The videos would be for friends, my club and this forum. And, I suppose, for me to relive my adventures on wintry nights.
The only thing you really know with a computer is that eventually it will fail, the real question is will it take the stuff that matters to you to it's grave when that happens.
To me there are 2 types of material on a computer, stuff that matters to me and "everything else" ... the stuff that matters are the pictures, documents etc that I have uploaded or created and everything else is the software that allows me to play with the stuff that matters. All of this software is usually easy to replace, the stuff that matters is not.
Ever since the PhotoBucket days, I really don't have a great deal of faith in "online" storage ... I just have issues giving control of my stuff to a 3rd party, and if you actually read the "Terms of Service" I suspect my judgement isn't that far off. Don't get me wrong, I use Google Photo and a couple of other services to share stuff,
just not as primary storage.
When I setup/build/advise friends computers the first thing I get them to do is setup a personal directory where everything they upload or create gets put ... this effectively separates the stuff they want from the software. Organize this personal area so it makes sense to you and you can find all the stuff you store. This separation can happen during setup or afterwards, obviously setting it up first is easier than tracking down where Excell has decided to store my sheet when I hit save, but it is there and can be found and moved.
Once you have this Personal directory setup, it is literally the only thing on the computer that matters (to you), it also makes it a lot easier to Backup and protect the information that matters to you. It sometimes amazes me how little space this important stuff actually takes from a storage perspective.
Every few weeks or more often if I am adding content, I will backup the personal directory to an external drive. The drive is kept in a safe, convenient spot near my system. I say convenient, because I can be a bit lazy and if it's not easy to grab and use, I will likely stop doing it. Leaving it connected all the time is also not a good idea, you likely want and should keep a backup out of harms way.
The external storage I use is a 2 TB NvME drive in an external housing and it connects with a simple USB cord to the computer. This is about the size of a large thumb drive and is as convenient as it gets. The backup software I use (and this isn't an endorsement or sales pitch) is called SyncBack, it is a free shareware program that works well for me. There are other shareware backup programs to be had if you do a search, this is just what I use.
My backup process is simple, plug in the external drive, start Syncback and hit the backup protocol I setup .... a few minutes later I remove the drive and put it back in safe storage ...
If anything ever happens to your system, once you have a new system setup, plug in the backup and copy your stuff to the new one and you are good to go.
Brian
