I have about 500GB of data (photos, documents, videos etc.) that I have accumulated over the years. Currently, I keep them on my computer and rsync all additions / changes once a month or so to an external hard drive. Do I need to be worried about data loss (sectors going bad, bit rot, bit flip, whatever it is called)?
To clarify,
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None of this is commercially important; I just don’t want to get into a situation where I look up an old family photo or video twenty years down the line and it has got corrupted.
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Both my computer and the external HD are HDDs. They are fairly cheap here (and very cheap if second hand). Buying SSDs or dedicated hardware would be expensive.
6$ is about 500 rupees. I can get another HDD for double that price.
I do copy some important files to Google Drive, but I don’t pay for it, and I don’t rely on it.
If you don’t pay for it, you can’t rely on it
Right, which is why I prefer to rely on local backups. Much cheaper in the long run.
It’s always a good idea to have an off-site backup (e.g. in case of fires, robbery, natural disasters, etc). If you prefer to manage them yourself, an option is to find someone else who also needs an off-site backup and exchange disk space. You do your off-site on their machine, and they do theirs on yours. With external HDDs, you can just have someone else hold on to it for you at a different location. You can come up with fancier schemes to reduce the chances of data loss or to make the process simpler if you care to do so.
I used to work with a guy who was religious about backing up his files to an external drives. Until someone broke into his house and stole his computer AND his external drives. He lost everything.