Over my years of creating I've always had a decent amount of storage on my computer. However as I started creating more and more interviews, that quickly changed.

Depending on the length of your videos, i.e. podcast interviews or gaming livestreams, and then on top of that the clips you make from those. Even if you are just making solo videos, those add up too!

I wanted to make this video/blog to be a warning to all of you other creators out there... BACK UP YOUR DATA.

There is a 3 backup rule:

  1. On an external drive in your home (a NAS counts).
  2. On an external drive or disks, OFF SITE (as in a family members or friends house).
  3. On the cloud, if you can afford to.

Why is it important?

Sure can you make all of your content over again? Yeah I guess, but YouTube is tenacious, they can take your channel down at a moments notice.

You never have full control on someone else's site, even your own website can go down for various reasons. This is why I often tell people not to have Substack or Medium as their MAIN place, as they can delete your blog in an instant. Same with YouTube or Podcasts.

You also need to have backups of your entire content catalog, even this post I'm going to copy and paste the text into my obsidian vault. I don't trust notion anymore to keep it safe.

How do you manage the data?

I try to do a monthly backup, and I tend to also cross post as much as I can too.

With the drives. I'm trying to figure out if I should have the major 5tb drive as my backup backup, and then use another drive as my actual video backup. Technically I have an external drive I keep connected to my computer that I often work off of, which is going to age the drive faster. However it is off my main computer, in case windows bricks again.

Just remember that you can never really backup TOO MUCH.

What can you take away from this, and what can you do right now?

Never assume that your data is safe, not only can a fire happen randomly, but on top of that even excluding disasters. Your hard drive or SSD could just fail at any time. HDDs can get scratched, SSDs can fail after too many writes to the drive, and even SD cards just die from old age.

I would say get a new backup drive, preferably an HDD as they last longer, and put everything onto it. That is your first bet, then take your most important data, and try to put it into a cloud drive. Zip if you need to compress it.

Find a person you can exchange a backup accountability with, and have a drive on their location and yours.