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Comment by xwowsersx | Hacker News Reader

What's my best bet for cost-effective and convenient external local storage? I have a ton of photos and large videos which are consuming tens of GBs on my main computer's hard drive. Just get a cheap thumb flash drive?

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I'd recommend a USB-connected external hard drive (not SSD). You don't have very much data, so a thumb drive could probably hold everything, but SSDs/flash aren't great for long-term data storage and will lose their data if you don't power them up and use them now and then. An actual HD doesn't have this problem, plus they're typically 1TB+ so you'd have plenty of space for future needs.

Alternatively, you could get a handful of flash thumb drives and back up onto all of them, syncing with a different one each week/month/whenever so that they're all getting continuously refreshed and you'd have snapshots in case you accidentally delete something and that deletion gets synced to the most-recent drive.

I have a synology single HDD NAS, which syncs to cloud. Its kinda slow but handy.

Which obviously means you also have to pay for cloud storage right? What cloud storage do you use?

I'm cautious so I sync to Backblaze from my Synology as well as S3 with a lifecycle rule to Glacier. You could easily just do B2, C2 or S3 depending on your needs.

Glacier. Yeah not sure if its worth it but figure its handy if there is a fire. Would be great if the family would stop taking so many photos and videos.

Yeah I have 3.5TB of photos. Backing them up redundantly is a bit of a pain but just a few external drives will do it, though requires manual syncing

Thanks.

Also...holy shit, I haven't kept up on how precipitously prices for storage have dropped. Just saw a 10 TB external drive for only $150!

Just remember, local external drives can still burn up in fires or drown in floods. I thought about this recently a lot and went with a Synology where I can have all of my data locally but backup that data to B2 (Backblaze) automatically.

That 10TB drive is 100% fake! Amazon is full of fakes. A good rule of thumb right now is $60/TB, significantly less and you're approaching fake territory.

I should be clearer - that drive is fake if it's an SSD, it's a normal price for HDDs. Cost per TB of HDD isn't linear, though, it's a bit of a bathtub based on drive capacity and feature set (e.g CMR vs SMR)

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