 Hey guys, I'm just stopping by the office here late this afternoon to pick up some stuff that I need to take home And I thought I'd make a quick vlog style video where I just record something quick and dirty on my phone One of the things I wanted to talk to you guys about was storage and specifically what I want to talk to you guys about is Data storage for the long term people often ask me about backing up data what do I use for backing up my stuff and one of the things that I use is for short term storage a Device I have with me all the time is I have this one terabyte External SSD that I'm actually picking up here today because I actually use that to transfer data from this workstation in my office To other machines, so I want to take my video files with me what I do So I put them on that one terabyte external SSD because I need a big drive to move video files around because some of these video files that I create Are very large Sometimes I record single clips, you know that are you know 10 15 minutes in length that are you know more than a gig in size And if I have a lot of them in a project, you know I need something bigger than a flash drive USB stick typically not gonna work SD cards most of them are you know 32 gigs or smaller and they're not gonna work for backing up a lot of video files So typically I keep that one terabyte SSD drive with me for short term just moving stuff around now short term backups Also, I would probably use my SD drives I've got a couple of external SSD drives and that's okay for the short term But I understand something as a long-time computer user that if you're young You know, you probably have never had a drive fail as somebody in my mid 40s I know something that you know again a lot of the younger computer users out there don't know is that drives don't last They fail all of them all your hard drives all your SSD drives all your SD cards They're going to fail they don't last if you will be extremely lucky if you make it a decade With any drive in any computer you have and that's a fact One of the things about spinning hard drives is they're spinning parts in them, right? They're spinning magnetic parts in these drives and because of they're the wear and tear on them because they have moving parts They will eventually fail also the magnetism It loses its magnetism over time and after a few years the drive just doesn't work anymore That's just a fact with hard drive. So hard drive is not a long-term way to store data Now if you Weren't using the drive, you know, because it's not getting where obviously if you're not actually using it if you wanted to You know put some important data on a hard drive and put it in a closet somewhere And you know, you might get a decade of storage out of it Maybe 15 years if you're really really lucky, but that's that's pushing it I wouldn't trust a hard drive for long-term storage Nothing more than about five years really and a SSD drive same thing This is again short-term storage if I had something on SSDs, you know I wouldn't trust them for more than a few years because You'll be extremely lucky to make a SSD drive last ten years because they corrupt over time They don't have the same magnetism problem that hard drives have but they they're Some kind of technology with electrons that move around in them. Anyway, they corrupt over time They lose their magic, right? So you get about a decade out of spinning hard drives and SSD Drives any flash memory, you know SD cards in VME drives. None of that stuff is long-term storage Don't think of you're not going to put family photos family videos any of your family Memories your precious memories on these devices and think you're going to get them in ten years You'll be lucky if they make it ten years You're not going to get them in 20 years 20 years. These devices are corrupted. They're not going to work anymore 50 years down the road Just forget about it. That's not what these are for your best bet for long-term Archival of your data and people laugh at me when I show this because I've shown you guys this on video a number of times Are these optical drives? I still have CD DVD writers I have Blu-ray writers and those are your best bet for long-term Data storage and I strongly advise you guys to go out and buy these devices You can still buy DVD writers and Blu-ray writers. They're not very expensive and the disc They're not very expensive and a standard CD or DVD If you're not using it if it's strictly for storage It's not a movie DVD right that you're playing all the time it gets scratched up and it quits working No, no, no, you just burn a whole bunch of data to a DVD and put it away That's easily going to last a decade. You might get two decades out of it Now CDs and DVDs they do corrupt over time because they're not very well made as far as Protecting them from the elements and they just degrade over time Now Blu-rays have a special coating on them that actually protects them a little better Your standard Blu-ray might survive more than a couple of decades It might, you know, it might be around in 30 years Who knows but they make special DVDs and special Blu-rays that have extra Protection built into them as far as a coating around them that allows them to survive Potentially a hundred years, you know some of these I've seen special Blu-rays that they sell. I believe the company is M disc They claim that they make one that they claim might survive up to a thousand years in storage So if you've got something really precious that you want to say for the long term I strongly recommend investing in a Blu-ray writer and some of these archival Blu-ray discs Now these Blu-ray discs are not expensive either. That's the great thing a Blu-ray disc They're typically either sold in 25 gigabytes or 50 gigabyte disc by the 50 gig disc They're like two dollars a piece and I'm talking about for the archival Protection disc. So these are really cheap options. They're your best bang for your buck And that's the only thing I would consider as far as long-term storage One other thing you need to consider is don't just save all of your files on these discs and think you're okay You also have to really think about the format you save stuff in because let's take images You've got all these pictures that you've saved And maybe you play around in some proprietary image editor with your images Maybe you play around with the adobe creative suite with some of your Images and some of your movies and things like that and you save these things in some weird adobe only proprietary format Well, guess what in 10 years You'll be very lucky if you can still open those files in 20 years. I doubt it, right? It's like almost no chance in 50 years. It's a zero chance Do not save anything in any proprietary format. Make sure whether it's music or movies or images or actual text You know, do not save that stuff in a proprietary format because you know a few decades from now There's absolutely no chance you will ever open that file So if you're doing anything in text, make sure it's standard plain text, you know and see text Don't music is the same way. There's so many open audio formats Make sure you save your audio files in one of the open formats. Don't save it in some weird Apple only Apple music store format. It's not going to work in a couple of decades You're gonna you're gonna regret that stuff. So always And I know I preach this stuff about free and open source versus proprietary all the time But when you're talking long term archival storage of your data, it's something you really need to take into account Anyway ran over guys peace