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Ask HN: What do you use for storing large amounts of personal data? (12TB+)

1 points by jonnyscholes ↗ HN
As someone who keeps a clone of every machine I've ever bought, runs daily backups and has a very data hungry hobby (timelapse photography) - at any given time I am running out of disk space. I have ~10TB of disks ranging from 500GB to 2TB - and half a dozen that have failed less than a year from buying them.

This method seems expensive, is prone to data-disaster and quite often has me sifting through half a dozen drives into the wee hours of the night looking for that one file that would be perfect for the job at hand (even when I know part of the file name).

I would love to use online storage but the Internet speeds here (Australia) would mean it would take literally a year to upload all my data - and would cost almost as much as my monthly rent too.

What do other people in this situation do?

2 comments

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140am
"daily backups" should not be on the same storage (or one could argue location) as your hot storage which has your photography data. How much of active storage do you have and access on a constant basis?

I personally keep local storage in the TB range (think drobo.com and local disks on workstation) and offload everything else to multiple cloud providers with a backup tool I trust (which I test on a daily basis by restoring data from the backup set of individual machines - example laptop vs home machine). Backup data resists on a mixture of cloud backends ranging from SFTP, Amazon Glazier/S3 and Dropbox. If most of your 12TB+ is backup/cold storage, you should be able to offload it to providers like crashplan.com or amazon drive which offer 'unlimited storage' for a few dollars if you are looking for a low cost solution and are willing to wait a year for your backup to complete.