Storage advice: hard drive vs. cloud. Thoughts?

backpackcrew

backpackcrew

Member
Hi everyone,

I'd love to have your thoughts on the use of cloud and hard drives.
At first, I thought that my 2TB hard drive would be enough but I end up having to delete my raw footage all the time (not enough space left) and only being able to keep the edited versions.
Having to constantly delete stuff to make space is not super convenient.

I originally thought about buying a second hard drive but I'm now wondering if a cloud based solution (i.e. Google Drive, Dropbox...) wouldn't be better.
Have any of you faced the same problem? Do you guys have a strong opinion on the matter? Did you keep on buying hard drives or did the cloud solution provide more convenience?

Thanks in advance for the tips!
 
My data needs seem a lot smaller than yours but let me give you my input on this because I recently researched and implemented a process for this.

I recently bought a laptop and I wanted a simple way to synchronise data between that laptop and my desktop PC (without messing around with USB keys and other manual processes)

I had 3 requirements:
1)Backup of data on laptop and PC
2)Synchronisation of data between laptop and PC
3)Encryption of data (in case of theft of the PC or laptop)


Both my PC and laptop run windows 10 and have 250Gb SSD drives.

I use GoogleDrive to automatically synchronise my data between the PC and the laptop. So if I'm out at an internet café doing some work, all changes (creation of files, modifications to files and deletes to files) are all synchronised to the cloud. Then when I get back home and switch on my PC, the cloud syncronises with the PC. That means the PC and laptop are always in synch, the same data on both machines without having to worry about it. That service costs me about $3 per month for 100Gb of data. Just a heads up - Google drive (and other solutions like DropBox) are more of a synchronisation service. They're not a full backup service. Ex: If I delete a file off my laptop, it will delete it off the cloud, which will consequently delete it off the PC. If I realise that was a mistake, then it is only possible to retrieve an archived version of it on the cloud for up to 30 days but after that period, it's too late. So it's not a true backup / archive. GoogleDrive is good. I'd recommend it. It's a huge timesaver having all my data in synch automatically.


For proper backup, I simply use an external flashdrive and twice a week, I copy all my data from both PC and laptop to that flashdrive. I keep several weeks of previously backed up data before deleting it. The backup is in case of hard drive failure and / or theft of the PC and laptop so that I can restore my data easily if necessary.

It's important to understand that DropBox and GoogleDrive store unencrypted data. So if they get hacked, then all your private data is there for everyone to see! I therefore use a 3rd party piece of commercial software called BoxCryptor which encrypts data on the fly before uploading it to the cloud. You can also encrypt local files and directories too. I use this to encrypt my data on my laptop, PC and the cloud. If someone steals my laptop and tries to open my data, they just get a load of garbage characters on the screen. It's a bit fiddly to set it up but after that, it works very well.
 
I've currently just got a 500gb HDD for my videos, however I don't do too many, they aren't huge, and I purge older videos. I'm planning on getting a 3tb HDD sometime soon, and using my current 1tb for videos. (Ironically I am running out of room on my main disk, not my recording disk)
If you're only using the videos on the one machine, then more disks is your best option.

Couple 3 or 6tb HDD's probably in RAID 1 if your videos are pretty important to keep, or in a RAID 0 for better performance and capacity, however that increases your chance of data loss as you're now relying on two mechanical disks for one set of data.
If you want to have them network accessible, however, then setting up a sort of NAS box, either bought or built, with a bunch of HDD's in would probably be your best bet. You'd need a decent router to have good transfer speeds, though, and you'd have to every so often transfer older footage over to it.
This would be infinitely faster than something like Dropbox, though, as that is limited by your upload speed, whereas a local NAS is limited by your network cards, cables, and router. (Which is going to be a looooot faster)
 
Personally, the only benefit of cloud is having it anywhere you go, you can easily fix that by taking an external harddrive. But I use a laptop on which i keep 1 weeks worth of video before deleting them.
 
My OS and games run on a 120GB SDD and I store my video files on a 1TB HDD. It's honestly not all that bad in my opinion. The only problem I've encountered so far is having to force myself to finish editing videos because I'm out of storage space. I agree, It is annoying, but I learn to cope with it.
 
Use a video compressor such as H.264 encoder. This heavily compresses your recordings without sacrificing too much on quality.

If less than a minute videos take several GBs, it's time to change.
 
Thanks a lot for all the answers guys, really helpful. I'll probably get an additional hard drive or change my workflow (Crown's approach is really interesting in that regard).
 
I have 6 2TB harddrives and a few old 500gb harddrives. I store everything externally. Even though external harddrives eventually fail, I still feel safer with them over the cloud..
 
I think the value of an external hard drive is better than the cloud.

Currently, I pay $9.99 a month for Microsoft Office 365 which also comes with 1 TB of cloud storage for up to 5 users (which currently is one for me, one for my wife, son, and daughter, and one empty slot available).

Comparably, a 1 TB drive is $55 and a 5 TB drive is $120 and can be used indefinitely. I would definitely stick with this and only use the cloud for things you wanna access from multiple devices.
 
If you are torn between the 2 simply get something like a WD cloud. Its an external drive that also allows you to access it over your network. However to be honest..I have one but I mainly only use the external hard drive connected to my computer. Good luck
 
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