Month: April 2022

How it started

Well…

It all started way back, when, like many people, I had a bunch of external hard drives and a total mess in terms of data organization. And how it goes in these scenarios… I lost my precious data. The drives did break and I had no backups. There are still a lot of projects and files, which, to this day, are missed very dearly. It was mostly a bunch of 500GB disks and smaller ones. Puff ! gone !

Around 2012/2013 a friend of mine gave me a 2TB drive. I attached it to my home server and I started collecting, like many datahoarders out there, “Linux ISOs” from scratch again, since, you know, my hoard ( if you could call it that ) was gone. This time my organization was much better and I even started to make backups of the most important files.

Fast forward to the beginning of 2015, I bought a NAS. I wanted something, that doesn’t need a lot of maintenance and can scale. At this time I still had a webserver and a mediaserver in my appartment. But I wanted a central storage, which, well, just works. So I bought a synology with 4x4TB drives. So 16 TB of raw storage. Finally I had a storage with RAID. But, as you all most certainly know already, RAID is not a backup.

And that’s were the fun began.

I bought additional drives and hooked them up, so I can rsync the most important stuff and have at least one full backup at all times. I also started to make random copies, here and there to have offsite backups. After all, I had collected a fine amount of data again and still remembered how I lost all my stuff before. This time I wanted to do everything right. No more losing data.

I discovered r/DataHoarder. And I thought. Holy shit: they are just like me. Except some of them had storage arrays in the 100s of terabytes. But I’ll probably get there… some day. So I felt motivated and continued collecting Linux ISOs. 2019 my NAS broke. Immediatly bought a new one , same model and kept going.

My storage slowly started to fill up. In 2020 I bought more drives to increase my capacity. I went from 4x4TB to 4x8TB and 16TB for backup.

How it’s going

I’m currently at 65,5TB RAW Capacity. But my actual hoard is just 13,21TB. A lot of it is duplicated and hence, a lot of TBs are used for backups. Also a lot of it is used for RAID.

As you can see the hoard is slowly growing over time. At this pace I still have some room to grow, but I already think about upgrading my equipment to more drive bays and bigger drives.

The size of the actual hoard, makes some bumps from time to time. That’s when I’m on a collecting spree or copying stuff from friends. So these are my current numbers:

Expenses

I also calculated the expenses for this weird hobby and I’m currently at 2790,30€ for everything so far. If I take 2015, when I bought my first NAS, as a starting point, the current monthly expenses for my datahoarding are at 33,22€.

So HAPPY HOARDING everybody.