Slight change of plan, of course: rather than have a mere hard-drive as my off-site back-up, I'm going to use a whole computer…
The old Rock is fitted with three 960GB hard-drives which is just about enough storage to load on all my pointless data (there's also the OS SSD in there which provides a bit of breathing room for additional storage). It provides a bit of reässurance (if not redundancy…) in that if one of the drives in there fails, only a third of the data is lost, rather than all of the data were it all on one drive. There's possibly a logical thought there somewhere.
I'm in the process of copying over the data onto the old desktop. When it's done, I'll bag ‘n’ box the computer and transport it to an off-site loft. This process has been made much easier by the semi-permanent computer set-up I've put in the cellar: basically a couple of old Dell monitors and a LAN-over-power-cables adaptor (the monitors are failing (I think they're of the era where they still used fluorescent tubes for illumination) and the internet is slow, but it all works).
I have a second old desktop which I'll attempt to fill with a similar capacity of storage drives and then fill those with the same data.
Well, not quite: what I need to do is SORTING! One of the 960GB drives will be over half-filled with “to sort” which is back-ups & downloads that have yet to be placed in the appropriate directories. This is a job best-done using the 5TB storage drive: all the unsorted data and the sorting directories can be on there and I can just sort the data into the directories; doing this across separate drives would be much slower.
Needs doing though! I have a suspicion that there's some stuff that's in the unsorted directory that's also in the sorted folders, but I won't know until I actually go through and sort it.
It occurs to me that this is something of a waste of life. Perhaps I should be consuming & enjoying the data I've accumulated, rather than just endlessly shuffling it around.
It's a hobby I guess.
