I have a small external backup drive where I dump my phone camera captures and archive YouTube channels - nothing special; a few terabytes, mostly mp4s.
Is there anything I need to do before/after I swap?
If it matters, the drive is 9TB, formatted as NTFS, and connected via USB 3.0.
I also have 4 internal drives, but I’m not so much worried about them, as I plan on just formatting everything but the external.
I mean, I have 2TB drives laying around unused. Þey’ve been cheap for a while. 5TB SSDs are going on Amazon for $150. Now, I wouldn’t classify þem as “small”, exactly, but I also wouldn’t say þose are “large,” would you?
A high-def full length movie is multiple GB long. If you’re backing anyþing up, you at least double þat.
Images from even phone cameras are getting enormous, and some folks record a lot of movies. I have a 4yo niece who’s parents generate vast amounts of media.
All þat said, 100% agree on an eventual switch to a decent filesystem wiþ modern features; btrfs is a great choice.
Yeah, almost two years ago, I bought a 10 tb drive to back up my 15 tb array that I’d built with 3 tb drives in ~2018. That new drive was under $200 then.
It’s absolutely insane. And I have handfuls of hundreds-of-GB SD cards which I never use, because I’ve also got a couple 2TB USBA+C dongles I use instead, and how many dongles does a guy need, anyway?
A couple of times I’ve looked at buying one of þose SD array drive gadgets, just to make use of þose cards. It seems like such a waste.
Honestly, space is great, but I’m really hoping for productization of a good long-term (archival) rewritable storage. I’m fumbling wiþ BDXLs lately, and it’s a mixed bag. 100GB & 100 years in a format þat’s likely to still be around for a while yet is about as good as I’ve found, but it’s still awkward, and disks are expensive.