Digital Hygiene - Part 1 of 3

Dated Dec 20, 2025

Our son is home for the holidays and so we decided to strengthen our home digital backup a bit during this break. Similar to nudging my friends to write our Last Will by providing my template, thought I should share what I am doing in this domain as well, in case it is helpful to others, as many of you may have a bit of downtime between now and the new year.

Ordered a 14TB hard drive, costs about $310, which is a really good price compared to yester years. Arjun and I talked about RAID, SSD drive, etc. But since I don't care about downtime (that RAID helps prevent) and speed (that SSD significantly improves), decided to go with just hard drive since it is cheaper. My main goal is to backup digital files/photos/videos from various home computers and be able to retrieve them if the originals are lost. It is ok if it takes even a hour or two and so RAID is not a must, which might be for business backup. SSD cost is not justified since hard drive speed is more than adequate for backup retrieval. 

We also ordered a 2TB SSD disk (close to $200) to serve as the main boot disk for the small Linux server we have at home. It currently has a 256GB boot disk that gets filled when some serious logging takes place. So, upgrading it to a bigger disk. Buying SSD (faster speed & more expensive) since we want that to boot and run fast.

Once the two drives come in, will setup the 2TB drive as internal boot disk and the 14TB HD as internal backup storage drive. The big backup drive will be accessible from all the computers at home. Then will setup backup programs to store the latest version of the files in that drive, since history (or previous versions of files) may not be that important. (I do have history support on one laptop I normally use, since it is connected to MS OneDrive. But if you do want to keep multiple versions of your files, consider "File History" app that comes bundled with WIndows.)

Will also properly implement a 3-2-1 backup model, that means

3 copies of important files, using

2 different media (cloud, UBS, HD, etc.) keeping 

1 copy offsite (for disaster recovery, like our whole home burning down).

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I am an Android phone user and get all my mobile phone photos automatically backed up to Google photos. It works really well when it comes to finding/sharing photos very efficiently. I do pay annual subscription to get some additional storage since the default free 15GB Google provides is no longer enough. I still don't want to solely depend on Google. So went to https://takeout.google.com and asked for archives of all my photos to keep a copy in my personal backup. It came close to 300GB and Google had provided 29 archives of 10GB each as I had requested. I could have asked for 50GB files, that would have reduced the count from 29 to 4. I have them downloaded now and will keep them in the big hard drive once we set it setup. On that note, take a look at this related article: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251212-why-your-early-2000s-photos-are-probably-lost-forever

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If you have a lot of family/personal videos, you can store them on YouTube as unpublished/unlisted material for easy access. But if you'd like to keep them all on your local server at home, you can consider using Jellyfin software that is a free open-source software that functions like your own personal Netflix service. We have it installed in the home server and clients installed on our home TVs and personal phones. This allows us to watch old family videos or digital copies of movies/shows you own that are stored on the home server, just like watching videos on Netflix.

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I don't want to turn off my non-techie friends and so will stop here. But if you are a techie and so interested in going further, you can consider Wireguard (that will allow you to play your videos stored in your home server even when you are outside your home) and NextCloud that will let you run your own personal cloud service to store your files. These are free open source project software that we are using reliably.

I know some of my contacts have several TB of files and are probably better at maintaining their archives and home network. If you are one doing other interesting things in your home network, clue me in. 

Happy Holidays as you up your game in digital streamlining!