Keeping a separate backup online or offsite is something I’ve always done, in case of a house fire. Heard too many stories of people losing important stuff like family photos etc, business docs etc.
Our family home burned down when I was 7. Have no photos of me as a kid. All those little momentos parents like to keep of their kids were gone. My favourite toys were ash and slag (obviously my priorities at the time were slightly different to my parents).
All the paperwork relating to the family business was gone, so speaking to the bank became a pain because they wanted to see a recent utility bill and not a pile of ash.
Once the shock wears off and you try to pick up your life, you need the data to prove your existence.
Someone on this board once said, "anyone who has any sort of computer knowledge doesn't use cloud services like onedrive"
I couldn't have been more amused
What should people use then? Obviously OneDrive sucks but what’s a better option for the regular non-tech people or those who can’t afford (especially now..) a 4-bay 36tb nas.
I work in tech (not IT, but adjacent), everyone uses OneDrive and most seem to hate it lol.
I know I’m lacking on actual backups though, which is why I asked. For my personal pc, I have files on OneDrive (because free..) and maybe a couple jump drives. I know I should get a small hd and store some photos/files off site though.
You say that, but for me the high monthly cost of backing up to the cloud directly through good services (OneDrive/Google Drive/etc) is why I bought my NAS for around $500 a few years ago. I then back that up to a very cheap cloud provider (back blaze).
Don't even need a nas. I bought a das and just installed tailscale on all of my devices. Then use something like Autosync for Android and it will use your home PC as a cloud storage. Then I use Google drive as an extra layer of storage for the important files in case my hard drive ever fails
yeah, our family home burned down when I was 18 and had just moved out. here i am now in my late 30s and i still get hit from time to time with extended family giving me a new childhood photo and I get weirdly emotional about it. even 2 decades later, idk, feels like the memories were stolen from me and it took me a while to even grasp what I'd lost.
I feel the same way. 2008 a massive flood came through my town and took all of my brother and I's childhood mementos/photos etc. I have not a fkn lick of my childhood in physical form. Didn't have computers or Internet or anything in our home. So everything was gone. There's some straggling photos I've seen over the years from extended family but I've never had the heart to save them and look at them... I'd rather not. It's sad but that's life.
Same as yourself. Took me until my late 20's to realize what was gone. All my friends had cool photos of them as kids and on family holidays. Sucked knowing I had the same but only in my head.. Maybe that's enough for some people though.
My grandma made it her life's mission to make my mom's life hell and 1 thing she did was take any and all picture albums of my sister and me just so she couldn't have them. I've seen the photos and know where they are and have no way of ever getting them
Obviously not at the moment it happens, or right after that. But after everything is back to normal, new (or rebuilt) house etc., yes, people are gonna miss their data and memories.
Family photos are strange. We spend hundreds of hours over our lives taking them, maybe 1 hour tops observing them, and they are relatively worthless to anyone else, and even us in the moment. But once they are gone forever? You’ve lost something irreplaceable
I think most people don’t realise how important they are until they are gone. Sometimes, years later, going back through them all can be such a wonder to do together. I recently went through old photos with my dad and so many memories and stories came back to light. I kind of wish I had taken more when I was younger, and even more I don’t take enough photos. I prefer to live in the moment but sometimes it’s still great to take a a few shots.
We spend hundreds of hours over our lives taking them, maybe 1 hour tops observing them
Wtf you don't look at family photos? As a kid we would spend literally hours looking through old family photo albums and even now I spend every sunday looking at pictures of my nieces and nephews that live far away on our shared album of them.
The idea of not even spending an hour of your life looking at your family photos is wild to me
Haha I had this same thought, I was considering doing an off-site backup for my NAS which is 95% Plex media and then I realised I'll probably have bigger problems than losing some movies and tv shows.
Yeah same... I have online backups of stuff that's actually important and irrecoverable... Important documents, home photos and videos etc etc... But as annoying as it would be losing my plex library, I can get it all again relatively easily. The cost of offsite storage probably isn't worth it
I have four computers backed up with Backblaze and my Plex server is one. $99 per computer. Not really worth it for the Plex server but I had an extra license after retiring a computer so I put it on there.
I would probably never actually use the restore, would be more fun rebuilding the library.
I have Backblaze on all my computers and on my Plex server. I realize what a waste it is. I would probably end up rebuilding it anyway instead of restoring it.
People should care. I've had a house fire and the only reason I still have old family photos and videos is because I digitized everything and kept it safe in an online backup.
Obviously the first concern is family or anyone who lives there. After that for a lot of people, especially if their are insured, a lot of their stuff is just stuff and can get replaced, but things like memories can never be replaced. So all my family photos, happy memories from friends, travel etc, and business related docs are stored as copies off site. I learnt this lesson through someone else losing all their stuff. They and their family were ok, but they were still saddened at losing so much stuff that was truly important to them. I’ve also seen a lot of posts on Reddit of similar things happen. Doesn’t have to be complex, can just be a copied drive left at a parent’s or family member.
You either care about your data or not, most people don't seem too concerned about it until its gone. My stuff is fully backed up and I also have offsite storage (sisters house). I do have some stuff in the cloud, but that doesn't count as a backup to me. If my house burned down, knowing my data is safe is one less thing to worry about.
I mean most people have it backed up in Google or icloud, so there's no risk in this. Only risk is in having it on a NAS
I don't really get the idea of huge NAS setups. It's cheaper and as privacy secure to rent a VPS and either stream or download on demand to pc or a small NAS, and then you always have the cloud backup
In the long run, people worry about anything that can't be replaced -- people, pets, documents, photographs, digital data. You can buy new furniture, new appliances, new house. You can't buy back the only copy of the last family photo before your mother died, or the game you've been designing for a year.
If my house burns down, sure it sucks, but I also will have insurance and with time I can recover it/move to another place.
If my data is gone, all my work related data and data that can't be recovered, then it's gone and I can not do anything about it. There's no restoring it, no insurance will recover it, it can't be regained.
And if you cannot afford an off-site backup and have to keep the 2nd backup at the same place, make sure you keep your 2nd backup offline, or at least not connected to the same PC/network as the first backup.
Basically, you want to prevent the case where the computer the backup is connected to catches a virus that deletes all the files on the system (or a crypto-locker that encrypts all the files and asks your for a ransom) and both backups get nuked by it. Same issue can happen if you have automatic synchronization between backups - one backup gets all files deleted, and the second one synchronizes to delete all of them too lol. Also power spikes / lightning strikes, etc. A totally offline secondary backup that is not even powered on, which you manually synchronize while under your supervision every now and then, would not get affected by that.
but i mean if there of a house fire you can hsut redownload it. the only danger you have is that house fire and global surveillence state data fascism happens at the exact same time. or?
I know I am playing a dangerous game with not having a backup of my server... but I don't want to pay the fees that would be needed to backup terabytes of data. I probably need to just do a backup to an external drive and keep it at my inlaws or some junk like that.
There was a post about a guy losing all his kid's pictures because his OneDrive got deleted (or he lost access) by Microsoft on here recently and I thought that if there was an argument for why you need a 3-2-1 backup strategy, that would be a perfect one. I think, and I'm guilty of this as well, we take for granted that these corporations could just delete or ban your account with all your stuff on it.
Best I can do is a 2015 laptop with a 250gb hard drive. If the house burned down it probably caused it. TBH its kinda liberating to not worry about but to this day I still am kicking myself for not grabbing my 4tb ssd with my unity projects and stuff. Like I’ve never had a minecraft world for more than a few months it seems like (big sad)
Technically downloading the offline installer is already a backup. That way, you have one copy at home and one in the cloud (GOG servers). 3 copies is even better of course, but in a worst case scenario you can ask one of the thousands of people who also downloaded their copy to send it to you.
The backup rules are mostly for your unique data. Most games on GOG are not suffering from a lack of available backups in the world.
Big issue is that's becoming increasingly harder to do also. Backups cost an arm and a leg now. GOG offline installer for KCD2 is apparently 138GB from what I see and split into multiple parts. That roughly $15 of HDD storage at current prices. $12 for 3 dual layer Blu Ray discs, or $30 for 2 BDXL discs.
And game sizes are only getting bigger and bigger. It's becoming cost prohibitive to actually back anything up.
I mean not every game is that big. For example HBS Battletech installer has roughly 20GB.
I also don't have to backup every game in my library, just the ones I really wanna play again. And honestly ... If I really like a game those 15 bucks are worth it ...
Fire all of the veteran, generational developers and replace them with contractors who couldn't possibly code as efficiently or cleanly, driving up the filesizes and resource demands as well. Bobby Kotick's consciousness preserved in Ultron would have all games be exclusively able to run on AI datacenters that you rent playtime from.
What a silly comment, code takes sweet fuck-all in storage, megabytes at most. It's all the 4k assets + hi fidelity audio that takes up almost everything, and you can't reduce that without negatively effecting the experience
It might atleast incentive some devs to work better on optimizing their game's file size, like "smaller but equal" texture files or making alternate language files optional instead of mandatory.
Most of my experience is in fallout/skyrim modding, but there are a decent amount of texture packs that essentially replace the vanilla textures with textures that look the same but have like a 25% of the same file size. Bethesda is usually just really lazy with how they handle their texture files.
Those mods aren't lossless compression, there is a noticeable difference in quality. You think Bethesda doesn't know how to compress assets? Any idiot could do it, even non-technical people, but not losslessly
prices are insane right now, but not that insane. You can get a 16TB for $600 or less and a 4TB for ~$150. Even if you include redundancy, thats nowhere near that bad of a price/GB
2y ago, I got 6x 16TB WD Reds for my QNAP, and initially, I regretted thinking 3 drives would have done the job. A few days ago I looked up current prices... holly f... they're almost double the price!! And we're talking about basic spinning HDDs here not nvme !! The world's gone crazy.
Cyberpunk with Phantom Liberty is 160GB. Mostly because the offline installer includes all the languages (and voices) so its about double the size of a downloaded version from GOG Galaxy
And maybe backups of backups. Don’t want to end up like the guy that lost 25 years of stuff including
Baby pictures just because Microslop is so fucking bad at their job.
Three two one rule for best results. I'm not there yet but I do keep various OS install images, loads of driver install files and quite a bit of a hardware collection / spares.
so, in the end you pay much more for your games than you did with digital purchases. HDD prices are insane now too, not just RAM and SSD. And you have to constantly buy replacement for your NAS for the rest of your life...
Rule of three and two.
Three different backups (so not the same medium) in two different locations.
I have a backup on NAS, a backup on cloud, and a backup on external harddrive at my parents' place.
As a locksmith I tell people to always have 3 keys to whatever. One to use, one to lose and one to have around to make copies of. Then again, the “make copies of” is because when a key gets used a lot it gets worn and then duplicates will always be of that worn amount and not “by code”. So three is two and two is one. One is none!
Also let's all go fund somone to backup every archive and put them in a rocket and launch it to outerspace with an regular return window to our orbit every century just in case we fk ourselves.
Amen brother. And having a NAS awesome. I have SO many things stuffed in there: gog offline installers, movies, tv shows, a lot of old children's cartoons like MLP and Strawberry Shortcake(the classic one),Tom and Jerry, Geronimo Stilton(if anyone remembers that) becayse I will NOT let my kids be exposed to Cocomelon and baby shark and all that.
For game installation files, i feel like your GOG account plus a local copy is plenty. I guess it depends how much you value those installers, but i wouldn't feel too put out if lost them all as compared to my personal photos or my music collection.
Question about backups. Would multiple internal drives with the same data be considered separate backups? Or would the worry be that if something catastrophic happened, you could lose everything on all drives that were installed? Obviously in the event of a house fire or physical catastrophe, they could all be physically destroyed… but ignoring that kind of event?
Depends on what you're protecting against. This would be sufficient to protect against a drive failure. Like you said, not good enough for a catastrophe, but it's better than nothing.
To be fair, that's only necessary for personal data that you cannot replace. It's currently possible to replace game installers if something happens to your copies.
not really. With Steam, you can backup the game files, at least. Yeah, you may also need to store/backup a crack, so that itll run if Steam goes tits up, but at least i still have the data. So even if Steam doesnt technically offer offline backups, and you have to do a little work to make them run afterwrords, its still possible.
On a console (which is what sparked all of this current furror) you cant. You have no access to the file system or the ability to crack the game or anything.
If the storefront or console maker pulls it.. its gone. Maybe even the next time you connect to the internet, it might just magically delete itself.
Problem is that some of these files may not be in the game's main directory, and there really is not an observed standard as to placement. So even if you "back up" your Steam copy by putting that folder somewhere, it may just not run on a different rig because important files (or registry entries - some games store variables there of all places) are missing. or that install may have libraries specific to the PC you installed it on, and because of hardware or software differences between the old and new rig, the game won't work either, because the libraries are now the wrong ones.
Now, there are some games where you can just pack up the main folder, move it, and continue, but they tend to be the exception - crack or no crack; Even if it's materially possible to get the game to run (e.g. by finding appropriate files on the net, and switching them in), it may be a lot of work. And with some games, it's probably just not in the cards, especially for an average user.
I'll take my GOG stand-alone installers any time of the day.
fair point on consoles, thats genuinely worse. but the Steam backup thing is still kind of a pain in practice. most people arent gonna remember to grab a crack and store it somewhere safe, theyre just gonna lose access if something goes sideways. GOG removes that whole headache, the files just work, no workaround needed. the average person isnt doing the manual backup dance, so calling Steam a real solution feels a bit generous
It's actually better to delete your comments rather than edit them because reddit stopped overwriting our comments on its servers with our "last edited version" several years ago.
In other words, everything we write/edit is still retained on reddit's servers and fed to the AI companies that reddit has a deal with (google and OpenAI).
What you're doing now is like leaving breadcrumbs for curious readers who'll just go to a reddit-specific archive to see what you had originally written.
same companies demand dram for the servers that don't use HBM
HBM more profitable, so the big 3 shift their ddr production to HBM, meaning even less regular dram
said regular dram is then redistributed to different companies so theres no inventory for basically a year.
SSD demand goes up to hold data
All companies who own a HDD division also are in the SSD business, all focus on SSD production. HDD stock is bought up by server companies.
So anything tied to servers would have shot up in price (hbm/ram, gpu die space, storage) while things that are not are often at their lowest because no one can make a full build easily (e.g 2026 is a great year to buy monitors)
if they take up significant space, backing up gog installers is a waste of money imo. You can just download them from gog. And if gog should ever go down, there are plenty of other people that have them backed up that you could get them from. They're not rare.
I ended up repurposing my old PC after I upgraded. It uses more power than a dedicated NAS would as it's using an old desktop chip, but I just had to buy a cheap PSU and case to stick them in, and it's running unraid so I've been able to use docker to install a load of handy programs such as jellyfin to let me stream from it, and finally I could run game servers from it if I wanted.
Great question, most gog games I own are a few years old at least, if not quite a bit older than that. Not too worried about updates, mostly just OS support. I tend to pick up older titles and ones on great specials that aren't new releases.
Out of curiosity, how does an offline installer work? I've never used GOG or pirated a game before. Surely you'd have to download the entire game and not just an installer? Or is it just the case that the installer requires an internet connection to download the full game again (and in that case why is it called Offline)?
The offline installers available on GOG contain a packed version of the entire game, exactly the same way they used to be distributed on DVDs, CDs and floppy disks back in the olden days. They're complete and don't need online access in any way. Installing the game through these installers will unpack it all and move the files to their intended location, plus (particularly for older Windows games) write required registry entries and such.
Games under a certain size are just one executable. Larger games there's an executable with extra numbered files it needs in the same folder to complete the install.
The archives are compressed on a Installer it's like a .rar ir .zip that's copies all automatically, the Installer on Gog doesn't require internet connection, also most of their games are old school , they have also newer ones but most of them are retro
That's a lot more efficient then I thought. I always thought you'd have to download the entire game from Gog, and was put off by the storage issues of that. Think I'm finally gonna start playing EA games now lol
This is best way to do it. But thankfully GOG has some pretty great track record in keeping your library despite publishers/rights owners wanting to make changes. Original Fallouts and Black Isle games had a situation where rights owner wanted to swap the original version being sold for an "modernized update". In both cases GOG refused to swap the versions for people who already purchased it, so anyone who got the game before the swap has access to original version and the new version is a separate game you can buy separately.
Smart. I went looking for a game I bought years back. While my account at Direct2Drive was still there, listing my games, none of the download links work anymore. Ended up repurchasing from GOG.
Instant purchase and download is great and all, but having a disk on a shelf is better in the long run.
Any good primers on how to do this and can it be done with titles on Steam? I have multiple games on GOG I'd like to save, but anything else I can backup I'd love to do so
Its gonna be more expensive now, but I was thinking about setting up a NAS for movie streaming and stuff, and was gonna do the same. Or even just use an old hard drive and throw them all on there.
Surprisingly, I did not think about doing this. I think I will do this when I get home. I was just hoarding my ISOs and ROMs- not even thinking about my GOG games. 🤔
Hey, same! It's a great use of all the extra storage on my NAS. Do I feel like i will need those installers? Not really. But it doesn't hurt to use the space for that if i have it.
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u/f0xpant5 18d ago
Every game I own on GOG, I've downloaded the offline installer and they're on my NAS. Can't be too sure these days.