Digital Data Organisation & Storage

[Nocturnal Submission]

I've been meaning to start a thread about this for a while now, even before it was touched upon on the new laptop thread, (I think it was).

I don't have a vast amount of digital data to sort and protect, a few thousand images perhaps, a handful of videos and a few score documents and spreadsheets. At present I've got the bulk of them sitting on memory sticks with a few more saved on my laptop hard-drive or as e-mail attachments. It's a right old mess.

I'm usually quite a sorted person so I'm a little surprised that I'm so disorganised when it comes to the above. So, OTF, what is your strategy in this matter, both in terms of the hardware deployed, extent of duplication and back-up, but also categorisation, for want of a better word?

[Ginger Yellow]

Photos on Google, everything else on a NAS. No particular categorisation beyond folders. Don't need to for the photos, because of Google's scary search algorithm.

[Patrick Thistle]

I literally just bought an external hard drive to store all the photos off my PC as the memory has run out. Its a 4 terabyte one. I bought it from Argos.

[Greenlander]

And I've just had to buy a USB stick for work.

We used to have loads lying around the office but not anymore.

[Ginger Yellow]

My work banned USB sticks ages ago for security reasons. They don't even work if you plug them in to a work issued machine.

[Snake Plissken]

You're never going to get it 100% correct, because people are messy.

I use OneDrive for personal stuff and sync everything to the cloud and across devices. (You get 1Tb with a paid Microsoft 365 subscription and you can use it on up to five of any combination of Mac, PC, tablet and phone.)

For the shared stuff between Mrs P and I, we have a 36Tb worth of Synology NAS where she stores her photos and documents. Our MP3s and video files are kept on there too. She has never got the hang of folders or naming conventions, but she does know to just dump stuff in there and use search/most recent files to find it.

[ursus arctos]

My work banned USB sticks ages ago for security reasons. They don't even work if you plug them in to a work issued machine.

Ours have to be encrypted using a specific protocol that basically makes them inoperative on other machines.

[Ginger Yellow]

For us it's more that they're worried people will put in infected ones. Though with the malware that tricks your PC into thinking the USB stick is a keyboard I'm not sure the policy is going to be effective any more.

[3 Colours Red]

Four external hard drives, four USB pen drives totalling about 4TB of storage. Half of that backing up the PC's main drive, the rest for extra videos/music/podcasts and ROMs and disc images to use in emulators.

Everything methodically named and placed in sub-folders within larger folders depending on file type, genre, format etc. I even use a program called Folder Marker to make them colour-coded.

I only use cloud storage for smaller files like photos and documents due to my internet still being a bit slow at the moment. Larger stuff buffers like nobody's business and downloading is a lottery no matter what browser or proxy settings I use.

[hobbes]

I literally just bought an external hard drive to store all the photos off my PC as the disk was full.

/Fixed that for you. Memory is not storage.

[San Bernardhinault]

I feel like most people don’t need NAS rather than just hard drives.

I’m paying for a few Tb of online storage but despite them having the best reviews their software just jammed up my computer and internet and it didn’t seem to work. I should go back and sort it out but haven’t had time.

[Nocturnal Submission]

NAS is network-attached storage?

[hobbes]

It is, NS. Basically a drive with a network card attached.
Although they tend to be more complicated than that having multiple drives for redundancy etc.

[beak]

Aah finally a thread that relates to my professional experience.

Two separate copies on external hard disks (get a NAS if you feel fancy), stored in separate locations. Figuring out some automatic mirrored backups will probably make your life easier. Have a plan to do regular backups at a regularity that suits yourself I guess.

If you want to paranoiacally secure about it, make sure your backing up involves some sort of checking hashes/checksums, and never trust a cloud service lest they go bust or fuck up in some other way. If you want to be doubly paranoid and have more money than sense (or enough data to warrant it) fuck off discs and get an LTO machine. Keep on top of changing file formats, and possibly have a migration strategy so you don't wake up one day and try to open a document that requires a piece of software that hasn't been used for decades and no longer runs on yer machine.

[beak]

Re: categorization I've no good advice, my only strategy is to use a rigid folder-and-file naming structure and my own (shoddy) memory, so I can't really recommend that. At work, of course, we have bespoke systems that do all this for us that are complicated enough I can only claim ignorance in so far as I'm not the mechanic, I only drive the car.

[DCI Harry Batt]

Folders and that are all old hat, these days, aren't they?

[beak]

If they're old hat, then call me a musty old trilby. If you've a bit of software running everything they'll still be getting used behind the scenes, but the stuff I receive at work is (theoretically, hopefully) organized in a standardized folder structure defined by a shadowy cabal of film producers/technicians/etc.

I use them on my own personal stuff to make sure me music is in a different place from me photos and whatnot. Would offer a better example but I'm only in this thread in the first place cos I'm into the 15th hour or what should have been a 12-hour train journey, one that is still showing little sign of reaching its destination..

[Snake Plissken]

Folders and that are all old hat, these days, aren't they?

Theoretically. The nerds/evangelists would love everything to be done via search, but that ignores two fundamental things - first that search works best when the user has put the effort into the metadata for each file and second that you are undoing four decades worth of a paradigm* that users can easily understand.


*nnngh

[DCI Harry Batt]

It is understood, but it's pretty rubbish, isn't it? Very one-dimensional.

[ad hoc]

But search works regardless of whether there is a filing system. So, why not have both to satisfy everyone's needs? My own filing system is far from comprehensive and very very far from perfect, but i;m glad I have it, though i also use search too.

[ursus arctos]

Quite

[Fussbudget]

Fair play, that is one sexy thread title

[Nocturnal Submission]

Fair play, that is one sexy thread title

Are you getting fresh with me?