He was in every single sentence not at all friendly nor helpful and perhaps even stubborn as he was telling me stuff that has already been revealed or it was just way to obvious.

Sure... trying to "roll over me" or denying any agreement on my statements is not gonna do the trick... this way we never will be able to get along. I assume it was not the true intention... yet, i have to say: There is a big evidence that he simply is by nature not a sweet chocolate... rather a very ripe cheese with a strong odor in some way.

No biggie, people... i will be able to upgrade my now outdated infrastructure... in some way... i just was looking for some mental support. Financial support is as well very welcome but i assume... as long as not someone with access to either a megacorp or taxpayers money is involved... it is in most cases unrealistic getting such a "support".

DRM and games overall are also a first world problem.

I don't know about you but I wouldn't appreciate if, whenever DRM is discussed on these forums, a bunch of people come tell "oh come on, who cares, first world problems, touch the grass, I don't even have a PC nor play any games so why should I care, and because I don't care, you shouldn't either".

I admit I couldn't care less if Facebook or TikTok or WhatsApp was down for a week or a month, but I realize it may matter a lot to many people, even if it is also a grass-touching problem. Sorry I don't have a solution, but I try to weed out stuff from my archives (lots of redundant stuff etc.) and also come up by some way to have the stuff divided to several hard drives in an organized way so that if I run out of space, I don't have to replace my 18TB USB hard drive with a 25 TB, and a year later with a 32 TB one, but instead just buy another 2TB or 5TB hard drive to expand my "pool".

So when you talk about 27TB hard drives and needing a total 100+TB of drive space, does it mean you keep four copies of your archives? Man that must be some precious data then. For now I think two copies for important stuff that I really don't want to lose is enough, but I need some better way to check the integrity of stuff so that I know if some file has been corrupted and needs to be replaced from the other archive.

Whats important to us is always a very subjective matter. Obviously, those who can not live without social media would moan hard if Whatsapp or comparable is gone... even those considered to be part of "a second class world". On the other hand... to me... caring about DRM free and backup storage... a lot of HDD space is valued very high by me; a matter those "second or whatever world-people" may barely be able to understand.

Even wealth by itself is always relative. Guess most people agree "Steam is rich"... yet compared to a company like Micron or Nvidia... Steam is just a beggar...

Just look the biggest news how Micron is becoming kinda the "second Nvidia":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvahiVBvn9A

They clearly make more than enough of profits and it is clear that neither RAM nor HDD or other "datacenter-material" needs to be that bloody expensive... yet... if someone can pay it by using investors or taxpayers money... it is obviously not a big deal paying so hard for it that almost any "commoner" will be wiped out of the markets "eligibility", so the commoners kinda will become wiped out of the "food chain", below the size of an ant.

(surging RAM prices) I'm glad I am mostly playing older games on older hardware so I can postpone buying any more RAM. And if Windows in itself starts requiring more and more RAM just to run, I guess I will use Linux more and more, Happily running the newest Linux Mint XFCE on e.g. one old laptop with 4GB RAM; I wouldn't dare to run Windows 11 on it at all.

As long as there is no shortage of some minerals etc. needed for RAM production, I would expect it to be a self-healing process, ie. higher RAM prices encourage more companies to invest more into extra production, and also e.g. game publishers to optimize their games more that they wouldn't waste so much RAM (so that people with less RAM would buy their games too).

27 TB is approximately the current size of all my data in a redundant way, so it is complete. It will need about 4 copies, yes, so we are hitting the 100 TB mark.

That is done in different ways... shared along 6 drives and if a HDD is 30 TB it could have a full backup of all the data, while the other 6 drives need to pick up split data between them, as they are to small picking up the entire pool.

It does not really matter if a HDD is 6x4 TB or 1x24 TB, in the end the cost per TB will be about at the same level. Only the "biggest drive" usually may have a certain bonus price added on top of the usual "per TB price" because simply with highest demand and requested by the rich datacenters with highest priority.

However... from a management point, it is more troublesome and less secure splitting the data between 6 drives instead of 1 and it will need some sort of RAID configuration if done this way. This is already advanced stuff that need expensive Mini-servers or a RAID-NAS instead. This additional infrastructure can be prevented simply by using one huge HDD, if it is even possible by the size requirement.

The HDD itself does not really matter as long as it is either a datacenter-HDD (Exos) or a NAS-optimized HDD. Although NAS-HDDs was historically overpriced and was not any better than a datacenter-HDD whích can be scaled up near endless in theory. It all comes down to marketing and NAS simply is considered "a special value for those enjoying NAS". However... i guess this time is over now and the ones being at the peak are now as well with the highest price... not anymore NAS.

I got different drives running in my PC. A Toshiba HDD and a WD HDD... both are datacenter type... not NAS nor any other category. A Exos and a NAS (Ironwolf) HDD i got as well as an external HDD. Now i plan to upgrade with the currently biggest Exos. External, because internally my PC got 2 HDDs that can still pick up a entire "redundant backup by themself". Which means they can pick up a full "additional backup without any reliance on external HDDs".

I'll be honest, Xeshra, this thread blew my mind.

Even if you didn't go full re...dundancy with quadruple storage, that would still mean that a single backup of all your stuff is coming in at seven TB.

I am absolutely having difficulty imagining the amount of stuff you have collected. Unless you are a film director or something of that nature, what could possibly comprise this colossal size?

I just did an inventory of all my stuff, to see how I compare:

0. Code = 4.8 GB
1. Pictures = 24 GB
2. Music = 7.6 GB
3. Everything else = <1 GB

Out of the 2 TB on my SSD, 696 GB is used, the rest is free.

What have you collected there? o_O

Not seven, twenty-seven. 7.5TB was just the estimated amount of storage used by of all PC games as of July this year. Then, what about his mostly disc-based PS5 collection which is probably around 2.5-5TB in size, assuming that he has made some additional backup of these. And these are just the things listed on his profile.

Twenty-seven ... x_X
I thought that was the total size of the four copies of the backup.

This is MADNESS!!!

I imagine that if I installed every single one of the thousands of games I have across various services, I too would end up with some equally absurd number. But ... is it really necessary to have all of them installed at once? I usually have no more than 10 games installed, and even that is a bit on the higher side.

What do you mean, installed all at once? He wants to have them backed up - all at once. He says plain as day in post five: Having four total copies is quite thorough, I must say. Is three not enough?

But whyyyyyyyy? :'-(

If you're serious about backing up the offline installers, then yes. However, putting four copies on the same drive doesn't create meaningful redundancy. If the drive fails, all four copies are gone, unless you count fringe cases where only parts of the drive fail and you might have enough time to copy over at least one full copy. Usually, you don't have this much time, a damaged drive degrades very fast.

I was going to mention tape, but while writing, I noticed just how much additional complexity, management and workflow learning curve this adds, in addition to the sizable cost of the required hardware (plus at least one backup drive in case the original fails).

Then I was going to suggest a specialized NAS distro, that would convert a normal PC to a capable NAS. Hardware RAID is a thing of the past, anyway, so going full ZFS would be sensible. But again, that adds complexity, management and learning effort. At least there would be no significant changes to backup workflows. And RINAB (RAID is not a backup), so you would still need additional drives, making up separate ZFS pools.

Regardless of what you do: you absolutely must separate the copies physically. That means: off-site. A sensible workflow for keeping them up to date would be to cycle the locations on a fixed schedule (the frequency of that depends on how much your data changes), and update the copy that arrives at your main site as soon as it does. Never leave two copies in one place for more than a day.

If you have decided that all your data is mission-critical, then there is no way around having full copies. Anything less means compromises, like only having three copies of games and four of your other data (as long as you can count GOG as one copy, at least).

Do as GOG does: Call your backup project a "preservation program" and set up a patron subscription scheme for it. A good feeling and being called a sweet teddy bear should totally be worth a monthly fee.

Because he is compelled to do so and wishes to lose nothing. If he desires a backup with multiple layers of redundancy, it has to be done! He's just thinking like people whose design and engineering made passenger aircraft increasingly safe throughout the twentieth century. Very commendable!

Indeed. Well, who am I to tell people what's important and what's not. Seems like an expensive hobby, but hey, he isn't hurting anyone, so why not. Sure as hell beats hoarding physical items, that's for sure!

Much easier for his family to chuck away when he dies!