Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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Do you use USBs for anything? (alien.top)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Stumbled across a deal for 10 64 GB USBs for 12 bucks. Figured it was so cheap that it can’t possibly hurt to have them, but now I’m wondering if they’re particularly useful for anyone?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

That's very cheap, but possibly genuine if they're not off aliexpress or temu. First off check them with Validrive as someone else mentioned here.

You could put Kiwix on them and have an offline version of certain sites and manuals. You could fill them with music, My music collection is only about 4000 songs, at 16GB - that can then plug into other things, or play in a car, on TVs or other laptops or devices. Just a seperate backup. If it gets lost somewhere too - you'll find it again one day and it'll be like the mixtapes or the home-burnt CD you did as a teenager.

If you have photos and videos of family or friends you're close to, find some albums of old photos of you guys together and mail them as a cheap present. We're backing up some old camcorder footage from when me and my cousins were kids and will send them off as gifts. We're in our 30s now and they are parents.

Keep them as install drives for Linux or Windows recovery drives?

Not very big for videos, so not great for the *ahem* homework folder. BUT I have one that I've filled with movies. Then I bought a cheap projector and then can play adult content on the walls.

You can fit a lot of photos into 64GB so you can use a couple as partial backups and store them in the attic or another location. For the ultra-precious, irreplaceable data, like family photos etc. more backups makes it safer.

Or you can dedicate drives for certain series or TV shows or movies. Again not as sophisticated as a big fancy NAS, like lots of people here.

If you can get yourself some stickers as well for labelling whats on them, that will help too.

The data transfer speeds on these do tend to be slow, and in many ways it's obsolete compared to modern SSDs / HDDs. But there are plenty of use cases where a few cheap drives are portable and only need to be basic and simple. Easy to send through the mail too, less susceptible to physical damage.