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General discussion (archive)Future proofing my good old games. -Advice Wanted-(59 posts)(59 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted January 27, 2014
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EckoShy: After reading the replies I am reconsidering using discs. Using an external hard drive does seem like a more sensible option. It sucks that I won't be able to have them individually available in a format that I can display on a shelf, but oh well. Saving them for the long term is my main goal here.

Another question I thought of. What about an SSD? The only thing I really know about SSD's is that they're suppose to be faster. But considering the fact that they have no moving parts, shouldn't they also be safer? Too bad they're so expensive though.

Also I'll look into prices on good USB sticks thanks to what Huinehtar posted.

EDIT: So I took a look real quick, and apparently I own 170 games here on GOG with a combined total of 260 GB (Rounding up where appropriate) required to download them all. So yeah, I would need a lot of USB sticks, or a really big SSD. Meaning more money...
I don't know enough about the long-term estimated life of SSDs. I think they only degrade if they undergo read-write cycles, so they're probably okay. In the short term, I'd go ordinary HDD and upgrade to SSD in a few years when they're a) cheap and b) we know how long they're likely to last.
Posted January 27, 2014
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EckoShy: Another question I thought of. What about an SSD? The only thing I really know about SSD's is that they're suppose to be faster. But considering the fact that they have no moving parts, shouldn't they also be safer? Too bad they're so expensive though.
I think I read somewhere that SSDs are more likely to lose files than hard drives if they are stored unpowered on a shelf for long periods of time (like a year+). This might be an issue if you wanted to store a backup in a safe deposit box or maybe your parent's place.
Posted January 27, 2014
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EckoShy: Another question I thought of. What about an SSD? The only thing I really know about SSD's is that they're suppose to be faster. But considering the fact that they have no moving parts, shouldn't they also be safer? Too bad they're so expensive though.
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Snickersnack: I think I read somewhere that SSDs are more likely to lose files than hard drives if they are stored unpowered on a shelf for long periods of time (like a year+). This might be an issue if you wanted to store a backup in a safe deposit box or maybe your parent's place.
If you want long-term storage that won't degrade in ten years, you'll want digital tape backups.

To the OP - you're now getting into one of the reasons for having games in digital format stored redundantly (your pc, an hdd backup, the cloud).

I suggest you consider storage and display as two separate projects. Display empty cases or something, is what I'm getting at.
Posted January 27, 2014
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jjsimp: One of them is stored in a fireproof safe, while the other one is nearby for when I need a quick file.
Wow, that's serious backup protection!

I would have to agree with everyone else on using a HDD. In the early 2000's my primary backup method was CD. I have spindles and spindles of CDs. They take up much more space than a hard drive and I had to spend a lot of time cataloging everything using catalog software because it would be impossible to find anything otherwise. Think of all the time required to burn your game collection to DVD. You can set up the GOG downloader to download everything directly to the HDD and let it go. With DVDs, you would have to stay around to swap discs and select which files to burn, etc.
Posted January 27, 2014
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phaolo: Optical media would be already obsolete, if not for movie companies..
Well, optical discs could still be a thing if game developers had embraced Blu-rays the way they did with CDs and DVDs. Too bad they didn't. I think Metal Gear Solid 4 is even among PS3 exclusives (supposedly) one of very few games that actually use up almost the whole capacity of the disc (and where I actually have the impression that the game actually makes use of it - other than tolerating sloppy asset management). And considering how angry I get whenever a Steam game has 20+ GB in size (the biggest ones I've seen having between 35 and 40) I'd gladly buy retail copies of such games on one Blu-ray disc. Also I think by now Blu-rays actually have a capacity of up to 100 GB. I think it could be put to some really good use.
Post edited January 27, 2014 by F4LL0UT
Posted January 27, 2014
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Snickersnack: I think I read somewhere that SSDs are more likely to lose files than hard drives if they are stored unpowered on a shelf for long periods of time (like a year+). This might be an issue if you wanted to store a backup in a safe deposit box or maybe your parent's place.
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misteryo: If you want long-term storage that won't degrade in ten years, you'll want digital tape backups.

To the OP - you're now getting into one of the reasons for having games in digital format stored redundantly (your pc, an hdd backup, the cloud).

I suggest you consider storage and display as two separate projects. Display empty cases or something, is what I'm getting at.
Unless one has a massive collection, it's better to keep a copy on an HDD and another on a remote back up service. And possibly another onsite backup.

Tapes are great and all, but they're a very specific format which means that you need to have both a spare drive as well as the interface that you'd need to go along with it.

Ultimately, you're better off just migrating to a new disk if there's a format change that needs it. Most of the time lately, there's a period where you have both options. And when you don't have both options, you can usually get a converter.
Posted January 27, 2014
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phaolo: Optical media would be already obsolete, if not for movie companies..
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F4LL0UT: [..]And considering how angry I get whenever a Steam game has 20+ GB in size (the biggest ones I've seen having between 35 and 40) I'd gladly buy retail copies of such games on one Blu-ray disc. Also I think by now Blu-rays actually have a capacity of up to 100 GB. I think it could be put to some really good use.
Well, for very big downloads, imagine if you could go to a store and simply buy the movie\game on a (cheaper) 32-128gb usb stick (or on a card or transferred to your portable hdisk)
Wouldn't it be much better than a Blu-ray disc?
Post edited January 27, 2014 by phaolo
Posted January 28, 2014
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jjsimp: One of them is stored in a fireproof safe, while the other one is nearby for when I need a quick file.
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CrowTRobo: Wow, that's serious backup protection!
Not really, I already had the safe for my important paperwork. Dedicating a little space for a hard drive took up little space in the safe and so I thought, why not.
Posted January 28, 2014
Tape is for professional use where the cost of $1500 or so for the tape drive and the effort of maintaining a tape library are not wasted. Not many gamers have collections of games worth the cost and effort of tape.

Recordable DVD has terrible reliability. The risk of your DVD being unreadable in 1 to 2 years, even with proper storage, is high. Recordable CD is better, but this comes at the cost of lower density. The problem is that the market for recordable CDs and DVDs is driven by consumers who care only about price and do not care about storage life. See http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/894.05/loc/

SSD and flash media are still pretty expensive to be used for backup, rather than working, storage. $0.50/gigabyte or so. That's ten times the cost of mechanical drives. They have very poor data retention characteristics. You can expect errors on an SSD that has been taken out of use and stored for less than a year. Flash drives (USB and camera) are better but still not any good for long-term storage.

Mechanical hard drives will be readable for tens of years if well stored. At a cost of $0.05/gigabyte or so, it's the way to go for a collection of data that runs to a smallish number of terabytes.

A rig with a removable HDD rack and caddies for your drives is inexpensive and easy to set up.

A combination of removable HDD and offsite backup is the way to go unless you have professional or unusual requirements.
Posted January 28, 2014
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phaolo: Optical media would be already obsolete, if not for movie companies..
Just backup everything to an hdisk, or, if you really like some physical support, try those suggested by Huinehtar.

P.S: I simply love digital media because it takes zero space. No more useless dusty shelves!
Few old physical manuals or boxes with good extra content are cool, though. ;)
In that reality, I have three less bookshelves.
Posted January 28, 2014
As per topic: is there some reason (besides price) to buy 2TB or smaller hard drives for now, instead of newer 3TB or 4TB? Like backwards compatibility and such?

I'm unsure if I recall correctly, but was the max capacity for MBR drives 2TB? So if you go beyond 2TB in size, the drive/partition must be GPT? Then again, I am unsure if there is a reason not to use a drive as GPT, if possible. Maybe old XP machines can't read GPT drives bigger than 2TB, or can they?

Do the external USB hard drive boxes usually work also with >2TB drives by detault?

EDIT: Googling a bit, apparently the drive should be initialized as GPT (not MBR), if it is bigger than 2.2TB.

Can an older Windows 7 PC with BIOS (not UEFI) read and write ok to such 3 or 4TB GPT drive? If I understood right, you need to have UEFI in order to use a >2.2TB hard drive as a bootable drive at least, but apart from that, is UEFI needed also for using 3/4TB hard drives as storage places (not boot drives)?
Post edited January 28, 2014 by timppu
Posted January 28, 2014
Haven't read the other replies yet, but try saving to 8.5GB disks or similar. Hard drives could be a good option but they are prone to failure at any time. (Like mine is, at the moment).
I'm also trying to save files, and I definitely think the best way are flash drives/DVDs, etc... though who knows, maybe in the future we won't even be able to run CDs anymore, just like most computers now don't come with a floppy disk/diskette drive. :P
Posted January 28, 2014
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Swyne: Haven't read the other replies yet, but try saving to 8.5GB disks or similar. Hard drives could be a good option but they are prone to failure at any time. (Like mine is, at the moment).
That's why critical files should be on several (at least two) different places, be it two separate hard drives, or hard drive and cloud, or whatever.

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Swyne: I'm also trying to save files, and I definitely think the best way are flash drives/DVDs, etc... though who knows, maybe in the future we won't even be able to run CDs anymore, just like most computers now don't come with a floppy disk/diskette drive. :P
Quite many smaller laptops are nowadays sold without internal DVD-ROM drives. Then again you can still use external USB DVD drives with them. Heck there are still even external USB floppy drives.

I personally would be fine with only an external USB DVD-drive, as I use the drive quite rarely nowadays. Mainly just when I want to play some of my ancient retail games (for which I don't have a GOG version), or watch some DVD movie on my PC (mainly just Robocop Director's Cut, frankly).
Posted January 28, 2014
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timppu: Can an older Windows 7 PC with BIOS (not UEFI) read and write ok to such 3 or 4TB GPT drive? If I understood right, you need to have UEFI in order to use a >2.2TB hard drive as a bootable drive at least, but apart from that, is UEFI needed also for using 3/4TB hard drives as storage places (not boot drives)?
On external disks, I think limitations are on OS level if there are any. On internal disks (S-ATA connection) there might be more limitations, since it's the BIOS that has to detect it. Afaik, Windows only uses what BIOS detects.

But many things can be done on OS level. For example my old fileserver running Linux was a Pentium 2 350Mhz and it had a 500Gb HD on it. Of course the BIOS only recognized 127Gb but the whole capacity was usable in the OS.
Posted January 28, 2014
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cjrgreen: Tape is for professional use where the cost of $1500 or so for the tape drive and the effort of maintaining a tape library are not wasted. Not many gamers have collections of games worth the cost and effort of tape.

Recordable DVD has terrible reliability. The risk of your DVD being unreadable in 1 to 2 years, even with proper storage, is high. Recordable CD is better, but this comes at the cost of lower density. The problem is that the market for recordable CDs and DVDs is driven by consumers who care only about price and do not care about storage life. See http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/894.05/loc/

SSD and flash media are still pretty expensive to be used for backup, rather than working, storage. $0.50/gigabyte or so. That's ten times the cost of mechanical drives. They have very poor data retention characteristics. You can expect errors on an SSD that has been taken out of use and stored for less than a year. Flash drives (USB and camera) are better but still not any good for long-term storage.

Mechanical hard drives will be readable for tens of years if well stored. At a cost of $0.05/gigabyte or so, it's the way to go for a collection of data that runs to a smallish number of terabytes.

A rig with a removable HDD rack and caddies for your drives is inexpensive and easy to set up.

A combination of removable HDD and offsite backup is the way to go unless you have professional or unusual requirements.
First of all, thanks for the interesting read!

I got a quick question regarding the storage of a mechanical HD. What I've been doing lately was buying a regular HD + a eSATA case to put it in, it was cheaper than buying premade external hard drive (not sure if it's still the case) and I often got to buy better quality HDs.

Now if I just went ahead and unplugged that external HD (still in its case) and stored it on a shelf, would there be any risk of losing data or would that already be a safe-ish way of storing it?

I do realize that the ideal conditions are in a dust-free, moisture-free environment with regulated temperature, but I don't have such a room :-)
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This is my favourite topic
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General discussion (archive)Future proofing my good old games. -Advice Wanted-(59 posts)(59 posts)
(59 posts)