ChristophWr: I have it turned off so people cant see my games.

patrikc: You have 456 games on this account (originally known as Chrislemale) and 0 on the Wheezyyyy one (previously known as Christophlemale). Shall I continue?

Wheezyyyy: So lets show some positivity here and tell me why do you choose gog as your main platform on pc

JakobFel: I would not say "dirt cheap". Even a 2TB mechanical hard drive runs around $50. Given the sheer size of games these days, combined with some GOG libraries being hundreds of games, neither cloud storage nor physical backup storage is particularly cheap.

Magnitus: Not dirt cheap, but affordable if you are middle class or higher.

Magnitus: Not when you got close to 10TB of games it isn't.

AWS glacier would cost me about 8$-10$ a month, which is pretty afforable (until I need to download my games if my local backup goes kaput anyways... then they'd hit me with their download cost which would be 700$-900$ for a collection my size), but it has some important access restrictions that need to be taken into account.

Backblaze B2 would be about 40$-50$ a month which is not horrible, but I wouldn't call it a negligible expanse.

Regular AWS S3 would be about 4x the price of Backblaze B2 and that is starting to get pricey.

However, none of those options are as cheap as a pair or redundant drives. It just fulfills a non-local redundancy requirement and because of the prohibitive cloud-to-internet transfer costs clouds tend to have, you use them strictly as a backup and hope you end up not having to rely on it as it will cost you a fair amount of money if you do (but if you end up needing it, the transfer cost is still a preferable alternative to losing all your games).

Magnitus: Because?

Magnitus: Yes, I've started investigating my cloud backup strategy as you can see above with pricing in mind as my collection is rather large.

However, I'm quite busy with work (and have been so for the last ~4 years) and given that GOG currently provides me with redundancy and I got a redundant RAID 10 setup locally to complement that, its not my most immediate priority.

It is something that I'm easing into as time allows.

JakobFel: I would not say "dirt cheap". Even a 2TB mechanical hard drive runs around $50. Given the sheer size of games these days, combined with some GOG libraries being hundreds of games, neither cloud storage nor physical backup storage is particularly cheap.

Grooves: It comes down to what matters to you. My game collection matters. So I invest in it and the storage to keep it. I pay for the 365 sub that includes a terabyte of storage and then 1TB for 5 other people. So I created accounts for all those slots so I am getting 6tb of storage which auto uploads from my NAS for literally nothing since I need the 365 sub anyways. For the rest I use backblaze. If you can't swing that much I don't know what to tell you.

Grooves: It really is "cheap" at this point. If you look around there are tons of cloud storage deals you can use.

Magnitus: I don't know what 365 sub is

Wheezyyyy: You seriously don’t have a life probably also no job.That’s not my main account

nightcraw1er.488: Online storage is never value though, you pay forever never actually owning it and access can be removed at any time (think mega). Personally I would see it as a waste of money which you could have saved and brought some hdds.

Whilst hdds are not free, they are cheap. Look for deals on price per tb. For instance:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/WD-Desktop-Password-Protection-Software/dp/B07W7YBB9H/ref=mp_s_a_1_6?crid=139I732XVW8H5&keywords=wd+hdd&qid=1645633863&sprefix=wd+hdd%2Caps%2C131&sr=8-6
Works out at £16 per tb, where the 2tb drives about £50 or £60 are £25 or £30 a tb. Bear in mind you can get raid and other setups to link drives (if you have old ones for instance) to make bigger ones, I have 3 6tb in an old machine linked into one drive using windows, far cheaper than an 18tb one. Also, note the comments, you can get good drives hidden in some enclosures.
For most people a 4tb-6tb duplicated would cover most of the time, it’s far from foolproof, but it’s a start.

Grooves: It really is "cheap" at this point. If you look around there are tons of cloud storage deals you can use.

JakobFel: That's precisely what keeps me from using online storage. IF I did, it'd only be as a redundant backup of non-sensitive information (unless said information was already encrypted before the upload but even that makes me paranoid).

I suppose for some, $200+ for a 12tb external drive would work but I'm not really in a place where that'd work for me, nor would it work for many others sadly. It'd have to be a very long-term investment, but if the drive fails just outside of the warranty period, I'd be out of over $200 for a drive that I may not even end up using in the long run.

If I had that kind of cash, I'd 100% go for it but yeah, right now, it's just not viable for me or for quite a few other people I know who would be interested in backing up their games.
JakobFel: Not if you plan to back up all or a majority of your games library, especially since you have to pay a monthly/yearly fee to make it happen.

nightcraw1er.488: Yep, can understand that. I wouldn’t go for large drives myself at the moment. Would rather have lots of backups of smaller eg 4 or 6tbs with raid over the tops. Also depends on what you want to keep. If it’s games (a big storage need) I would suggest isolating what you really want to keep. I went from 12k plus down to about 6k simply by removing games I would never play so no point storing. If it’s personal stuff, docs and pics, a small drive copied multiple times is better. You can get refurbished or second hand ones off eBay for very little in bulk, 10 copies gives you a fighting chance even if half to down. You could also go another way, tape drive backup, expensive outlay but tapes are pretty cheap. DVDs even if it’s <1tb. Plenty of options. Run an old machine with all your old hard drives in is another.

JakobFel: Yeah, right now, I only back up my Humble Trove games and, of course, all my personal data and I store them off-site. thankfully, a 1TB option works for all of that. Down the road, I definitely hope to go for something bigger to store at least my favorite GOG games because while I'm not concerned about GOG going down anytime soon, I do see the value/wisdom in backing stuff up. Besides, why not take advantage of one of the more unique aspects of the service?

Thanks for all the other suggestions, I honestly didn't think about using options other than external hard drives. I do have an old machine as I just built a new PC so I could potentially empty the second drive on that thing and start storing them there. I'm not entirely sure what I'll do but I really do appreciate the suggestions.

nightcraw1er.488: No probs. Also note that whilst hdds do break occasionally, it’s not nearly as much as seem to be stated. So long as the drive is cold for some time, ie not alway connected firing up all the time, eg what a backup should be, then it should last for a long time. I have just thrown away a 40mb hdd I had since the 90s, still fired up with a connector, but did make a nasty mechanical noise, hence it got wiped and dropped. If they are used all the time obviously lifetime is shorter. Multiple copies is always the best way to cover faults. Also, probably good to look at better ways to copy than just windows copy, teracopy has a check copy function which compares file signatures. I also use freefilesync to only be copying updates. There are other tools to check hard drives as well. Bitrot is also possible. If you can, might be worth creating hashes of files using a tool to do this and check them periodically. I suggest this, but haven’t done it myself though it is on the list of jobs at some point. Fortunately I have backups going back years so should be able to recover.

Magnitus: I don't know what 365 sub is and I don't think I need it.

Otherwise, concerning the crux of your argument, we're talking about security and it is never binary. Its a scale and it depends on how much security you need and how much you want to pay for it.

We're not talking about not having a backup here. We're talking about the likelihood of GOG going offline and something bad happening to my home setup in quick enough succession that I don't have the time to react to one of those events before the other one happens.

I feel comfortable enough with those odds that I can afford to focus on work right now and take a little time to find and adapt to the cloud solution that works best for me (probably aws glacier as the overall expected cost is low and the worst situation cost stings, but is not completely disastrous).

Magnitus: Thing is, I (and anybody who is serious about keeping a long term backup) am not shopping around for a 1-year storage deal with a startup, I'm looking for a stable storage solution long-term.

Grooves: Yes, which is why I gave you a cheap solution. If you're worried about losing GOG or your home setup then get to it. It's the Microsoft 365 sub for $100 a year. So 6tb for $100 a year. It's a no brainer for me since I need the sub. That leaves me with a 4 or 5 terabytes that gets thrown into backblaze. Cloud storage is so cheap now you just need to pick one and go. My setup has 3 copies at any given time. Good luck to you.