Hi all,

This is loosely related to WAM, but not about WAM itself, so thought this was the best place for it.

I wanted to know what other people use to store their WAM collection? At the moment, mine are all on my laptop and/or external hard drive. It's ok, but my laptop is getting full and both are obviously liable to failure.

I love the ease of streaming sites, but then you don't actaully own the clip and there's a risk of the site going under or the store owner pulling everything.

Is cloud based the way to go? If so, has anyone got any reccomendations? I'm in the UK if that makes any difference to the options available.

Thanks,
DJ

I've got one scene that's purely photos saved to my phone on the Unzip app and then two videos saved to the Documents app.

I've got a fairly large collection acquired over the last 25 years.

The master copy lives on a physical hard drive on my main PC (desktop system).

That's fully backed up by Backblaze.com along with the entire rest of my system, to a secure datacentre in Seattle. Backblaze is $7 a month to back up your entire computer and anyone who has any kind of purchased downloaded content and doesn't use it, or something similar, is just asking for trouble.

A second copy also lives on an external hard drive attached to my media PC downstairs, which this one replicates to over the network.

I store 1 copy on a desktop hdd and 1 identical copy on an external ssd. I use the ssd on my tablet and play with vlc. I have a few other partial copies on microsd cards, older hdd, and other devices which all became full .

I'm also looking to improve how I store and backup my collection.

I don't use a cloud drive for my wam collection. I tried onedrive a long time ago. I didn't like it.

For full safety you want a minimum of three copies:

One on the computer or device you use to watch them.
One on an external hard drive elsewhere in the house.
One in the cloud.
Ideally you also want:
One on an external hard drive you keep in another building, e.g. at a storage unit, in a desk at the office, or in a locked box at a trusted friend's house.

Effectively you're protecting against multiple threats:
Hard drive failure. This is the biggest risk.
Fire. If the house burns down, the off-site and cloud copies are your recovery route.
Theft, especially if your main system is a laptop or other portable device.

I store absolutely nothing on the computer it's self, meaning its not on the main M2 SSD or the 4TB hard drive used for storage, nor the backup drives.

Anything WAM related is stored strictly on USB Flash disks which can be attached and detached. Last thing we want is any visitor using this to stumble across this stuff hell no.

When the USB Flash disks are not plugged into this, they are locked inside a 1000F degree rated vault of a giant gun safe which my girl and I only ones who know the 6 pin code for, oh and not to mention it's anchored down to the concrete in the garage too, so yeah anybody else wants in then they might as well forget about it, not happening unless your a professional safe expert with a giant torch and knows this exact safe's internal workings. I know I know this is absolute overkill storing this with my armory but 1: security is no joke and 2: its our safe so we might as well make the most of it why not.

Of course I know most people don't have safes like these but hey smaller safes are not a bad idea if locking data up is something you want to do.

That's fair enough, but in that case, be aware of the risk of bit-rot, where single bits in the storted data can be "flipped" (from 0 to 1 or back again), rendering the file either degraded or completely unusable. You probably want to have at least two copies of each flash drive, even if they do all live in the one safe. Then if one gets corrupted (mostly caused by cosmic rays which it's impossible to sheild against), hopefully the other copies will be OK and you can re-copy over the damaged one.