Do you remember when storage used to be cheap? It’s a little hard to do that right now given that every type of computer component seems to be undergoing price surges from unending data center demands, but ten years ago I was on a storage buying spree that lasted a few years.

Today, I’m sitting on over 20TB of data spread around multiple computers, external drives, and, of course, “the cloud” and if I had known everything back then that I do today, I would probably have gone about things differently.

More storage never fixes bad storage habits

There aren’t enough drives on the planet

There is never such a thing as “enough” storage. My experience of this goes far beyond just the last ten years. It’s just human nature, I suppose, but I naturally think of empty storage space as a waste of room that I paid for. Inevitably I fill all the hard drives I have with software or data files, and then instead of putting some of it in cold storage or deleting it, I just buy more storage.

This is obviously unsustainable, but I started off on a 40MB hard drive in the early ’90s and I currently have 3.5TB of storage on my Windows computer that’s almost always full.

It’s not all my own fault, of course. The actual size of the data has increased exponentially! Either way, just adding more storage just kicks the can down the road. You aren’t dealing with the data in any way, you’re just buying an additional landfill for more of it.

Storage Capacity

6TB

Brand

Seagate

The Seagate Expansion 6TB external hard drive is an excellent starting point if you are building a laptop NAS, offering plenty of capacity for backups and media. It is affordable, easy to set up, and fast enough over USB 3.0 for most home server use cases.

If your data exists in only one place, it’s already at risk

3-2-1: it’s a countdown to destruction

Credit: Ismar Hrnjicevic / How-To Geek

The exception to the “more storage” rule is making redundant copies of things that are actually important. There’s a reason the 3-2-1 backup rule is the gold-standard strategy. That’s the one where you need to keep three copies, in at least two formats, with one off-site copy.

For me, cloud storage has become my off-site backup, but an old cold-storage HDD you keep at your mom’s house is just as valid. I just like that cloud providers also follow some version of this rule with my data, so it’s exponentially safer this way.

The downside is that cloud storage is expensive and an ongoing cost, so I only use it for truly irreplaceable information. Unfortunately, it also comes with privacy concerns, and some of my most important documents are very private indeed. So I have learned to encrypt them individually before uploading to the cloud. This means the cloud provider can’t read the contents, but that’s the point!

SSDs and hard drives are both still essential

Complementary, not mutually exclusive

There was definitely a time when the general sentiment seemed to be in favor of SSD technology being a total replacement for “spinning rust” hard drives. I started my own SSD journey just over ten years ago, and that first SSD of mine is actually still going strong. It’s a 500GB Samsung drive that I’ve overwritten completely 280 times in a decade, and it’s still in perfect health. In fact, all but one of my SSDs have failed, so my level of trust in this technology is quite high.

And yet I won’t quite trust it for long-term storage. SSD bit rot is a real issue where flash memory loses its contents if you don’t plug it in for a very long time. We’re talking many years at room temperature, but I’d still rather trust my data to an archival hard drive.

I tend to keep data on SSDs that I can replace from other sources, and mainly benefit from speed. So it’s mostly software installed on them. Besides, SSDs are still so much more expensive per gigabyte than hard drives, despite prices going down across the board. Hard drive makers have just managed to cram more and more storage into the same HDD form factor. They’ve become faster too. Dual-actuator designs mean that high-end modern hard drives can even keep up with SATA SSDs when it comes to sequential data transfers.

The way I feel now, I think mechanical hard drives will be with us for the foreseeable future, it’s just their role that’s changed somewhat.

The biggest threat to your files is usually you

Mea culpa

Credit: Daniel Krason / Shutterstock

I’m enough of a grownup to admit that almost every time I’ve lost irreplaceable data in the last ten years, it was because I was a doofus. It wasn’t drive failure, or a virus, or ransomware that got me. It was my habit of using the Shift-Delete shortcut in Windows (which skips the recycle bin) or a poorly-considered terminal command in Linux that torched my bits.

I once destroyed a terabyte of video footage trying to convert an NTFS drive to APFS so my Mac could read and write to the drive. I foolishly believed a utility that claimed it could do this in-line without having to move the data to another drive first. Lesson learned, I guess.

Not everything deserves to be archived forever

The biggest lesson is also the hardest for someone with hoarding tendencies like me. I have the idea that maybe I’ll need a document again one day, or that I need ten photos of almost exactly the same thing. I still have documents I created in previous jobs for people who are no longer even alive.

So I’ve started using time as a filter. If I’ve had something stored for longer than five years, I need to decide if it’s worth keeping or not. If I haven’t needed it in five years and it’s not sentimental or critical (like a copy of my birth certificate) then I should let it go, and so should you.