So, I'm faced with the situation where my computers hardrive could fail literally at any minute and I'm sure like most people here my UMD purchases are on that hardrive totaling 36GB.

I'm struggling to find a way of moving them or backing them up due to size of the folder I keep them all in and I really don't have the means to purchase a new hardrive or some form of subscription to a cloud service.

Any recommendations you may have on where to back them up to or what I can do if my HDD goes bang before I can transfer all the purcahses would be amazing.

Thanks
Josh

Can you not back up to a few dvd's or a couple of cheap flash drives?

Of course if the drive goes, you may be able to hook it up as a slave to your new computer and access via MiniTool Data recovery or some similar software, with the appropriate connection cable.

Good luck!

You can get several terabytes of external USB had from eBuyer for under a hundred quid, use a credit card if necessary? You can also get on line backup from BackBlaze for a fiver a month. I think some of the cloud services like drop box do free accounts that can probably store more than 36 gig, that's quite small in data storage terms by modern standards. Some laptops come with cloud backup as standard, do you have one of those? Last one I bought from Tesco, an Asus, came with on line backup.

Always have backups, it's only when you lose a drive and have to shell out £££ you realise how fragile digital data is, I had to pay a Sheffield firm 500 quid when a drive with lots of unreleased scenes on it died with no warning a couple of years back.

It could be a problem if they were 36TB

Buy a 64GB pendrive from a pc store

You can buy 64 gig thumb drives virtually anywhere these days. They are in grocery store checkouts next to the snickers and AA batteries.

Let me take this opportunity to repeat my semi-regular warning that YOUR HARD DRIVE IS FAILING RIGHT NOW!!!!. All mechanical drives, all writable optical media, all online storage, and all flash storage have a finite lifespan.

Modern hard drive have expected life spans in the hundreds of thousands of hours, but that just means the very last drive in the batch to fail will last that long. A few will be DOA, a few more will die in the first week or month, considerably more will die within 2-3 years of daily use, and the majority will be dead or failing within 10 years. The size and possibly the interface will be woefully obsolete by then anyway.

Writable optical disk media is obsolete and laughably small these days and it suffers from "bit rot" even stored in a climate-controlled dark space.

There are far more online file storage services that started up and then shut down than currently operate today. None are guaranteed to last for an extended period. If you are lucky, you might get a month to transfer everything to some other service. If you are unlucky, your stuff will just disappear one day when they pull the plug and vanish from the internet.

Even a modern flash drive doesn't last forever, It suffers from the same manufacturing flaws and early failures as a spinning disk. If used daily, it physically "wears out" after a few years and can no longer be written to.

If you only have your data stored in one device, you are most likely going to lose it all someday. Anything reasonably important MUST be copied to at least one other device regularly. The minimum "safe" backup is 3 copies - one on your main device, one on a local backup device, and one one a device stored in a different physical location. The last one can be in a different room, in a garage or outbuilding, at a friends house (you can act as offsite backups for each other), in a bank safety deposit box, or an online storage system. One of them WILL fail in the next couple of years, but the chances of two failing are much lower. The chance of losing all 3 at once should be statistically impossible with enough geographic separate and different media types.

look for some old computers thrown out or sweet talk the people at a recycling center and take the hard drive out of that computer. and keep the data cable.
Open the case of your pc and hook it up. depending on expansion space you may need to borrow power supply from the DVD drive but you should have an extra data connection in the mother board next to your current drive. Take a look in yours and watch you tube a bit if you are not familiar before you go to harvest a drive flashlight n screwdriver handy.
This is the cheap but effective way. The hunter gatherer.

I kept the HD from my old PC and happened to come by a 1TB external someone threw out, slow old model but vwerks. I should run a back up soon come to think of it.