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| Porn Users Forum » Porn Storage |
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| 12-12-18 02:11pm - 2202 days | Original Post - #1 | |
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dracken (0)
Active User  Posts: 29 Registered: Aug 01, '09 Location: Chicago |
Porn Storage I mostly keep my collection on a few local hard drives, but I had one fail recently taking with it a lot of videos and now I'm left wondering what would be a better backup solution. So I'm gonna ask here if anyone has any preferences. I know I could buy a subscription to one of the cloud providers, but I probably have around 5 tb of images and videos that I like to access remotely via Plex (mostly on my phone). That didn't really work well with AWS or Zoolz, not sure if Google drive or Dropbox would be better. The other alternative I guess would be to buy a small NAS server and host my "private" cloud, but I'm not sure how expensive that would get. Any opinions? | |
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| 12-12-18 05:26pm - 2201 days | #2 | |
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rearadmiral (0)
Active User Posts: 1,453 Registered: Jul 16, '07 Location: NB/Canada |
I know this doesn't answer your question, but bear with me. I'm firmly into middle-age and don't trust the cloud yet. And with a collection probably north of 25TB (I'm more of a hoarder than a collector) I'm not sure the cloud would be a viable option. I have multiple external drives that I use as for my primary collection. Most of them are WD 2TB but a couple are newer and have 4TB. I also have a bunch of the WD "My Book" drives. Those are the ones that are physically bigger, have more storage, require AC power and tend to be cheaper than the small ones. I have enough of those to have a complete backup of my entire collection. I guess it would depend on the size of your collection and how much you trust the cloud, but consider WD's My Book drives for a backup source. They're up to 6TB now and here in Canada they're somewhere around $130 so they'd probably be around $100 or so in the US. Good luck! | |
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| 12-13-18 11:58am - 2201 days | #3 | |
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dracken (0)
Active User Posts: 29 Registered: Aug 01, '09 Location: Chicago |
Thank you for the advice. I did think about buying some external hard-drives when they went on sale over black Friday, do you hook them up periodically to back up everything or keep them hooked up at all times? I also want my collection relatively easy to access so I guess this approach would be just for backup, I'd still have to keep everything on my main pc, which wouldn't be the worse. | |
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| 12-13-18 01:07pm - 2201 days | #4 | |
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rearadmiral (0)
Active User Posts: 1,453 Registered: Jul 16, '07 Location: NB/Canada |
^ It depends on how much porn I've been downloading but I usually back things up monthly. But keep in mind that if I have a membership to a few sites that may only mean that the drives with new scenes from those sites on them need to be backed up. It isn't a big job to back things up monthly. For me I added an extra element of protection that may not be available to everyone. I have my backup drives stored somewhere else. If my house burns down then the only hardship is replacing the hardware since the data is all backed up. So the answer to your question is that I only plug those in when I'm backing things up. In years of using the WD drives (the small ones with no AC power) I've only ever had one fail. It happened to be the drive with some of my favourite stuff on it. With the backup it was just an annoyance - I had to buy a new drive, bring the backup drive home and plug them both in and let them run overnight. Without the backup it would have been a crisis. Depending on how much data you have the drives could be cheaper. | |
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| 12-13-18 03:33pm - 2201 days | #5 | |
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pinkerton (0)
Active User  Posts: 151 Registered: Jan 13, '07 Location: UK |
Unless you have broadband internet access that provides upload speeds well above 100Mbps, then using the Cloud isn't a realistic option unless you're willing to wait many months for your terabytes of porn to upload to cloud backup. As already mentioned in this thread, you need to back up your collection to backup disks but do you then backup your backup disks? Obviously the answer is 'yes' but doing that can be a huge expense. I have my collections over the years stored on various disks that I no longer frequently use, so for example, I've upgraded a few internal HDDs on my desktop PC and used those HDDs for porn storage and I now have a number of "old" HDDs storing my porn which I don't store locally any longer than a few months. Obviously I should backup those old HDDs to be on the safe side but I guess a cost effective option would be to invest in one large HDD and go through my collection across those old disks and backup those that are particular favourites. The question for me is: how long will a bunch of old HDDs retain data for whilst stored in a box in my attic? | |
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| 12-14-18 04:34am - 2200 days | #6 | |
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rearadmiral (0)
Active User Posts: 1,453 Registered: Jul 16, '07 Location: NB/Canada |
^ I hadn't thought of factoring in the upload speed. That's a good point. As for backing up the backups, I have my fingers crossed that it's a one-in-a-million chance that a primary drive and a corresponding backup drive would fail at the same time. I don't re-purpose old drives as backups though; I buy new drives. But a new drive is just as likely to fail as an older one... For me, apart from not trusting the cloud yet, the cost of backup storage is the deciding factor. I bought my first 250MB external drive 12+ years ago and now that same price gets me 6TB. The low price of data storage has changed me from a porn collector to a porn hoarder (with a 100% backed-up collection). | |
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| 12-14-18 09:50am - 2200 days | #7 | |
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dracken (0)
Active User Posts: 29 Registered: Aug 01, '09 Location: Chicago |
The internet speed is a good point. I have Comcast and I'm pretty sure they cap my usage anyway, so that would be a no go. I'm curious how do you organize your external hdd's? I've had a few drives in the past, but would always forget what was on them and accidentally back up the same stuff twice. Come to think of it this might be an organization issue on my part more than anything. If I had an up to date list I could probably only back up the stuff I really cared about and is hard to get again. I take it no one has looked into NAS's ? Over on reddit people rave about Synology as a solution for storage issues. | |
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| 12-15-18 08:24pm - 2198 days | #8 | |
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pinkerton (0)
Active User Posts: 151 Registered: Jan 13, '07 Location: UK |
They’re good but also check out QNAP devices - I have one but not for porn storage. | |
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| 12-16-18 07:42am - 2198 days | #9 | |
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rearadmiral (0)
Active User Posts: 1,453 Registered: Jul 16, '07 Location: NB/Canada |
It does sound like the first issue you need to resolve is how your collection is organized if it already isn't. This probably depends on how much porn you have too. I have 24 WD external drives so organizing the stuff is essential. There are lots of options, and probably a lot of them better than what I do, but I started organizing my collection this way back when VHS tapes were the 'in' technology. All I use is a Word document. Well, two Word docs to be precise. My organizing starts with how I name the files I download. I create a separate folder for each DVD (if I'm downloading from a DVD-based site like Evil Angel) or the site name. Then I download the scenes into that folder naming it for the female star(s). That’s pretty simple but it's worked for me for years. My primary Word document has a table for each drive. The table has three columns. The first column is the DVD or site name, the middle column lists the female models in that folder on the drive and the last column gives the drive number. That last column is redundant since I group the tables by drive but it's a hold-over from when I had just one table and alphabetized the whole thing. It eventually got so big that the alphabetizing tool in Word wouldn't work so I opted to break it down by drive. (That document is currently 235 pages long.) A second way that I organize my collection exists within the primary structure. As with any porn collector there are certain things that I really like so I use a simple way to flag those scenes. For some reason I like sex scenes on boats so if I download one I put it in the appropriate DVD or site folder and name it for the model and then I include "check boat" in the file name. The word "check" acts as an easily searchable word. I can plug in any drive and do a search for "check" and it'll dig out all my favourite scenes on that drive. I follow that up by having a separate Word document for my favourite scenes. That's a three-column table as well. The first column is the DVD or site name, the second is the model name and a brief description of why I flagged it (it's something simple like "Lily Adams - first anal). That way if I want to see a specific thing I can just do a Word search within the document. I can search 'first anal' and the list will show all those that I've flagged. The key is being disciplined to catalogue the scenes frequently and to use the same descriptors. My system isn't fancy but it works. Let’s say that I want to watch a Megan Rain scene. All I have to do is open the primary list and search “Megan Rain” and I can click through to each entry. Once I find one I want to see the list tells me what drive it’s on. Or if I want to watch a scene from Holed I can just search “Holed” and see what drive I need to plug in. Or, let’s say I really want to see a Megan Rain scene where she rims a guy. Rimming is something I track in my favourites list so I can go to that and search “Megan Rain.” There will be multiple entries but since I include rimming on my favourites list I can easily click through and see that I have ten scenes where Megan rims the guy. I find the one I want to watch and my list also tells me what drive I need to watch that scene. As for backing up my primary drives, the backups are simply a mirror image of the primary drive. If I download a few scenes from DVDs from Evil Angel I first put them in a main folder that indicates to me that they haven't been added to my lists or backed up yet. Once I add them to the list and back them up I move them into the main folder on the drive. If I rejoin a site I simply create a folder outside the primary one that I label as needing to be added to the lists and backed up. That would be something like "Add to True Anal.” Once or twice a month I take a bit of time and update my lists and back up the new stuff and then move it into the primary folder on each drive. Not to get too anal on you, but I also keep a Word table of sites I have and have had memberships to. I originally started that list back in 2012 because I had lost track of a couple of memberships and got frustrated digging around in emails trying to find information on them so I could cancel them. That document has seven columns – site name. join date, username/password, biller, cancel date (I list that five days before the rebilling date), cancelled (where I confirm the date I actually cancelled it) and comments (where I put a membership number and other comments that I may want to refer to if I ever rejoin). I should also add that I put the drive number in brackets with the site name. For example, “Amateur Allure (17)” so I know what drive to plug in when I rejoin that site. That way I don’t have Amateur Allure scenes scattered all through my collection. They’re all together on drive 17. After I cancel a membership I highlight the row in red so I know at a glance that it’s cancelled. After the membership expires I cut and paste the row to the bottom of the document. My membership list has several advantages. The primary one is it allows me to see at a glance what memberships I have and, more important, it allows me to quickly check if I need to cancel anything to avoid rebilling if I don’t want that. A second advantage is that it allows me to see when I joined a site in the past. For example, I can use a word search and see that the last time I joined Tushy was on August 5, 2018 and I cancelled it on August 31. When I rejoin I’ll know that I’ve already downloaded everything I want prior to September 5 so I only have to go back to that date. And I’ll also know at a glance that when I rejoin Tushy I need to plug in drive 21 because that’s where my Tushy collection is. I’d plug in drive 21, create a folder called “Add to Tushy” and then start searching and downloading scenes from early September to now. Then at some point I’d add them to my primary list, add any favourites to my favourites list, back them up and move them to the primary Tushy folder on that drive. Yes, I’m a bit obsessed but to be honest, the cataloguing is a lot of fun for me. And given the size of my collection there is no way I could just dump random scenes on a drive and have no organization. (Not to drag this out any longer, but starting a few years ago I occasionally go through my collection and delete stuff I don’t watch. That frees up space so I don’t have to buy new drives very often. Once I cull my collection I need to update my lists to remove any listings of the deleted scenes. The final thing I do is delete the culled stuff from my backup drives.) Hmmm… this was a longer post than I expected. I’ll be interested to see if anyone else weighs in on how they organize their stuff. | |
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| 12-17-18 11:21am - 2197 days | #10 | |
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Colm4 (0)
Active User  Posts: 117 Registered: Sep 22, '07 Location: Holland |
I started using a seperate external for each niche. Lately I've been into softcore, so I bought a 2 TB just for that. I have seperate drives for gonzo, lesbian, etc. On those drives I have them ordered on which I like most. Like folder 1 are my most awesome scenes, folder 4 is stuff I don't care much for but still don't want to delete. I'm not a hoarder and only keep what I really like. So I only have about 1-2 TB for each niche. I back them all up so I have copies of each. I don't have anything on my pc. I'm too afraid, if the pc fails, the repairman finds it. I don't have anything illigal, just don't want the embarrasment. | |
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| 12-17-18 04:41pm - 2196 days | #11 | |
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rearadmiral (0)
Active User Posts: 1,453 Registered: Jul 16, '07 Location: NB/Canada |
I've been contemplating something similar but haven't done it yet. The closest I've come to that is during my last major overhaul I compiled all of the scene from one site that were spread across multiple drives on one. The idea of having one drive with all my favourites is something I've thought of though. The only downside to that is that I regularly watch obscure stuff buried in my collection that then becomes a favourite. If I had a drive just for current favourites I'd probably stop exploring the far corners of my collection. | |
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| 12-24-18 03:48pm - 2190 days | #12 | |
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superjank (0)
Active User Posts: 25 Registered: Nov 16, '16 Location: Florida |
One route is to invest in SSDs (Solid-State Drives). They are essentially flash drives with large amounts of storage. Since they don't have any moving parts (as opposed to a regular HDD) they are much less likely to fail. The only downside is their cost. If you want one with a decent amount of storage, you'll be shelling out quite a bit. | |
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| 01-01-19 07:56am - 2182 days | #13 | |
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skippy (0)
Active User  Posts: 78 Registered: May 19, '07 Location: out there |
SSD drives have a limited number of reads and writes so although they are are solid state and will never fail mechanically, they data on them may degrade over time. Yes, that is a long time, but some of my collection dates back to the very early 2000s, so 10 years is not unreasonable. These SSD drives are best for boot partitions and operating systems that are loaded into memory when a computer starts. All of my 4 desktop computers have SSD drives to boot from and then all data is stored on large mechanical drives. I have one "hybrid" ssd/mechanical drive, that moves huge blocks of data from spindle to SSD as you use it so the data is accessed my quickly, but I have not yet decided if that is a significant benefit. Skippy | |
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| 01-01-19 08:30am - 2182 days | #14 | |
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skippy (0)
Active User Posts: 78 Registered: May 19, '07 Location: out there |
I have 3 tower desktop computers and one tower server in my home used for a lot of things. Total drive storage? About 50 TB on-line and another 50 offline. I bought a bunch of drive caddies that allow you to swap standard drives in and out of computers without opening the computers. I bought the ones below. Black is out of stock but there are other colors. https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816215323 You should be able to find something similar. There are even some that fit in 3 5.25" slots and mount 4 removable 3.5" drives inside them like this. (note: this one required mounting the drive in the cage so you willneed spare cages) https://www.amazon.com/Rosewill-5-25-Inch-3-5-Inch-Hot-swap-SATAIII/dp/B00DGZ42SM/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1546359875&sr=8-3&keywords=hot+swap+cage If you have a non-tower, they also make these things to connect externally but they cost a little more and you will need some additional cabling. If you install two or more of these into your computer, you can easily copy everything onto a relatively inexpensive standard hard-drive and then remove it and store the backup. If you want to make an incremental copy of just your new stuff to a backup, it is pretty easy. Here's a script. This will copy everything from the date listed and later and will replicate the source directory structure at the destination. Put this into a text file and call it xcopynew.bat. place it in the top folder that has everything you want to copy under it. xcopy *.* "\\{computer name (if other computer) and directory location of your backup directory tree}" /S /Y /D:12-27-2018 pause Once you save it just click on it to run. You can automate this further if you like to run automatically or copy everything that is less than X days old. It will copy everything in all directories below it and then pause at the end so you can see what it copied. If you run it automatically, you can omit the pause or write output to a file. (type "help xcopy" at a cmd prompt to see the options). With these two solutions, I have at least one copy of everyhting in my collection! Skippy Edited on Jan 01, 2019, 08:34am | |
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| 01-01-19 02:59pm - 2182 days | #15 | |
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jook (0)
Active User  Posts: 325 Registered: Dec 22, '13 Location: jersey city |
I agonized over this after losing almost my entire collection when 2 large drives failed at once and I had no backup. I set out to look for a way to hold my 20TB of data with room for expansion plus a reliable backup. I spent a tidy sum 2 years ago so the chances of data loss happening again are slim. There's probably better ways, but I bought drive enclosures that hold 4 hard drives. You can get smaller or bigger enclosures, i.e., 2 bay or 6 bay. It is the older version of this... https://www.amazon.com/OWC-Mercury-Elite...wc+mercury+elite+pro I bought 2 of these, one for backup. Each enclosure has the capacity to hold four 8TB drives. I opted not to do RAID for reasons I forget. So, it's basically like having a bunch of external drives except they're organized neatly into an enclosure. And you don't need to buy single external drives - you get internal drives which are less expensive. The entire setup probably cost close to $1000, but I'm set forever, or at least until my dick falls off  . I have the ability to store 32GB of data with a method to backup.I am not very technically inclined. This setup is very simple and all it takes is being able to use a screwdriver. Edited on Jan 01, 2019, 03:03pm | |
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| 01-01-19 02:59pm - 2182 days | #16 | |
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rearadmiral (0)
Active User Posts: 1,453 Registered: Jul 16, '07 Location: NB/Canada |
I had no idea that this was an issue with SSD. Thanks for mentioning this. | |
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| 01-01-19 03:12pm - 2182 days | #17 | |
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jook (0)
Active User Posts: 325 Registered: Dec 22, '13 Location: jersey city |
I considered SSD but couldn't rationalize the cost. For data that doesn't need to be accessed often, I don't feel it's necessary. Speed is not important in when it comes to viewing videos. My first backup took a long long time, but that was a one time thing. Incremental backups are fast enough. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that a reliable regular hard drive is sufficient assuming a backup is done. | |
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| 01-08-19 11:06am - 2175 days | #18 | |
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dracken (0)
Active User Posts: 29 Registered: Aug 01, '09 Location: Chicago |
Well, I finally found a solution that might work well for me. Over Christmas I bought a NAS and dropped 3 10tb hdd's in it. It was much easier to set up than I expected (pretty much just plugged the drives in, connected it to the internet and after it did it's updates and install it was up and running without issues) It came with a bunch of apps so I can access and stream videos from my phone or I can remotely log in from pretty much any pc and I've been very pleasantly surprised at how intuitive everything has been. Only downside is that it was pretty pricey, in total it ran me probably around 700 bucks, but I would have had to pay half of that for HDD's anyway. Pretty content for now, we'll have to see how well it holds up long term. | |
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| 01-24-19 05:59pm - 2158 days | #19 | |
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spank1 (0)
Active User Posts: 2 Registered: Jan 24, '19 Location: costa mesa |
had a 2 and 3tb drive where they were virtually duplicated on the good downloadable stuff. just got two 4tb drives to do the same and replace the older ones and plan to do that every three years for about 100 bucks each as they get bigger and newer...also the password protection and new computer issues. 100 bucks for a drive is peanuts | |
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| 01-25-19 10:07am - 2158 days | #20 | |
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pornpundit (0)
Active User Posts: 104 Registered: Mar 10, '07 Location: brooklyn ct. |
Good advise Pornpundit | |
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