Hey guys, I'm just stopping by the office here linked this afternoon to pick up some stuff that I need to take home. And I thought I'd make a quick vlog style video where I just record something quick and dirty on my phone. So, one of the things I wanted to talk to you guys about was storage. And specifically what I want to talk to you guys about is data storage for the long term. You'll often ask me about backing up data. What do I use for backing up my stuff? And one of the things that I use for short term storage, a device I have with me all the time is I have this one terabyte external SSD that I'm actually picking up here today. Because I actually use that to transfer data from this workstation in my office to other machines. So, I want to take my video files with me. What I do is I put them on that one terabyte external SSD. Because I need a big drive to move video files around because some of these video files that I create are very large. Sometimes I record single clips that are 10, 15 minutes in length that are more than a gig in size. And if I have a lot of them in a project, I need something bigger than a flash drive. USB stick, typically not going to work SD cards. Most of them are 32 gigs or smaller. And they're not going to work for backing up a lot of video files. So typically I keep that one terabyte SSD drive with me for short term, just moving stuff around. Now short term backups also, I would probably use my SD drives. I've got a couple of external SSD drives. And that's okay for the short term. But I understand something as a long time computer user that if you're young, you know, you probably have never had a drive fill. As somebody in my mid 40s, I know something that, you know, again, a lot of the younger computer users out there don't know is that drives don't last. They fill all of them. All your hard drives, all your SSD drives, all your SD cards, they're going to fill. They don't last. If you will be extremely lucky, if you make it a decade with any drive in any computer you have, and that's a fact. One of the things about spinning hard drives is they're spinning parts in them, right? They're spinning magnetic parts in these drives. And because of the wear and tear on them because they have moving parts, they will eventually fill. Also the magnetism, it loses its magnetism over time. And after a few years, the drive just doesn't work anymore. That's just a fact with hard drives. So hard drive is not a long term way to store data. Now if you weren't using the drive, you know, because it's not getting where, obviously, if you're not actually using it, if you wanted to, you know, put some important data on a hard drive and put it in a closet somewhere. And you know, you might get a decade of storage out of it, maybe 15 years if you're really, really lucky, but that's pushing it. I wouldn't trust a hard drive for long term storage. Now, nothing more than about five years, really. And SSD drive, same thing. This is, again, short term storage. If I had something on SSDs, you know, I wouldn't trust them for more than a few years. You'll be extremely lucky to make a SSD drive last 10 years because they corrupt over time. They don't have the same magnetism problem that hard drives have, but they, there, some kind of technology with electrons that move around in them. Anyway, they corrupt over time. They lose their magic, right? So you get about a decade out of spinning hard drives and SSD drives, any flash memory, you know, SD cards, NVME drives. None of that stuff is long term storage. Don't think of, you're not going to put family photos, family videos, any of your family memories, your precious memories on these devices. And think you're going to get them in 10 years. You'll be lucky if they make it 10 years. You're not going to get them in 20 years. 20 years, these devices are corrupted. They're not going to work anymore. 50 years down the road. Just forget about it. That's not what these are for. Your best bet for long term archival of your data. People laugh at me when I show this because I've shown you guys this on video a number of times are these optical drives. I still have CD DVD writers. I have Blu-ray writers. And those are your best bet for long term data storage. And I strongly advise you guys to go out and buy these devices. You can still buy DVD writers and Blu-ray writers. They're not very expensive. And the discs, they're not very expensive. They standard CD or DVD. If you're not using it, it was strictly for storage. Well, it's not a movie DVD, right? That you're playing all the time. You get scratched up and it quits working. No, no, no. You just burn a whole bunch of data to a DVD and put it away. That's easily going to last a decade. You might get two decades out of it. Now CDs and DVDs, they do corrupt over time because they're not very well made as far as protecting them from the elements. They just degrade over time. Now Blu-rays have a special coating on them that actually protects them a little better. Your standard Blu-ray might survive more than a couple of decades. It might be around in 30 years, who knows. But they make special DVDs and special Blu-rays that have extra protection built into them as far as a coating around them that allows them to survive potentially 100 years. Some of these, I've seen special Blu-rays that they sell. I believe the company is M-Disk. They claim that they make one that they claim might survive up to a thousand years in storage. So if you've got something really precious that you want to save for the long term, I strongly recommend investing in a Blu-ray writer and some of these archival Blu-ray discs. Now these Blu-ray discs are not expensive either. That's a great thing. Blu-ray discs, they're typically either sold in 25 gigabytes or 50 gigabytes discs. By the 50 gig discs, they're like $2 a piece and I'm talking about for the archival protection discs. So these are really cheap options. They're your best bang for your book and that's the only thing I would consider as far as long-term storage. One other thing you need to consider is don't just save all of your files on these discs and think you're okay. You also have to really think about the format you save stuff in because let's take images. You've got all these pictures that you've saved. Maybe you play around in some proprietary image editor with your images. Maybe you play around with the Adobe Creative Suite with some of your images, some of your movies and things like that and you save these things in some weird Adobe only proprietary format. Well guess what? In 10 years, you'll be very lucky if you can still open those files in 20 years. I doubt it. It's almost no chance. In 50 years, it's a zero chance. Do not save anything in any proprietary format. Make sure whether it's music or movies or images or actual text. Do not save that stuff in a proprietary format because you know a few decades from now there's absolutely no chance you will ever open that file. So if you're doing anything in text, make sure it's standard plain text and see text. Music is the same way there's so many open audio formats. Make sure you save your audio files in one of the open formats. Don't save it in some weird Apple only Apple music store format. It's not going to work in a couple of decades. You're going to regret that stuff. Always, I know I preach this stuff about free and open source versus proprietary all the time. But when you're talking long term archival storage of your data is something you really need to take into account. Anyway, ran over guys. Peace.