[SOLVED] What is the best/efficient/popular way to store media? (Content Creators)

[aronbchek]

I am a small time content creator. Nothing big budget films or the like, but I collect alot of footage from work and personally and it accumulates disk space. My system of storage NEEDS some WORK. I currently just have an old external holding a backup of my working hard drive. With a harddrive bay collecting some redundant files. Essentially its a big nightmare.

I've gone down a rabbit hole of ideas, work arounds, and solutions, I just can't pin point where to invest my money into.

I know there are cloud services, NAS builds and buys, or collection of harddrives in a neat and orderly fashion. I'm curious as to what some more organized, professional people do as their solutions.

I want to keep my precious memories of course, I know practically once the job is done, purging the files might be the most logical reason, but I am haunted by the fact that there may be another edit or one clip that I might have needed from footage I shot long ago. What are some of your suggestions on how to store lots of data, long term, in a cost effective way?

 

[DSzymborski]

Really, the most straightforward way, simplest way (NAS builds are great, but there's a bit more work involved) is to simply have an automated backup to a secondary large HDD for bulk data daily using software (I use Bvckup 2, but there are lots of other choices) and a cloud backup for the most important data. Pretty much all quality backup software these days will only backup the unchanged files and using delta copying, can even back up just the portions of changed files that were in fact changed.

Personally speaking, I have two 12 TB HDs connected to my main rig (one internal, one external, the latter so that I can simply grab it and go should the need arise) with the assorted daily drives backing up their contents every night. Also on the 12 TB HDs are disk image of my OS drive, which is taken once a week. This is also all done the same to my home file server and to my cloud backup. The most crucial files, I also keep on an encrypted flash drive I store in my car and another encrypted flash drive I have in my bank vault.

 

[USAFRet]

Either a commercial NAS (QNAP or Synology) or an external drive or two.