What happens when your cloud drive starts to fill up? I am not there yet, I have probably only used a quarter of it. But what I didn’t know was that the cloud function synchronizes everything to my hard drive and I don’t have a free terabyte to do so. So, I am going to start archiving some stuff off of the cloud.

Many years ago, I was in charge of the physical act of backing up when I worked at the lab. I would burn data to DVD on a month by month basis. This is an option for things that don’t need immediate recall. I tried my DVD burner and while it could read disks, the write portion failed.

I thought about my options. I moved my mechanical hard-drive from my laptop to my desktop computer. This is a decent option because a mechanical drive failure can be re-built from the One Drive synchronization. Then, I resynched everything to that location. That at least gave me breathing room.

At some point, that is going to run out of room as well. So, I thought about media again. Each podcast I make runs between 1-2 GB with the raw files and these are things that I really don’t access other than to look for episode numbers or certain content. I decided to order another DVD burner. I was just about to start archiving things and then a thought occurred to me, what about Blue Ray?

It turns out that DVD only holds 4.7 GB of data making this project take forever (over 20 disks). The newest quadruple layer Blue Ray burners can do up to 100GB per disk. That is for me, I ordered one of those. I am waiting for it to arrive and then I will start archiving certain items particularly all of the AltF4.co content.

Do I think that there is any perfect solution? Ideally, I would have a backup array of hard-drives that had infinite storage and access at my finger tips. The downside of disks is that they can degrade and technology moves on. I think about the stuff I have on 3.5″ floppy drives that I have never accessed since I moved to a computer without a floppy drive. The good news is I still have a floppy drive in an old computer if I really wanted the files and you can buy a USB floppy drive for $30.

It is definitely a new world. My laptop does not have an optical drive or even an expansion slot. Policies on business owned computers prevent any sort of plugin devices, everything is moved electronically via the network. Disk images have to be ‘mounted’ in a faux drive fashion to emulate physical media. In many ways, a physical device is simpler and easier. I don’t like all that run around to get around having the device.

Other options would be an external hard-drive but those are not infallible either. I might eventually do both, but for now I just want to make sure that I do not have a problem. I am going with BD-R at 25GB per disk.

End Your Programming Routine: In the old, old days the professional way to go was tape back-up. That still may be used, I don’t know. We had Zip and then Jazz drives, then CD, DVD and now Blue Ray. It is not likely that I will really ever need these files again, but I hate to just delete them if I can get them into a easily storable and compact fashion. It is my life’s work after all.