What are my fellow members using and what's your experiences?
Let's find out more about how you save your files.
Currently there are a variety choices both internal/external and the cloud, what's your poison?
Currently I have my good old reliable WD PR4100 4 bay NAS which I inherited from a former job used. I have had it for years and it's populated with 4 x 8GB WD Red Plus 3 1/2" 5400rpm spinners in a RAID 5 array. Reliable as heck but still could be scrambled by a ransomware attack. It's 99% entertainment files so I wouldn't cry if that happened, they are mostly replaceable. I keep a new spare 8GB Red Plus should one of the array fail but all the files on the failed drive would be recreated as it's a RAID 5 array.
I also have a USB DAS which consists of many hard 2 1/2" drives 2 - 6 GB in size as the needs change. These are the temp. archive and work drives with what most might consider junk, programs, stuff I am messing with, and work in progress files. It's saves me from cluttering up my C drives on my systems.
Currently I have a bunch of Win 10 laptops and 1 portable work station. They all have SSD's installed 512MB-2MB NVMe of the fasted speed they will accomodate. On my main systems I have a D drive for new downloads and assembly of compressed files. these are also SSD's NVMe are 2 1/2' SATA SSD on one system.
I also maintain 3-4 Mini computers in a small cabinet in my basement. These do most of the work, downloading/uploading to the Usenet and Torrents. They are the soldiers who carry out my bidding. Mostly i7 and all but one could not legally run Win 11. I am currently shopping for deals on Win 11 Mini Computers.
All these little guys have 2 1/2' spinners attached to them. Each of those drives has a specific subject or purpose. I also use these drives to archive files and they are then disconnected from the system. All my systems share the same network which is fortified by a few pieces of enterprise grade network hardware.
I send my important data to various cloud based storage providers. Some are general use such as G Drive and One Drive. Others I use are quite secure and are on a subscription basis. I consider those the same as an off site vault and private for important documents and such.
as an aside my WD NAS is the heart of my system. The flexible DAS which is connected to the network via one or more of the mini comps is where the junk lies and keeps the clutter of my C drives. C drives run my systems and keep temp files. I routinely so an inventory of all the C drives to make sure that is the case. I can't stress that you should do the same. It will lengthen the life of your System drive take a load off of your system and keep things a bit more organized. I defer to Thumper who seems to be someone who has far better organizational skills than I do. Just an observation after knowing him for years but I do believe it's true, so take notice when Thumper addresses that topic in the forum.
Off topic but a bit of an explanation, I am one of those loners who doesn't play computer games in any form. Quite frankly they don't interest me and I do not have the time or suitable hardware to invest in on-line gaming. During the years at the VoIP company where I was a network engineer that made me a weirdo. Every one in my my department played routinely and 2 of three were constantly playing on their phones at their work stations. That kind of scared me that they became so addicted to gaming. I am an outdoors person, a biologist by education and I love watching critters in the wild. I did a great deal of SCUBA underwater ocean research right after I graduated. So possibly you see why gaming in an artificial environment is not attractive to me.
I have already explained why I have my handle which I plan to finally let go of in 2025. It's as extinct as the DVD is becoming. In the hay day 20 years ago and sooner it was a heck of alot of fun pirating that form of media. You could say that forced me to really learn the fine points of computing although I already had a two year degree I got while working at night. I at one point accumulated a ton of props by chartering and more or less ran the forum associated with alternate binaries DVDR on the Usenet which at the time was pretty much the only way to securely trade huge (at the time) files. Times change.
Let's find out more about how you save your files.
Currently there are a variety choices both internal/external and the cloud, what's your poison?
Currently I have my good old reliable WD PR4100 4 bay NAS which I inherited from a former job used. I have had it for years and it's populated with 4 x 8GB WD Red Plus 3 1/2" 5400rpm spinners in a RAID 5 array. Reliable as heck but still could be scrambled by a ransomware attack. It's 99% entertainment files so I wouldn't cry if that happened, they are mostly replaceable. I keep a new spare 8GB Red Plus should one of the array fail but all the files on the failed drive would be recreated as it's a RAID 5 array.
I also have a USB DAS which consists of many hard 2 1/2" drives 2 - 6 GB in size as the needs change. These are the temp. archive and work drives with what most might consider junk, programs, stuff I am messing with, and work in progress files. It's saves me from cluttering up my C drives on my systems.
Currently I have a bunch of Win 10 laptops and 1 portable work station. They all have SSD's installed 512MB-2MB NVMe of the fasted speed they will accomodate. On my main systems I have a D drive for new downloads and assembly of compressed files. these are also SSD's NVMe are 2 1/2' SATA SSD on one system.
I also maintain 3-4 Mini computers in a small cabinet in my basement. These do most of the work, downloading/uploading to the Usenet and Torrents. They are the soldiers who carry out my bidding. Mostly i7 and all but one could not legally run Win 11. I am currently shopping for deals on Win 11 Mini Computers.
All these little guys have 2 1/2' spinners attached to them. Each of those drives has a specific subject or purpose. I also use these drives to archive files and they are then disconnected from the system. All my systems share the same network which is fortified by a few pieces of enterprise grade network hardware.
I send my important data to various cloud based storage providers. Some are general use such as G Drive and One Drive. Others I use are quite secure and are on a subscription basis. I consider those the same as an off site vault and private for important documents and such.
as an aside my WD NAS is the heart of my system. The flexible DAS which is connected to the network via one or more of the mini comps is where the junk lies and keeps the clutter of my C drives. C drives run my systems and keep temp files. I routinely so an inventory of all the C drives to make sure that is the case. I can't stress that you should do the same. It will lengthen the life of your System drive take a load off of your system and keep things a bit more organized. I defer to Thumper who seems to be someone who has far better organizational skills than I do. Just an observation after knowing him for years but I do believe it's true, so take notice when Thumper addresses that topic in the forum.
Off topic but a bit of an explanation, I am one of those loners who doesn't play computer games in any form. Quite frankly they don't interest me and I do not have the time or suitable hardware to invest in on-line gaming. During the years at the VoIP company where I was a network engineer that made me a weirdo. Every one in my my department played routinely and 2 of three were constantly playing on their phones at their work stations. That kind of scared me that they became so addicted to gaming. I am an outdoors person, a biologist by education and I love watching critters in the wild. I did a great deal of SCUBA underwater ocean research right after I graduated. So possibly you see why gaming in an artificial environment is not attractive to me.
I have already explained why I have my handle which I plan to finally let go of in 2025. It's as extinct as the DVD is becoming. In the hay day 20 years ago and sooner it was a heck of alot of fun pirating that form of media. You could say that forced me to really learn the fine points of computing although I already had a two year degree I got while working at night. I at one point accumulated a ton of props by chartering and more or less ran the forum associated with alternate binaries DVDR on the Usenet which at the time was pretty much the only way to securely trade huge (at the time) files. Times change.
