When I was in school, I had a couple two-terabyte drives that I would go between, and then after
I left school, I got a four-terabyte desktop drive that you'd have to plug it in the wall,
which was a little annoying. And then my biggest upgrade to that point was I got an 8-bay NAS, and I filled it with
four-terabyte drives full, which is all I could afford at the time, because four-terabyte
drives were really expensive back in the day, and all of it is full.
I probably have a couple other loose 512 drives just randomly around, but nothing I used actively,
so those are all things I used actively. And I have maybe a terabyte left on my NAS, and some of the stuff that was loose on those
other drives I have backed up to my NAS, but yeah, that's where I'm at with that.
Most of what is stored is footage that I shot in school, footage I shot after school, footage
I've shot here that I just wanted to keep for myself.
It's like all video. And I think as soon as we actually switch to the red cameras, I have a bunch of stuff
that I just like, when we went to Banff, I shot a bunch of just like scenery stuff that
I took home as well just for fun, and all those files are gigantic, and I've never consolidated
them. I just have every raw clip I've ever shot. So I've kept everything deleted nothing when it comes to footage I've shot, and then of
course there's a lot of photos from like trips and stuff that I've done for this job, just
traveling for fun. Every photo I've ever taken in my life is on that NAS.
So I have my NAS set up in a RAID 5 with a 2 drive parody, but I kind of wish I did it
with a 1 drive parody because I would get an extra 4 terabytes out of it, and that might
last like just a little bit longer because I'm really on edge when it comes to data right
now. I have no, I mean like working with just external drives has always kind of sucked, and I knew
it was a bad solution, but I also couldn't afford anything better, and NASs were like
kind of foreign to me at the time that I was doing that.
I wish my file structures were better. I think I wish my, immediately when I set up my NAS, and I told myself I was going to
do this, set up a like logical file structure that you can carry on through years, and it
will scale well. I didn't do that, and now I am probably five years into owning this NAS, and it's just
a mess. Like I'll go through my folders, I'm like, I kind of sort of have a system of like, I'll
date things, but then I don't know what's in them, so or like I'll label it, like I'll
shoot, I'll do a photo shoot with a person, and I'm like, I'll put their name there.
But it doesn't tell me what the shoot was, why I did it, like, I have no discernible
information in the file structure, which makes it hard, because if I go through everything,
I'm like, what am I going to find? It's like kind of like a lottery.
I am ashamed to admit this, but I have not backed up a single piece of data to another
place. I mean, technically, all the loose drives that I have, I have backed up to my NAS, but my
NAS is also a single point of failure.
And it's also a lot, like four terabytes times eight in RAID 5, two drive, what's, yeah,
I have 24 terabytes, 24 terabytes that I have not backed up because it's expensive to backup
media. I don't have the money to just spend on another 24 terabytes of backup when I could use that
24 terabytes of backup that I could just put more data on.
I understand that logically, I should have a backup, but who can afford that?
And cloud storage is also expensive. I don't want to be paying monthly for 24 terabytes.
Also downloading it and like access is a kind of an issue you'd have to solve.
So no, no backups.
I thought about this for a really long time, and I'll talk about it in the video. I'm sure I have if you've watched that video, but I wrestled with myself.
Do I take what's on my 24 terabyte NAS with eight bays?
Do I rip it all off to something like the server? Because Lyon said I could just do that temporarily and then fill that eight bay with brand new
drives and then remove the data back onto the new bay.
Well, considering how much time, effort that that whole process would take, I instead,
I'm buying a new five bay NAS and filling it with 16 terabyte drives, which I admit
is only going to delay my problem that I currently have because I will still have no backup.
And I will also eventually run out of space, but it is more space.
It is about 80 terabytes. And I'm probably going to run it in a rate five again with a one drive parody even though,
because it's only a five bay, not an eight bay. So like there's less drives to fail, you know?
But I'm hoping that this will last me at least another five years.
But at the rate that I've been using data and eating up the NAS, I've honestly stopped
shooting as many photos because I'm like, I literally have nowhere to put these.
Like up my, my Angel Bird two terabyte portable drive that I forgot to mention in all of this
that I used to just work off of. Like whenever I'm doing an active photo shoot that I'm editing, I'll work off that drive.
It's full. And I have nowhere to put the data because my NAS is basically full.
Because like I have one terabyte on my NAS, two terabytes on this drive, so I can't put
the whole drive on my NAS if I wanted to.
What would you do if you lost everything tomorrow?
I'd probably cry because it is nearly 10 years of work and memories and things that
I've done that I like have never even seen, like stuff I've done, I've never even posted
like photos that I love that no one, but me and my, maybe my family have seen.
So that stuff is irreplaceable, which is why I understand the importance of a backup.
But it's like, I have so much data that is just accumulating.
I'm perpetuating this problem by getting a new NAS and having no backup.
But I also need the data because I'm continually making more data.
I probably could delete some stuff. Like I probably don't need the raw footage of everything I've ever shot, ever.
But that also takes a lot of effort and I need to sit down for like maybe days and go through
it all. That's nine years of stuff.
Who has time for that?
Okay, so my main drive I believe is two four terabyte drives or no, sorry, two two terabyte
NVMe drives in RAID zero.
Then I have a two terabyte NVMe cash drive.
Then I have, am I counting USB drives like, okay, I got a 16 Gigabyte USB drive.
I got a four terabyte game drive and then I got another four terabyte game drive.
And then I got a one terabyte archive of sorts.
It's an older SSD. I got another four terabyte backup drive.
I got a 32 gig USB stick.
I got a four terabyte again SSD.
I got another two terabyte SSD.
Another, this is becoming worker.
A 64 gig USB drive again, a two terabyte mobile, that's the, oh yeah, that's my, like
the only R disk drive I have, a two terabyte like Western digital hard drive.
Another two terabyte NVMe and another two terabyte SSD.
And I believe that on my network, because on top of the two drives that I have idle
in that computer, because I don't have the PCI lanes for, because I'm an idiot, and
I sold my tread ripper, I have, what is it, like two, two 40 drives.
They're both SSDs still, but yeah, two, two hundred and forty gig.
It's like from the build I had from back when I think I started talking with Linus.
So you're talking about 20, 14, 20, they're old Seagate drives.
So you mentioned a few things as you were listing all of those off. What's like the primary usage of all this storage?
I do not, so I keep my old like graphic design files, old pictures, old video game assets
that I made, just like I've been continuously holding onto that for, I don't know, the better
part of now it's maybe 14 years, and just my video game collection is all downloaded
and accessible on two of those drives because four terabytes is not enough these days, I
guess, for all the free games that Epic just dumps on you, plus like whatever old stuff
I used to buy. Are you one of those guys who goes and downloads every free game?
Oh, yeah. I try, I try to, I've been trying to try most of them recently.
Uh, yeah, other than that, I have like, it's not that big.
I mean, we have access to a lot more music with streaming these days, but I had like
a hundred and twenty gig, I think, music library back in the day.
The reason I have so many SSDs to begin with is I had a plan for a just mass storage server
and it was supposed to be kind of mostly like, I don't know, 14 TB, 12 TB hard disk drives
and these SSDs, and reasons I sort of gave up on that sort of goal, it's just I didn't
need it, I never needed it.
So what I do anything different, I wouldn't have bought those drives.
SSDs weren't cheap back then.
They're like, they're all basically eight sixties and some crucial drives.
So and the NVMe drives are all like nine seventies and nine sixties.
You can, if you want to look back and see how much those used to cost, yeah.
Do you have any backups?
The backups would be on site and they would be basically just identical drives not being
used as much. So as I said, I have like a, one of those drives is just a 14 TB 860 SSD that serves
as the backup for the rate configuration.
That backup is not well set up. It's just backing up basic files.
I haven't had problems, maybe it's, I don't know, maybe it's going to fail at some point.
I don't know. My important files are not on my Windows setup and I have, given that I have many SSDs and
that I have an abundance of SSD storage, I have copies of those archival materials
on multiple drives right now.
That being said, if one of them were to get shorted by say a rogue PSU, I don't have a
Gigabyte PSU, but yeah, it would kill all my data, which is great.
Speaking of that, what would you do if you lost everything tomorrow?
Oh, it'd probably be fine. I like it's, it doesn't matter, almost lost most of it actually.
I can't remember, but I think no, I didn't have a raid failure.
Something happened with one of my drives that, so I had everything organized as someone
would in, well, you know, a decent folder structure, you have your portfolio there,
you have your music there, and I, yeah, I don't remember what happened, but basically
I've had to recover the files and in recovering the files, I lost the folder structure.
So right now it's just a mess of files. Well more or less, I did like some sorting, but it's still like not as anywhere as granular
as it used to be. I have a lot of unnamed PSDs from like my texturing slash doing websites days that
are just scattered now, at least I still have thumbnails, so I can sort of figure out what
they are. But also, why do I hold on to this, like it's not like anyone cares about the websites
I used to do, like it's just, like, it's like holding on to physical good, it's not like
it doesn't do anything for me, it's my legacy, but then I pay for a website, like, what the
f***, like, it doesn't go on there. I'm a data hoarder, it's Jamie, I'm doing my interview, goodbye.
Okay, so there's an 8TB drive that's about, I don't know, like a third, maybe two thirds
full, why would I want to do that? Anyway, so I got an 8TB drive, I think there's about two or three terabytes on it right now.
Then I've got a 3TB drive, that's about a quarter of the way, maybe half of the way full,
it used to be all the way full, then I moved it over to the 8TB drive, mostly it's just
music in my downloads folder on that one now.
And then the other drives, every other drive in that computer has games on it.
Because I used to have a data cap, so my data cap was like 500GB a month, and if you went
over that, it was like $10 a GB or something like that.
And so if I went over, it was like the end of the world.
So I used to download games and then never delete them.
But one of those drives in there is like 15 years old.
So if it ever dies, I don't know what I would do.
And then that 3TB drive is one of those western digital caviar greens, they don't even make
the caviar green anymore. Well, I got those two NVMe drives in it, one is a 500GB and then the other one is like
a 1TB I think. That has games on it, the 1TB has games on it.
Yeah, the only thing about the NVMe drives is that if I have the one in the bottom in
there, it turns it from a x16 slot, from my graphics card into a x8 slot and it disables
all the rest of the SATA slots on it, because I don't have enough PCI Express Lens, it's
a B450 chipset. So what do you use all of these drives for?
Game storage mostly, and then some 100% legal music in movies.
You know what? It's sort of like A-Primes computer, it's just a collection of drives I've had over
the years. There used to be more drives in it, but one of them died.
So I bought the Western Digital Blue in a pair at the same time.
So it was like when 1TB drives were just becoming affordable, and I bought them together, and
they used to be like RAID 1 maybe together, but one of them died and I just kept on with
the other one, and it's been going strong for like, like I said, almost 15 years now,
or maybe a little less than that. Do you have any backups at all?
Oh no. How would I do that?
It's just games. If I lost the games, now I don't have a data cap, and I have gigabit internet, I would
just download them again. What would you do if you lost everything tomorrow?
I don't know, start all over again. Probably wouldn't do anything better than that.
Maybe I should back things up. If I was smart, I'd probably build a NAS or something like that, and put it in my hall
closet. Man, I have like a one bedroom apartment. If I start filling it up full of hard drives, it's just going to sound like a data center
in there, right? So, no problem.
Start backing things up to DVDs or something like that. Remember that?
DVD backups?