Hi Lemmy!

My partner and I are moving from the US to the EU soon. We both have gaming PCs but they’re a bit older, so we’re thinking it’s a great time to sell them, taking the SSDs, and buying new components there to avoid shipping them.

Any suggestions surrounding it? Maybe there’s a good way to pay a little and backup the whole SSDs to the cloud?

I know it’s not strictly gaming related but it sorta is? Sorry if this is inappropriate for the community

  • DestideEnglish
    4·
    2 months ago

    Generally, you want backups in three places, at least one off site for anything you deem important, so now’s a good time to start. SSD’s should travel fine as long as you take the right precautions regarding physical and static damage. Steam will handle most cloud saves, as will some other third party launchers. If you’re coming to the UK, I recommend Scan as a retailer.

    • astrsk@fedia.io
      8·
      2 months ago

      For clarity, the recommendation is specifically 3 copies of your data, not 3 backups.

      3-2-1 backup; 3 copies of the data, 2 types of storage devices, 1 off-site storage location.

      So in a typical homelab case you would have your primary hot data, the actual device being used to create and manage that data, your desktop. You’d regularly backup that data into warm storage such as a NAS with redundancy (raid Z1, Z2, etc). Followed by regular but slower intervals of backups to a remote location, such as a duplicate NAS with a secure tunnel or even an external drive(s) sitting at a friend or family member’s house, bank vault, wherever. That would be considered cold storage (and should be automated as such if it’s constantly powered).

      My own addition to this is that at least one of the hot / warm devices should be on battery backup in case of power events. I’ll always advocate that to be the primary machine but in homelab the server would be more important and the NAS would be part of that stack.

      Cloud is not considered a backup unless the data owner is also the storage owner, for general reliability reasons related to control over the system and storage. Cloud is, however, a reasonable temporary storage for moves and transfers.