered your own question. I never compare sponsored products to the competition because (a) brands hate that, and (b) viewers will think my opinion is biased anyways since I’m being paid by a brand. Fully dedicated videos like this are designed to give you the information you need to explore solutions on your own.
I have a HDD in my computer that I back up to, and two external drives that I back up to, and store at my dad's place. I back up to one HDD, bring it to his house, bring the other one home with me, and back up to that 1-2 months later. I have other computers, but none of them have anything on them that I can't live without, so a NAS is a bit overkill in my case.
I've always been big on optical data backup, pretty much all my offsite is just optical. Was always easy to keep at my parents house or in my work locker. Discs would be encrypted so if lost or taken no issues, and the DVD's are dirt cheap. I moved to using blueray a couple of years ago and it great having the extra size, especially for all the larger media files we tend to create now adays or maybe a movie rip that I don't have the dvd for anymore. I would stay away from DL blueray and BDXL the pricing is ridiculous compared to standard blueray.
@ondrejbrandejsky5592 only lost one, still got dvds that are around 15 Years old that I burned. Verbatim sells mdisc dvd and bluerays and they have an archival quality disc as well. Cheaper dvd can definitely suffer from disc rot though and Ig they are left out exposed to sunlight a lot that can effect them. I always check my archives every 2-3 years and I make 2-3 copies of the same disc just to be sure.
I use Acronis Cloud for anything in the Windows world but not on my Mac. Time Machine and iCloud storage are much more suited for the Mac imho. For Windows I totally agree. Acronis has been my choice for a long time now for all servers and workstations. Most important of all, it has never let me down when I ( or my customers ) needed to recover things, be it a certain mail attachement, a complete system restore or a VMware export. But for the Mac, I dunno, Acronis won't let you pick a certain mail and recover it, only the Exchange Server module can do that...with an Exchange Postbox on a Win Srv, not on your Mac.
I don’t understand why you think Blu-ray is an economical storage format… $5 per 100gb is way more expensive than hard drives, and way, way less convenient
this video is so useful. I love it. thank you so much for this. also I almost never comment in videos but I am so grateful right now that I ended up doing it.
My NAS is rather simple (or complex depending how you look at it) since I'm on a tight budget. Thin client PC running Windows 11 (yes I'm aware alternatives exist) as a file server with a hard drive dock plugged into it. Originally, I had this attached to my router (w/ OpenWRT) but it was limited on what i can do with it. For example, I can't do a mirror copy of the hard drive to another hard drive automatically. I need to do this manually on one of my PCs. With the client pc running windows, i'm able to automate this process and it's been running great. I also use cloud backups, but only to backup very important files. However, these are stored inside an encrypted container using Veracrypt. This is still a manual process for me but it's no big deal since these files don't get changed as often. Everything else, I backup to two separate drives. One of which is attached to the thin client pc to run a nightly backup. I often tell people that backing up is not hard. Mine is complex for most because it involves a lot of configuration. All you need are a bunch of high capacity hard drives and just put your files there. A backup is better than no backup
I have a 50GB iCloud for my iPad and iPhone - which also gives me browser access to my stuff. I also have 1TB of OneDrive with my Microsoft 365 account. So I'm definitely covered for off-site as well as sharing a common space between my different devices.
My most memorable backup experience was with Brian Cuthie’s SafetyNet with a DAT drive under NeXTSTEP. It’s notable that you appear to be ignoring Time Machine.
I've got external SSD's, 2 NAS's, one in RAID 6 (5 drives) and the other in RAID 1 (2 drives). I back the NAS's up to Backblaze B2. I'm probably going to add blu ray disk backups as well for all the data that just won't change over the years but would be devestating if we lost it.
I learned a painful lessons about backups before deciding to build a home NAS with RAID6 to backup. There's still no viable offsite backup for NAS though, at least not any that I can afford.
Linux master race here. All the required changes are stored on the web and all I need to do is to type 2 - 3 commands (tops) to get everything the way it were before.
I like your video and the way you present it all:-) Just so you know, if you want to make long time storage on a CD-ROM is it best to burn as slow as possible, 1x or 2x if possible. And if you are really serious, do you have to get the gold-plated CD-R from Verbatim.
FYI BlyRay Disk M-DISC are my preferred backup method :) So from my PC throught the network to my NAS, and then I backup the NAS to BD-R. I'm 3-2-0 strategy :P Everything at home
I refuse to use any sort of redundant raid config on my media server. The drives all are the same age, so if one wears out and dies, I wouldn't want to stress the other ones out trying to rebuild. Got enough HDD's lying around to keep a full copy of everything.
I was literally looking for backup options yesterday. I got a busted 1TB HDD with all my college photos / family photos. A new SSD and a lot of stuff on google drive. They're all filling FAST. I am almost done organising them and i got a folder that i want to never lose, and i think Bluray can be a GREAT option for it. Idk why i never thought about it. I am just wondering, how long can i keep them? I will prob never use the discs, i need them in case i lose the cloud storage ( which is very unlikely ) OR in case i don't have access to internet. I will also have a local backup on a HDD but i wanna know the life of blu ray discs. Also is it the same for movies? I wanna go into bluray movies because watching banding on Netflix absolutely triggers me.
I have no idea how long CDs last. I have a bunch of old CD-Rs and games from the early 2000s and they seem to work fine. Regardless what medium you use, you still need to make multiple backups. In my setup, I have two extra hard drives that I use to keep a mirror copy of my main drive in my NAS. For movies, you need to setup a Plex server. Since you are looking for a backup solution as well. Find some old PC hardware you might have lying around or look around used markets like ebay or Facebook Marketplace. You can use that to run a Plex server and a file server.
What do you use for Differential back ups? I want only something that looks and backs up only the changes to the your original backups. Takes less time as well.
3.2.1. Is crucial, I have my primary storage as a 5 bay Synology under raid5, my second copy is replicated in realtime to backblaze in the cloud. And third copy backs to to a second Synology 5bay raid5 at my second house. Just as an extra precaution I backup my laptop and servers to the first Synology that still backs up to the second nas off-site
I wonder how the Acronis iOS app can backup without having to be opened. I have Synology Moments/Photos, and you have to open them for their photo uploads to work.
I have a two bay syn NAS with 8 TB set to SHR. I have an internal 1TB sata SSD that's just the /home partition on my desktop, so it will never change or get formatted, just a storage that follows me around if I ever change Linux distros. I have a 1 TB external SSD, I have a ton of USB sticks and I use Google's free 15 GB to store photos. I think I'm set for life. LOL
If you care about your data, don't burn at maximum speed. Drives lean into the error-correcting codes to offset the lower recording accuracy at higher speeds. If you want to still have your data in 20 years, write at 2x. Also, store them in a cool, dry, dark place. Sunlight is really bad for optical media. Constant temperature changes can also cause de-lamination, so you really don't want to leave your stack of backups near a heat source. Computer tower, heater, black storage case that may get left by a window...
First I thought you was taking about hard-drives an I was like 🤔
You care... I care...but the majority doesn't care..they're impatient and burn at the highest speed, they try to save money by buying crappy optical media, and can't be bothered to store them properly. It's like talking to a wall with those people.
The 100Gb formats to about 90Gb. That is too small for my needs. My normal backups are generally around 1.25Tb.
@@frankwalder3608then use multiple discs idk
@@bigtitmaster LOL. I'm certainly not going to have three backup sets of 15 x 90 GB disks sitting around. I would rotate three single 4TB or 5TB 2.5" HDD. The hardware is cheap. It is the software that is expensive.
Back in 1999. My apt got broken in to. They grabbed my brand new 21” CRT, my gaming rig, my secondary gaming rig, my DVD player, my 32” TV. But here’s the thing. They took the time to EJECT my JAZ cartridge in my second PC and leave it on the table. The JAZ cartridge was labeled “My Files”
Because of that, I still have some of my oldest most cherished data to this day.
Polite, considerate home-invading thieves! Wild.
That's the sweetest thing I've read all day...
At 12:25, it appears that Acronis gave Quinn 5 TB of included storage for his backups…but the $50 a year version includes no online storage. It also only backs up one computer. If you want 5 TB, Acronis is $285 a year. So…WTH?
This Video is sponsored by Acronis, so they propably gave him the 5TB Subscription. Look in the Video Description, there is a Affialiate Link for Acronis.
S3 compatible storage is less expensive at that price point. (Backblaze B2, Wasabi, and Storj)
@Talzet lumis me and you both
@@elevatorz89 This is highly misleading. S3 is not cheaper if you're needing to share files OR access your files. If you never need more than 100gb a month for ALL of your AWS stuff, let's say you need to recover 1TB of data, you're out 90 dollars. If you need to recover that full 5TB, it's like 500 dollars. Already over the yearly cost of Acronis for 5TB.
I'm not saying Acronis' product is good (I haven't used it.) If you need just storage but don't need to share it, there are cheaper alternatives like Wasabi that is S3 compatible (and allows you to transfer out unlimited but they'll TOS if you try to use it primarily to share, their rule of thumb is the equivalent amount of storage to transfer per month) that's $5/tb OR you could use something like Hetzner's Storage boxes (be warned that speeds can be sort of slow from US -> EU, but it is very cheap and reliable).
But don't advocate for S3 for stuff like consumer storage of backups. It's terrible for that unless you're using it deep glacier as like, a third back up of all of your very very important stuff and hopefully never, ever have to recover it.
(S3 is great! I've used it a ton for work in production environments; or for small files, or for stuff I need to access within AWS. but cheap it is not. There is MUCH better options for cheap, object storage if you're a small business that's not super vested into AWS or if you're needing it for non-business use cases, like Wasabi, DigitalOcean, Linode, etc. And they're all S3 compliant. Not trying to be like "you're wrong lol" but I don't want anyone to get absolutely wrecked by Amazon's insane egress data bandwidth costs)
Colleague: hey I have this HDD with my whole life's digital pictures on it. It's my backup but it broke down. Can you repair it?
Me: sure man! Glad you have a backup so you haven't lost anything if this doesn't work.
Colleague: But this is all I have!....
Me: but you said it was a backup!
Colleague: Yeah I put all on that drive and stored it in a safe place! My backup!
Me: Oh dear...
Oh man, I love your videos but having a video with the subject being directly related to the sponsor is.... eh.
Yeah... yikes
Fuck advertisements like this.
Like the vacuum videos?
Agreed on both
I bet this guy also hates Linus tech tips Intel Xtreme upgrade videos.
It's always difficult to give a broad information video when you've got a sponsor urging you to hit their talking points and make their product seem good but I feel you threaded the needle well. Didn't feel any different than any other snazzy labs video. Much better than that gimbal webcam video from last year.
Thanks. We tried hard to make it work and I know it won’t interest everyone but I’m hoping it doesn’t seem so ad-y.
@@snazzy I think it's 50/50 i'm more concerned about the fact you didn't explain the bluray being more expensive part to people and that's extremely important before they end up investing on that then realising they made a huge mistake due to the cost per TB being so high.
have noticed a lot of snazzy lab videos feel like an imformercial. i mean, good on them making money. thats the point, but lets be fair too....
@@dashtesla Blurry seems like all the hassle of floppy disks, modernized. I don't think I'll ever go back to removable media. I did my time backing up my HDD to a few hundred floppies, then 100MB Zip disks, then CD-Rs, and finally external hard drives. HDDs win.
yea, literally half the video is just an advertisement for the sponsor's software. i feel like snazzy labs should've made the sponsored segment far shorter and on a less related video. this massive sponsored segment makes the video overly biased towards one single product when the rest of the video is kinda shrugging off entire mediums of storage in order to make the sponsor's product look like an amazing option.
If you think a NAS could be useful for you, it can actually handle a couple of those points. I use a Synology NAS (The 4-bay version of what you showed) both to story my files in a sort of personal cloud that I can access anywhere as well as to backup my entire computers to (Time Machine Mac backup and the Synology Active Backup app on Windows PC). Backup number 1 done! And being a NAS with multiple drives, it also has that disk redundancy.
I then have the NAS configured so that whenever I plug a specific USB hard drive into it, it automatically copies my most important data to it as a differential backup, so I always have another copy of the most vital data that I can share in a lock box until it’s needed.
Another thing is that if you lose a primary copy you want to create extra backups, not just switch to the backup as your primary. I lost 3-4 years of my personal programming projects waaay back in around 2007 or so. There were backups but they managed to all get destroyed due to a comedy of errors. Primary copy on the flash drive was lost when the drive got corrupted and truncated every file to 4K. I was able to get all the other parts via chkdsk files but realistically I wasn't going to be reassembling those files. Second copy of the data was lost while trying to fix the Flash Drive because I somehow managed to delete the wrong partition. And the final copy on another hard drive got lost when I accidentally injected CD Burner firmware into it instead of the CD Burner.
*_"Primary copy on the flash drive"_*
Sorry, but then you're asking for trouble when you store your primary copy on something as unreliable as a flash drive.... ~sigh~
LTO Tape is really cheap for what you get in terms of capacity. But, wow, those tape drives are expensive…😱
BD-R is NOT a format you want to use for archiving
I've learned this when working at an advertising agency where I was doing daily backups which I stored in a huge heavy fireproof safe.
Guess what?
3 years later: read errors all over the place.
I’m curious about this. Were you able to read the backups right after burning them to Blu-Ray disk? Was there a change in the backup software that would’ve made the old backups unreadable (I.e. not backwards compatible)?
@@CapCrunch45 Yes, the data copied fine right after the backups were made. I always did random tests. After about a year or two a co worker came to me and told me a disc he got from our regular archive couldn't be read anymore (it had been used many times without any problems). So I thought it got a scratch or whatever. I went to the safe where I keep the backup discs and was going to make a copy for him. To my surprise that one had read errors as well. I then started testing all the discs (a few hundred) and several were showing read errors. We used different brands over time and there was no logic in which dics were affected. Always stored in the dark. I don't trust optical media for archiving since then. The discs were written with iso standard so no compression or software dependency. They could be read on all platforms.
isn't this what M-Disk is supposed to be for?
One big Problem with LTO Tapes is that the read/write heads can become dislodged meaning only the device that wrote the tape can read it and only if it is already dislodged too. Getting a second tape drove for checking is prohibitively expensive and just makes it even more unpractical for home use that it already is
I use only MDISC media because (allegedly) its longevity far exceeds media that uses either organic or inorganic dye. If you don't use MDISC discs, you should check out whether the media you are using has organic or inorganic dye and choose the one that won't fade in just a couple of years, making your backups useless and unreadable.... I use a simple USB 3.0 portable BluRay writer just like the one Quinn shows in the video, it's pretty quick and I keep the burned discs in one of those CD binders like you would have used with your home theatre DVD movies.
You make a very fair point about no one wants to steal your stack of disks but basically anything else would be stolen
Good advice. We back up our workstations windows and mac to our synology NAS and then it backups up to a local 12 tb usb hard drive and to backblaze cloud. Protected in all avenues.
Whoa, just come from Luke Miani's house and he's doing an Acronis sponsored video as well. The Acronis marketing dept must have just woken up! 😂 All joking aside, backup is a super important thing that's way too often overlooked so thanks for this video 👍🏼 I run daily, weekly and monthly backups to separate local NAS devices, I clone the boot drive every night plus to an external SSD and I do change based backups to the cloud (CrashPlan). You can call me paranoid! 😄
Dude, I just watched it too. I had the same thoughts… What is going on?
@@MrCooper83 Dyson situation
One thing I really like about backing up to a BD-REs is the fact that you don't need to spend lots of money upfront, or lots of money if you run out of space. That's why I used to back up my data to DVDs back when I was a broke teenager.
Now this is what I call a 20 minute ad
I mean, the guy even brings up backup in cd disk like if it’s nothing xD
No, I bring it up as a good backup solution-which it is.
Mannnn, I was so pumped because I've been looking into long term backups, but I'm not looking for an ad. I'd rather just have the different pros and cons laid out and left it at that.
He literally did give you all the pros and cons. You realize people have to make money in order to make content right? You think people should have to work for free to give you information? That's insanely childish, naive, and selfish.
One addendum to using SSDs, especially if the use-case is for archival storage: because flash memory is dependent on a stored electrical charge to retain information, they do need to be periodically powered on to retain data. This isn't as common an issue now as it was on earlier lower quality flash memory, but It's still enough of a concern that I would recommend anyone using an SSD as an archive drive to access the drive annually as a precaution.
According to testing performed by IBM, Samsung, Micron, etc, most higher end MLC drives theoretically may be able to hold their charge for around 10 years but TLC and QLC drives cut that theoretical time drastically. This in no way means that flash is too unstable, there are many times that I've found an old flash drive that I've not touched in years only to find the files still perfectly intact, but the chance is still there and should be considered if long-term archival use with flash media is being considered.
Mechanical HDD also run the risk of losing some of their magnetism over time which can lead to data corruption or loss but this may be upwards of 20 years for modern drives manufactured by reputable brands, especially if those drives are designed with archival in mind and designed for long term archival storage. Also, unlike flash where once the charge on a flash cell degrades that bit is gone forever, for HDDs its generally a gradual weakening of the magnetic field which means if the data is really crucial following magnetic degradation, it may be possible for some data recovery firms to recover that data by transplanting the platter to a machine that can read weaker magnetic fields.
Does this also apply to USBs, namely that they should be powered up once a year or so for data retention? As for QLT flash drives, whats then theoretical longest for it to last, if its below 10 years so unlike MLT? Also, would it be possible to increase the data retention (and so amount of time the data can last) of either SSDs or USBs by only writing your data to them once, and then storing them properly? I've also heard ppl recommend to recopy your USB data once a year or so to increase the longevity, but that seems to violate only writing data to it once as one would be erasing it all and writing nee copies of the same data back in.
7:59 Those brilliant engineers at LG figured out how to make the cupholder useful for backing up data!
Seriously, though, "Ain't nobody want your blu-ray" is why I don't like the single-write optical backup idea. Even the recycling centers don't want them because they don't have a plastic resin ID code. They're just plastic waste. It would be nice if you could simply drop them into a blue bin after scraping away some substrate and breaking the disc in half (a secure enough destruction for the average person, since it makes the disc unreadable to anyone without access to forensic level data recovery hardware).
A microwave will destroy an optical disk quickly (if you don't mind the toxic smell).
@@gblargg Or just snap it into 4 pieces, no toxic fumes, and easy enough my 4th grader can do it, and throw the pieces away in different locations (like half at home and half at work or even Starbucks)
@@compudude Also using encryption makes it benign even if someone gets it intact.
Ahh, flashbacks of the old days burning CDs at 1x and if you looked at them funny or touched the mouse or keyboard it would fail
What I would say about backups is that the best backup is one that actually exists, and while everyone is going to lecture about doing routine backups, it isn't going to happen. It needs to be automatic, which means a Timemachine backup to the NAS, and then the NAS backs up the TimeMachine dataset to your offsite provider.
Or, if you have a home and office, or two homes, then have NASes in both places, and have them back up to each other.
Backblaze is also great with external raid 1 drive
And unlimited storage
This is actually perfect for me - I've wanted a backups service with bit-for-bit drive cloning, but OneDrive isn't designed for that, and services like BackBlaze don't allow you to backup system files. Obviously this whole video is an advert but I found it super useful.
I came to this video hoping to hear about an affordable consumer LTO solution, and am leaving a Bluray disk appreciator. I'm sold and I'm buying some now 😂
I back everything up to floppy discs. Nothing can ever go wrong with that.
3.5 inches of GODeness!
I always keep a bootable copy of everything on three medias. I use a cloud storage for my data. I learned a hard lesson in 1978 when my team lost six months of development on our mainframe. I’ve not had any loss of data nor more than a little downtime due to hardware failure.
*_"I always keep a bootable copy of everything on three medias"_*
Why do these copies need to be bootable, you make no sense.
It takes thirty seconds to get back up and running.
@@Jake-mn1qc
@@Jake-mn1qc ....so you can boot a system off it..?
Is Bluray really dependable? I'm asking because I used to backup to CDs and over years have read error for several disks. Not sure how much more reliable Bluray is compared to CDs
Acronis, just give me your old imagine software. No cloud, no security scanning BS. Just a good disk imaging tool. And let me buy a PERPETUAL license! Zero interest in a subscription or software as a service business model
If you just need a disk cloning tool, you can't go wrong with Clonezilla. Free, fully open source, can save disk images to either local hard drives, a network share or a Clonezilla server, uses a somewhat standard format to save your disk images that are supported by other competing softwares such as Rescuezilla and is an overall amazing tool! It doesn't have a GUI per se - which does deter some people - but something more like a really easy to use text-based system of menus that takes your hand through out the whole process.
@@RogerioPereiradaSilva77 Is it possible to image a disk with clonezilla and output to a single image file? Like a single .img or preferably an .img.gz? The normal output it gives me is a folder with different images for each partition and a bunch of other files.
@@Tony-xf8dx I haven't really looked into it so I can't tell for sure. Those files are a bunch of metadata about the disk image that Clonezilla needs to do its thing so I assume that they're needed. But that never bothered ME anyway; there is no difference in storing a file or a directory. When I need to restore a disk, I just point Clonezilla towards that directory and that's that. If that's important for you then maybe you can create a tarball of the resulting disk image for archival purposes...?
@@RogerioPereiradaSilva77 Is there a way to burn a clonezilla image to a disk without needing to boot into clonezilla? That's my main reason for wanting a single image file, because they can be written to a disk more easily
@@Tony-xf8dx Not sure I understood what exactly your are looking for or your requirements. The way Clonezilla works is: you boot your system off a flash drive with Clonezilla, it starts the wizard that walks you through the process to either save a disk image somewhere (attached external drive, network share, what have you) or to clone a disk onto another (e.g. if you're replacing a mechanical HDD with a SSD). If you need to restore the image, you boot off that same flash drive, start Clonezilla, point it towards the image you want to restore and then sit back and let it do its thing. Isn't Acronis required to restore a disk image created with it into the system disk as well? As for copying the resulting image somewhere else, I dunno... I really don't get what's so different between storing a single file versus storing a single directory. But if that is a dealbreaker then maybe Clonezilla might not be what you are looking for...
Impressive. Your file in 2:02 is from 3 years into the future!
This video inspired me to finally do a Time Machine backup, thanks.
I was just watching a video from Luke Miani that was also sponsored by Acronis. Seemed like it had a lot of potential until I got to the end. Then I was like “… that’s it? Did I just watch a long commercial?”
For anyone with an old-school tower or more recent offering including quarter-height front expansion bays _and_ the dosh to spend on it, ICY Dock and similar brands offer 6-slot adapters for 2.5" media. So you'd install that, attach data cables to motherboard _or_ insert a 6-port SATA PCI card and hitch 'em together for building a NAS-like device in your desktop PC.
Some virtualization setup later and you can keep your first backup _directly attached_ to your PC with a separate Linux distro to manage the backup for quick and easy migration to another PC in-future. Pair that with a UPS tn ensure the power isn't interrupted unexpectedly (as when it is, you can just power off gracefully) and at least your first backup like that should be bullet-proof Of course, _three copies; two backups; one off-site_ right? But off-site isn't in the scope of this writ.
100GB BD may be cheap in your area but here in europe it's at LEAST 20/each on amazon and i've never seen them that much cheaper anywhere in the world so would love to see those $1 100GB discs :) you're way way better off looking for a used tape drive on ebay LTO 6 can do 6 and 5 tapes at 20-40 each, drive it's about 300-500 so that's 35 EUR (in my area) for 2.2TB vs 22x 20 EUR for BD-R that just 2.2TB will already put you at 440 EUR it makes 0 sense as far as i'm concerned unless you're only backing up very very little data 100GB or so and you already have a BD drive. but at 22TB of data you'd be looking at 4400 EUR just for optical media plus all the space it takes and how not practical it is to split data in smaller chunks and makes recovery a lot harder and slower anything newer than LTO 5 also supports LTFS which basically can mount any tape with a drive letter and you can copy/paste stuff without any software just needs the LTFS binaries installed, you can use third party software to organise and manage if you prefer that but it's not required, LTO 6 also stops making sense at over 100TB where you'd be better off with LTO 9 (unless you already have an LTO 8 drive or can get one for very cheap). So BLURAY = absolutely NOT super cheap don't tell that to people do math instead per GB and your own research before making any decisions. Also one more thing BD-R is also WORM (Write Once Read Many) if you go for BD-RE you'd also have to account for that extra while tape you can get special WORM cartridges but it's obviously rewritable as standard.
I'm backin' up, backin' up, backin' up, backin' up… Cause Quinn Nelson taught me good…
I love your intro and the time you took to make it very complete and not pushing the sponsor too early on. You really set the table very well for the main topic.
Thank you so much 🤗
it is annoying that its a pretty big chunk of the video though
whatever though, its not my video to decide, lol
I do my local backups on portable SSD's and it's great. They're tiny, super fast and easy to hide somewhere in your home. I use Apple Time Machine which keeps full system backups, so in case my laptop dies or gets stolen, I can simply replace and restore it. Time Machine also gives reminders if you haven't backed up in a while which is great.
Portable SSDs are okay if you are not using a lot of data. Some days I record up to 200GB even more sometimes so those SSDs just don't work in the long run. No point to spend thousands on a bunch of SSDs when I can create a 50TB drive for way cheaper that can be accessed anywhere in the world.
@Snazzy Labs Nice video! As stated numerous times, backups are important. But even more important is periodically testing those backups and restores, especially from tapes.
For Acronis, if you encrypt your backup to be stored on an external media, are you required to be in a valid subscription when you need to decrypt the backup files after, say, 10 years?
Use your brain:
No. If you still have the old installed software, or can install/activate it again, or have the boot disk/image and can still boot it, etc.
Yes. If you only have the backup files.
(Trial version may help but will have restrictions or limit max amount of restore).
Subscription service for the software to back everything up 🤮🤮🤮
Backblaze cloud backup is a good option!!!
What a coincidence, my HDD just gave up on me few days ago. I feel dummy
Great overview of 321 backups and for most people cloud storage is definitely the easiest option. Though I wish you would have discussed some of the other options available for of site backups like synology remote server snapshot replication or less expensive cloud, backup options like backblaze b2 which allows you to back up your Nas to the cloud.
Snazzy, you don't need Acronis, you Synology nas that you own offers all of what you were doing and most likely for less.
I remember in a job back in 1999, it was my first job maintaining a web app written vb6 and vbscript, they backed up the data in tape but it wasn't square like that, it was rectangular like half the size of a beta with a ratio closer to a VHS, I think it w was a 2TB tape.
comparing the cost of tape vs M-Disc, cost per GB or TB, tape is a lot cheaper the problem is the tape recorder it will take a lot of tape to compensate the cost of the recorder vs the M-Disc. This is something that is really exclusive for a business and not for a hobbyist.
Great video! Having a reliable backup power source is crucial, especially during camping trips or family outings. The Segway Portable PowerStation Cube Series seems like a perfect solution. With its massive capacity, fast recharging, and waterproof technology, it's definitely worth considering for outdoor enthusiasts like us. Thanks for sharing this recommendation!
Thanks for the recommendation! I completely agree that having a reliable backup power source is crucial, especially when you're out camping or on family outings. The Segway Portable PowerStation Cube Series sounds like a perfect solution with its massive capacity, fast recharging, and waterproof technology. I'll definitely consider it for my outdoor adventures!
I've been putting off actually getting a good backup system in place, but I'm finally going to actually do it, thanks!
I do like that you mentioned the option of using BD-Rs for backups, which I did to make an "archival copy."
Also on the note about a multi-bay NAS system or similar, I've come to stop using RAID, especially since I only use a 2-bay unit. Since I can't really access the other drive conveniently if it was configured for RAID and I'd really like to in case say the NAS itself blows up, I just have the NAS do a nightly backup of the primary.
For things like a thesis or written project, Git is amazing. Has many advantages besides backups on all devices.
oh shit, this is genius!
What is Git?
Literally doing this to sync files and have a backup for my files 😂
@@flashxcate Github....generally used for collaborative software design coding, but can be used for other things.
Tape drives can be bought pretty cheap these days, as long as you don't go for the newest version. Usually LTO-5 or even LTO-4 is is usually more than enough and you can get the drives for a couple hundred bucks and the tapes, as long as they are still available are sold for roughly €20,- for on LTO-4 tape that hold 1.6 TB compressed.
LTO-8 tape is AWESOME!!! It's already saved my butt a few times.
Yes, the initial cost of the drives ARE expensive and the original cost of the tapes were about the same as a HDD, but the cost of the tapes have come down and on a $/GB basis, the more storage space you need, the cost/GB starts to go down (because the price of the tape drive is a fixed cost, and not a variable cost like HDDs).
And then if you compress the data (the system that might be doing the backup might not be very great at doing the compression AND writing the compressed data to tape), so if you compress the data "manually", and then write the compressed result file to the tape, you can get pretty good compression ratios onto the tape, depending on the data that you are trying to backup.
(Videos doesn't compress very well at all, but text files compress VERY well.)
Was playing this video in the background and not skipping the sponsored part and after 5minutes was like when is this going to end 😂
Guess who deleted 7+ years (almost 300 GB) of data dating back to when they were eleven? (This was back in 2020)
learned my lesson in 2001 to back up everything to disc, CD, DVD, Blu-ray, and ext USB drives. Not the cloud.
It is mentioned that cloud storage companies tend to severely throttle you when uploading gigs of stuff. I wonder of Acronis throttles you when doing a full backup? What is max throughput they will allow?
Oh my god this video is such a gem of useful information! Gonna archive this on a blu ray brb
please don't... use LTO instead
@@dashtesla LTO tape drives are soooo expensive tho
@@samhrabovsky9188 as i said in my other big comment it's a matter of perspective bluray is way more expensive for the same amounts of data
@@dashtesla True, if you’re storing large amounts of data it is cheaper but most people are only backing up photos, text files, etc and don’t need all the extra storage that comes with the scale of tapes
Time Machine, a Mac and large hard drive coupled with cloud storage and if you're really adventurous, a bootable drive from like Carbon Copy Cloner.
I remember when CD-RW was DA BOMB - _and_ prohibitively expensive.
Come to think of it, I've probably heard the old modem sounds more often than I have actually burned a CD-RW...
Lost an external drive that had data that wasn't backed up in any shape or form. Now, I have multiple hard drives and Backblaze to backup.
Alternatively, consider if you really need big backups. Do you really need to hold all that data? I did some cleansing and deleted most of the files.
is this a long ad?
It’s a 20 minute video with a short ad segment at the end of the video that’s disclosed the second you click on the video, yes.
@@snazzy totally gotcha. Just felt super super markety with the pretense that the “ad” segment was the short segment. Feel like the whole thing was an ad but using the sponsor as a crutch.
I learned from The Great JAV Files Loss of 2018, were over 2 Petabytes of HD and some rare JAV files were lost from my servers.
I use Time Machine, and iCloud from Apple. $2.50 a month is worth it, as your get 200 GBs of storage space, you can access and modify the files of your choice.
I use Time Machine backups. One of them I keep here, and another I keep at the storage unit. And…yes…hard drives DO fail. It’s happened to me; some of mine have failed. They ARE very cheap, though. Mahalo for the reminder; today is a good day to backup and take that drive to the storage unit. It’s a good day to swap the backups and leave the home backup at the storage unit and bring home the storage unit drive. I don’t trust the cloud AKA “Some other clown’s computer.”
PTSD from PhD results being sent already corrupted to three copies, one offsite
Verify every copy people!
I use SuperDuper to make a local disk image copy and iCloud for remote storage and a NAS, so, already have overkill. SuperDuper is not that expensive to buy a lifetime license. It runs fast and I can boot from the local drive if my SSD was corrupted. Not sure what Acronis would provide me differently. I guess the cyber portion, but I already have security software and would be concerned they would step on each other. So if you have a new system and don't have any of the components then I guess the Acronis solution is pretty cool. Am I missing something?
I use my Qnap NASbook as my main backup device and my old Airport Extreme Time Capsule with a 16tb HDD as my backup's backup.
just commenting for the algorithm , because i found the video Educational. Shout out, Quinn.
Thanks!!
Great stuff, but some actual disclosure of the costs would be SUPER helpful. The 5 tb storage level shown in the video, for 3 computers (not an uncommon situation, especially for a couple... and not actually enough for me personally), is a whopping $350/year. Unless you have primarily computers with tiny drives (a possibility these days, but not how I roll), multi-terabytes is really essential. But at that price, it's far cheaper (and arguably better, since 5tb is laughable in my situation) to pay for multiple Backblaze accounts instead, which include unlimited amounts of data backup.
The problem for me with using Discs is that I would be creating a lot of trash as the data is always changing. So, file 1, is now trash in a day or so. It would be replaced with file 2, and so forth. I think you get the idea. What is your suggestion with files that always change.
Flash storage would make much more sense to me than discs. There are also many free software solutions that allow auto backing up selected folders the moment you connect that drive
Blu-ray is certainly better for periodic archival backup rather than frequent. 😊
Most of the relevant data should be quite small, so you can easily append to the same 50GB disk many many times. I mean, my whole documents folder ist barely 100 MiB. And the data that's big (e.g. photos, music, or videos) is very unlikely to change at all.
If you're still running into an edge case, you could also think about making incremental backups, i.e. only storing the changes between versions. However, this comes at the cost of a massive risk increase, as ALL involved disks would need to work for a proper restore. But that's the same as for a hard drive etc.
Setup Veeam to backup to a NAS or an external drive, then once every 3 months or whatever you deem reasonable, write that Veeam backup to the Blu Ray. Slap a date on it with your favourite ink pen and you're good to go.
I would recommend cloud backup. If you have a personal Office 365 subscription - then you have 1TB of OneDrive to go with it. If you don't use Office 365 then 2TB of iCloud is very good value at a couple of $ less per month than a personal M$ O365 subscription. It's not that hard.
Love your videos and always get so much out of them. unfortunately, this video completely lost me the minute you discussed Acronis. Although it seems a decent backup, why wouldn’t you mention much better services? I understand they are a sponsor but you should have been a bit more objective.
Because it’s a sponsor. You answered your own question. I never compare sponsored products to the competition because (a) brands hate that, and (b) viewers will think my opinion is biased anyways since I’m being paid by a brand.
Fully dedicated videos like this are designed to give you the information you need to explore solutions on your own.
I have a HDD in my computer that I back up to, and two external drives that I back up to, and store at my dad's place. I back up to one HDD, bring it to his house, bring the other one home with me, and back up to that 1-2 months later. I have other computers, but none of them have anything on them that I can't live without, so a NAS is a bit overkill in my case.
Great video. 👍 Still waiting for my 5TB on data on my portable HDD to recover after suddenly stopping while plugged into my TV.
It looks like Acronis just came out and bought advertising to numerous TechTubers at once. Just like in the old days
I've always been big on optical data backup, pretty much all my offsite is just optical. Was always easy to keep at my parents house or in my work locker. Discs would be encrypted so if lost or taken no issues, and the DVD's are dirt cheap. I moved to using blueray a couple of years ago and it great having the extra size, especially for all the larger media files we tend to create now adays or maybe a movie rip that I don't have the dvd for anymore. I would stay away from DL blueray and BDXL the pricing is ridiculous compared to standard blueray.
don't dvd's rot in a few years tho? lost a lot of data to rotting dvd's
@ondrejbrandejsky5592 only lost one, still got dvds that are around 15 Years old that I burned. Verbatim sells mdisc dvd and bluerays and they have an archival quality disc as well. Cheaper dvd can definitely suffer from disc rot though and Ig they are left out exposed to sunlight a lot that can effect them. I always check my archives every 2-3 years and I make 2-3 copies of the same disc just to be sure.
@@ondrejbrandejsky5592 I have DVD's from the 90's that still work.
@@ondrejbrandejsky5592thought so as well, so I would suggest blu ray over dvd
10:30 I haven't seen one of those portrait Apple displays since I was in high school in the 90s 😐
I use Acronis Cloud for anything in the Windows world but not on my Mac. Time Machine and iCloud storage are much more suited for the Mac imho. For Windows I totally agree. Acronis has been my choice for a long time now for all servers and workstations. Most important of all, it has never let me down when I ( or my customers ) needed to recover things, be it a certain mail attachement, a complete system restore or a VMware export.
But for the Mac, I dunno, Acronis won't let you pick a certain mail and recover it, only the Exchange Server module can do that...with an Exchange Postbox on a Win Srv, not on your Mac.
I don’t understand why you think Blu-ray is an economical storage format… $5 per 100gb is way more expensive than hard drives, and way, way less convenient
Did not know about enterprise tape backup.
Neither I knew CDs are still viable :D
Thanks for the video!
Yes, they re not as convenient but an actuall cheap and great option.
this video is so useful. I love it. thank you so much for this. also I almost never comment in videos but I am so grateful right now that I ended up doing it.
Nice flashback desktop ya got there Quinn, I miss the show, here's hoping that it might come back.
My NAS is rather simple (or complex depending how you look at it) since I'm on a tight budget. Thin client PC running Windows 11 (yes I'm aware alternatives exist) as a file server with a hard drive dock plugged into it. Originally, I had this attached to my router (w/ OpenWRT) but it was limited on what i can do with it. For example, I can't do a mirror copy of the hard drive to another hard drive automatically. I need to do this manually on one of my PCs. With the client pc running windows, i'm able to automate this process and it's been running great.
I also use cloud backups, but only to backup very important files. However, these are stored inside an encrypted container using Veracrypt. This is still a manual process for me but it's no big deal since these files don't get changed as often. Everything else, I backup to two separate drives. One of which is attached to the thin client pc to run a nightly backup.
I often tell people that backing up is not hard. Mine is complex for most because it involves a lot of configuration. All you need are a bunch of high capacity hard drives and just put your files there. A backup is better than no backup
I have a 50GB iCloud for my iPad and iPhone - which also gives me browser access to my stuff. I also have 1TB of OneDrive with my Microsoft 365 account. So I'm definitely covered for off-site as well as sharing a common space between my different devices.
My most memorable backup experience was with Brian Cuthie’s SafetyNet with a DAT drive under NeXTSTEP.
It’s notable that you appear to be ignoring Time Machine.
I've got external SSD's, 2 NAS's, one in RAID 6 (5 drives) and the other in RAID 1 (2 drives). I back the NAS's up to Backblaze B2. I'm probably going to add blu ray disk backups as well for all the data that just won't change over the years but would be devestating if we lost it.
I learned a painful lessons about backups before deciding to build a home NAS with RAID6 to backup. There's still no viable offsite backup for NAS though, at least not any that I can afford.
Linux master race here. All the required changes are stored on the web and all I need to do is to type 2 - 3 commands (tops) to get everything the way it were before.
I like your video and the way you present it all:-)
Just so you know, if you want to make long time storage on a CD-ROM is it best to burn as slow as possible, 1x or 2x if possible. And if you are really serious, do you have to get the gold-plated CD-R from Verbatim.
FYI BlyRay Disk M-DISC are my preferred backup method :) So from my PC throught the network to my NAS, and then I backup the NAS to BD-R. I'm 3-2-0 strategy :P Everything at home
Apparently new M-DISCs are fake / not real?
I refuse to use any sort of redundant raid config on my media server. The drives all are the same age, so if one wears out and dies, I wouldn't want to stress the other ones out trying to rebuild. Got enough HDD's lying around to keep a full copy of everything.
More people need to know that optical discs are currently the best long term data storwge option. They will basically last generations.
What’s the best way to backup iCloud Photos?
For easy blueray off site storage, loan someone your blueray player
I was literally looking for backup options yesterday. I got a busted 1TB HDD with all my college photos / family photos. A new SSD and a lot of stuff on google drive. They're all filling FAST.
I am almost done organising them and i got a folder that i want to never lose, and i think Bluray can be a GREAT option for it. Idk why i never thought about it. I am just wondering, how long can i keep them? I will prob never use the discs, i need them in case i lose the cloud storage ( which is very unlikely ) OR in case i don't have access to internet. I will also have a local backup on a HDD but i wanna know the life of blu ray discs.
Also is it the same for movies? I wanna go into bluray movies because watching banding on Netflix absolutely triggers me.
I have no idea how long CDs last. I have a bunch of old CD-Rs and games from the early 2000s and they seem to work fine. Regardless what medium you use, you still need to make multiple backups. In my setup, I have two extra hard drives that I use to keep a mirror copy of my main drive in my NAS.
For movies, you need to setup a Plex server. Since you are looking for a backup solution as well. Find some old PC hardware you might have lying around or look around used markets like ebay or Facebook Marketplace. You can use that to run a Plex server and a file server.
Good info and vid. If only Linux was also offered I'd be a buyer today as I run all three OSs in my work flow.
Eventually...
What do you use for Differential back ups? I want only something that looks and backs up only the changes to the your original backups. Takes less time as well.
3.2.1. Is crucial, I have my primary storage as a 5 bay Synology under raid5, my second copy is replicated in realtime to backblaze in the cloud. And third copy backs to to a second Synology 5bay raid5 at my second house. Just as an extra precaution I backup my laptop and servers to the first Synology that still backs up to the second nas off-site
I too use backblaze. Their month long versioned storage as standard is great.
If you have a good internet connection I use backblaze. Not a bad way to back up critical data!
Backblaze is awesome (I use it too) but if you have 3+ computers to back up, instead of only one, it gets expensive really fast.
I wonder how the Acronis iOS app can backup without having to be opened. I have Synology Moments/Photos, and you have to open them for their photo uploads to work.
I have a two bay syn NAS with 8 TB set to SHR. I have an internal 1TB sata SSD that's just the /home partition on my desktop, so it will never change or get formatted, just a storage that follows me around if I ever change Linux distros. I have a 1 TB external SSD, I have a ton of USB sticks and I use Google's free 15 GB to store photos. I think I'm set for life. LOL