Need to make a backup of 3TB of data

[jamesster]

It's actually more like 2.5 to 2.7 TB. But I need a backup of it. It's a whole mishmash of stuff, but for the most part it's uncompressed videos recorded with Fraps - in one folder alone I've got 142 videos of LEGO Universe that take up 525 GB of space. Online backup isn't an option, I don't have internet reliable or fast enough for doing anything on this scale (0.24 Mb/s upload speed, 1.5 Mb/s download speed, speedtest.net gives it a grade F and says it's slower than 91% of the US). So I'm probably just gonna use more external hard drives (I have four or five already). But what sort of hard drives? Multiple smaller ones, one larger one? What brand? Multiple brands? Any other solution?

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[Bacon Pancakes]

Finally, someone with internet as bad as mine!

[Kimono]

i would say multiple smaller ones so that if one fails you only lose a fraction of the backup

i dont think brand matters at the slighest, just 7200 rpm for a normal hard drive should be good

[Bahamut]

inb4 "your internet sucks, look at mine! <speedtest link>"

[Muzzles56]

At least compress the files...

[Treynolds416]

You could try compressing some of that video in a lossless quality. What do you need uncompressed video for anyway? Youtube forgets the quality so hard it doesn't matter at all, you could just do mp4 with a bitrate of 8000 and it wouldn't look any different after uploading

[jamesster]

At least compress the files...

I will, but even then they're quite large.

I've looked around on various websites, trying to figure out what sorts of hard drives are the most reliable, but haven't been able to reach any sort of conclusion, it's a mess of mixed results. HDD or SSD? Hitachi? WD? Seagate? Ugh... I have multiple old hard drives sitting around but they're mostly from different brands and types (only one has failed so far), so I don't have any personal experience to go by when choosing the next set.

You could try compressing some of that video in a lossless quality. What do you need uncompressed video for anyway? Youtube forgets the quality so hard it doesn't matter at all, you could just do mp4 with a bitrate of 8000 and it wouldn't look any different after uploading

I compress the videos before uploading them, but I also take still frames from the uncompressed videos as screenshots - can't stand any sort of fuzz on those. Still, I could probably get rid of a lot if I took the time to sort through it... But when you've got hours and hours of video (including a complete playthrough of LU that's over 40 hours long), and a ton of other projects, it doesn't happen very quickly.

[JazZ5109AI]

you only need an HDD, most likely external, either Seagate or WD is a good choice.

Compress the video, it will save you a ton of space.