Season's Greetings to all! This is another of my occasional posts about stuff that grown-ups should know, but apparently don't always remember

Many of you will receive gift cards for the holidays and naturally, your first impulse will be to sit right down and indulge yourself in your favorite WAM content, but keep a few things in mind.

1) - Some cards are store-specific. If someone gives you an Amazon or Home Depot card, it most likely won't work anywhere else.

2) - All cards are backed by specific card networks. At Vidown, we can accept most cards with the Visa, MasterCard, or Discover logo on them. (we do NOT accept AmEx because they are too expensive to process and vehemently anti-porn)

3) - Most Gift & Prepaid cards will NOT work online, at gas pumps, or at any kind of unmanned kiosk that requires entering a ZIP code until it is registered to a street address. You normally do this by logging into the card issuer's website (probably printed on the back of the card) and entering the information there.

4) - All cards will "reserve" funds on every authorization or charge attempt. If you screw up the expiration date, ZIP, or CVV number, the transaction will fail, but the issuing bank will still lock out the funds for 3-10 days. Make absolutely sure that you enter everything correctly the first time, as multiple failures can and will reserve your entire balance and make the card unusable for several days. This is simply a function of the card processing system and there's nothing the merchant can do about it, so don't yell at them if you fat-finger the numbers

Another important issue is that YOUR HARD DRIVE IS FAILING RIGHT NOW. All hard drives (both mechanical and solid-state) have an expected life span of many years, but that means absolutely nothing. There are always premature failures. Some don't even last a week. Many fail in the first year, and a select few may actually last a decade. (probably not yours though ) It's imperative that you have, at a minimum, TWO full copies of all your important data. Generally one on your laptop or desktop, then at least one more on an external drive. For extra security, make a 3rd copy on yet another portable drive (updating once a week or once a month) and move it to a separate location that will not be affected by the fire, flood, earthquake, or meteor that may possibly bash your primary dwelling into tiny, uninhabitable bits someday.

You can also use cloud storage for your most important records, but modern video formats are so enormous, it quickly becomes impractical if you have more than a few dozen clips in your possession.

Remember: Backup Early, back up often, backup, backup, backup!

Brother, your talk about hard drives needs to be listened to by everyone.. Never put that off!

Soundguy speaking the hard truths.

Sadly I have not had a good experience with gift cards, Firstly, our cc processors at Wamtec, Wamflix and Eurowam websites....which are Verotel and ccBill....will not accept gift cards for use on adult websites. They deem them to be a security risk so we cannot process any transactions with customers who try to use gift cards.

Secondly, I cashed in some Citibank reward points for a Citibank gift card which they mailed to me.....and when it arrived I took my wife out to a fine restaurant for a treat, but when I tried to use the gift card (which I had never used and only just arrived in the mail) I had the embarrassing experience of being called over by the restaurant manager who basically tried to accuse me of pulling a scam, because she said the gift card I was trying to use had already been cleaned out and had a zero balance on it. This turned what was supposed to be a pleasant dinner with my wife to be a sour event where I was accused of trying to scam the restaurant...and that annoyed me no end. It seems that thieves have already found a way to scan gift cards in the mail system and clean them out before you get to use them. So my tip is, if you receive a gift card, before you try to use it double check to see if it has a balance on it, because thieves with scanners can cash out your gift card before you ever get to use it.

MK

As the IT nerd that gets stuck breaking the bad news to people from time to time, the hard drive backup reminder is a good one. I usually phrase it as "if I strapped a brick of C4 to your computer right now and took it to a field and detonated it, what content would you be mad that you couldn't get back from it?." Then I tell them that if they don't back up that content, any number of probably-less-violent things are going to make that content no longer be retrievable from that computer at some point in the future, be it tomorrow or a decade from now - you just never know. Always good to toss out a reminder from time to time.

Shout out to services like Crashplan and Carbonite for automated off-site backups. I've had to restore from them twice due to hard drive failures, and while it's a bit annoying, everything comes back.

Personally, I work on the basis of having a file-server that's backed up to Crashplan and a laptop and desktop combo where I save all of the files to the server. On my laptop, I ensure that the files are synced to be available offline. Then, if the worst happens to my laptop (eg, I loose it or it gets broken or the hard-drive fails), it's inconvenient but not catastrophic and I only loose the work that I have done since the last time I used the computer at home.

If the worst happens to the file server, I can download the backups from the internet. Not the most convenient, but it ensures that I don't loose any files.

Regarding cloud backup, I use and recommend Backblaze, we have over seven terabytes of data backed up with them, and have used them to recover photosets a couple of times after accidents. If you have a big system it will take a while from first signing up up to being fully synchronised, but it will do it and is worth every penny. Costs just $6 a month.

They also publish great stats on hard drive reliability, which are useful when deciding on what to buy yourself.

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html - sign up now. Absolutely worth it.

Just before reading this post, I came across an external hard drive, 1 TB, that I'd gotten for Christmas a few years ago for the express purposes of backing up my hard drive and had then forgotten about. An hour later, I saw this.

I decided that was a sign. I'm backing up my hard drive as we speak.

Excellent advice Sound guy. Amazon has a 2 TB Western Digital external drive for 64 dollars US.
Just picked up one for myself , now i have 5 hard drives for my gaming PC . 2 internal soon to be 3 external drives. Link is attached, https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06W55K9N6/ref=od_aui_detailpages00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

And still pasting.
....holy CRAP I have a lot of porn.

Can't preach the backup gospel loud enough. I learned two hard backup lessons the hard way in my youth, the first being to have two copies and the second that RAID 1 is not a backup.

Personally I am a huge fan of these ones from Best Buy for those of you that have one or are within mailing reach of them. The price fluctuates pretty often, but if you wait long enough they eventually go for $140-$150.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-easystore-8tb-external-usb-3-0-hard-drive-black/5792401.p?skuId=5792401

we have backblaze

Yup. Used to use Crashplan but they're stopping their product soon (unless you upgrade to their business plan) so I did my research to make sure all of Candy's irreplaceable content was safe!

Of course there's another copy on the UMD - but as the thread above says you can never have too many backups!

Just check from time to time that you can actually get hold of your backup and restore it properly!

I've never heard of Backblaze. Just checking through the Ts & Cs, they ok with what some might consider "porn" since obviously would be using it to back up the source footage and rendered video files.

It's not web hosting, just backup - they do not care what the files are. If you're worried about them 'snooping' you can choose to encrypt your stuff first with your own password.

Let me reiterate that cloud hosting should only be used as a THIRD copy, not your only backup. There are far more cloud companies that have gone bankrupt and closed down than are currently operating today. It's "a" backup solution, but not a particularly good one, and should never be used as your only one.

Hey, here's some more bad news for you

Remember all those DVDs you bought a decade ago from various producers? They're probably all junk now. Commercial, professionally-manufactured optical disks are "stamped" in pretty much the same way that vinyl records were made in mass production. They have physical pits and blank spots on them that represent digital bits. If you keep them out of harsh conditions, they will probably work just fine a hundred years from now. "Burned" disks, OTOH, are made with a laser that creates the pits by scorching an organic dye layer sandwiched between the disk face and the reflective top layer. Unfortunately, that dye layer turned out be unstable in the long term. A lot of the early disks started developing "bit rot" within 2-3 years. None of the dye formulas are expected to retain their information for more than a decade or so.

Digital disk reading hardware have a lot of built-in error correcting systems, so a certain amount of loss may not be noticed, but eventually they will all crumble into the dust of history. Right after you back up all the important stuff on your computer, you should also start ripping all those DVDS so you have a backup of them too. Handbrake does a great job of ripping and it's free.

Same, somewhat.

Of course everything is backed up on a server. but you don't have RAID arrays.

I close my eyes, only for a moment and the porn is gone. All my dreams, pass before my eyes a deleted fantasy...

Dust in the wind...
All my porn is dust in the wind...

Absolutely true - but on the basis that any backup is better than no backup, I'd advise everyone to sign up with Backblaze anyway, because it's dirt cheap, and you can set it up in seconds - unlike some other systems there is none of this "select the folders to backup" business, it backs up all the data on your system automatically and there's no size limit, it really is "fire and forget". It skips program files, and the operating system - but gets every bit of actual data no matter where it's stored.

Ideally you should also have at least two sets of external hard drives and keep them fully synchronised with your master system, and one stored off site at all times and swap them regularly - but doing that takes time and we all put stuff like that off or forget for a few weeks - invariably the few weeks just before a disk fails. Backblaze runs in the background all the time and starts backing stuff up the instant it appears on your system.

And as Henry said, they aren't serving files like a web host, just keeping a copy for you, so they really don't care what the contents are, it's all just digital data.

And if anyone is wondering what are the most reliable hard drives, Backblaze do a blog on hard drive reliability - and as they have almost 100,000 spinning disks in service, their sample size tends to be good. Latest quarterly stats are here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/2018-hard-drive-failure-rates/ - note scroll past the quarterly stats for the lifetime ones, which are the real guide when buying - looks like Segate have risen significantly in reliability.

Seagate is literally the only show in town now. I use to use a mix of Seagate and Western Digital in our servers, but started seeing a LOT of WD failures a couple of years ago, many right out of the box. Now it's Seagate only.

Wow, interesting! A few years back Seagate had a terrible reputation for reliability, while WD and Hitachi were superb, and that showed in the Backblaze stats of the time and I've mainly bought WD only since as a consequence, but things look to have swapped over since - I guess my next major disk purchases may well be Seagate.

Really!!? It was the opposite for me... Weird. I really think a lot of it is determined by home many assholes at UPS/FedEx/etc drop kick the packages. Spoiler alert, it's most of them

At least according to a cousin I had that worked in a UPS warehouse.

Worth noting is that I only use Enterprise/Constellation class Seagate drives. In WD I only used "Black label" .The consumer grade of every brand is a crapshoot, with all of them having bad batches over the years.

I also only buy from NewEgg and they have special drive packaging that renders them pretty much immune from handling/shippping damage. When a drive shows up dead, it was probably dead heading out the factory back door.

Even buying the best available isn't enough. I also run every main drive in a RAID1 array, with a 3rd onboard drive for backup, and a 4th drive as remote backup. The databases get 5th and 6th copies in other countries.

I bought this 5TB Seagate for my desktop PC in August 2017, then cost £170 in UK:
Seagate STEB5000200 5 TB Expansion USB 3.0 Desktop 3.5 Inch External Hard Drive for PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

It was recommended to me by a PC expert friend and gives me no probs (yet) although a bit noisy at times. I put all of my work directly onto it and backup my huge Wetlooker folders using several 128GB SD cards. I have thought about Cloud but done nothing to date, reading forum comments I may not now!