Hi,

Just wondering how people are storing their video collections?

Not wanting anybody to find them on my laptop, I was storing mine on an external hard drive, which annoyingly failed & I lost access to all my videos.

I started building a collection again I've stored them in a password protected folder hidden away on my laptop, but that was using up too much space, so moved them all to a new external storage drive. That has now gone crazy and although most are ok, a few videos now won't open or play fully.


So just wondering what everybody else does to safely store your downloads etc without people finding them who you don't want to?

I had all mine backed up on on to DVDs. Then I backed those up onto Blu-Rays and in the process of doing that, I had to re-upload everything up onto my computer, so I put all that onto an external hard drive. Haven't had any issues with it crapping out on me yet, but I dread the day...I need to get another one soon and back it up just in case. Not only are my wam videos on there, but also nearly 12,000 songs that I've amassed over the years and keep backed up in case my ipod shits the bed again, nothing worse than having to go through re-ripping all your all your CDs to mp3s and downloading everything you've purchased all over again...I also keep some on my computer, but usually I get rid of everything on there when I've gotten enough to fill up a blu-ray disc.

One ideal would be to use an external hard drive
Like a 3 terabyte one save space and condense files

I have a locked away Hiden on my pc hard drive and a backup on an external hard drive

You don't ever keep ONE copy of digital data. You keep THREE, always. Two copies on separate devices at your main location, and an additional backup offsite somewhere. This goes for all your data, not just videos. Photos, receipts, personal documents, etc. Update the local copies every day (all computer and mobile device operating systems make this trivial to automate) and the offsite one can get refreshed once a month or so. Offsite locations can be a cloud storage provider, a friend's basement or garage (encrypt the drive ), a bank safety deposit box, or even your own garage if you have a stand-alone. The point is to make sure all your copies are not lost in the same catastrophe. If you are in a flood or tornado-prone area, the offsite copy should really be out of state.

This is like the official advice from security experts.

I had a crash back in 2015 and lost a lot of media. Now, when I film, I save to an external hard drive that has my dropbox sync folder there.

I'd second everything Soundguy said. All storage devices have a limited lifespan, all will eventually fail, so you keep all important data copied on multiple devices so that you don't lose anything if one fails, and can restore from the copy.

At the very least, get an account with backblaze.com, who will back up your entire machine (including external drives if they are usually kept attached) for six dollars a month.

Beyond that, keep one copy on the laptop's local drive and a second copy on an external drive, and whenever you buy more content copy the entire local WAM folder to the external drive (so everything gets refreshed), and have Backblaze as well for the off-site copy.

In my case I've always been completely open about being into WAM so never had any need to hide things, my collection lives in /data/WAM, divided into paid-for content, which is stored in folders named for the producer who made it and subfolders for each scene, and the various freebie previews and other random stuff I've collected over the years, in other folders.

Flash drives and I have around 15 google drive accounts (keep creating new ones for free when I hit my storage limit.)

This is some of the most valuable advice ever. To compound that advice, I recommend keeping one of your on-site storage types as something with redundancy built in. While this ends up getting expensive, it is EVEN MORE sure to avoid loss. I keep a RAID-6 NAS for my always on storage filled with 6 10TB drives. with raid 6 I can lose up to two drives at the same time and still not experience data loss. The probability of data loss drops significantly when you have to have 3 drives fail within the same period to actually lose data. I keep large capacity sata drives as non-connected storage, keeping them immune to power issues or potential malware issues as its hard to infect something that isn't connected. Lastly as mentioned above, I keep an off-site set that I update monthly. If you only have one copy of your data, you may as well have none.