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yyywww111: That is quite impressive! Or perhaps I have had bad luck with my drives...
Unfortunately no as it has bad blocks and the 1mb/s transfer speeds are for the patient. I just keep it around as historical drive. The one that I use, which is also old, is Seagate barracuda 7 with 120Gb. Its 14 years old, no bads.

Drive mostly die from firmware failures (like old samsungs, hitachi, ibm; and modern seagate) and fluctuating operating temperatures. This includes fans blowing directly into the drive freezing it below 40 celcius. Place the drives below cpu and if your the case is not made from thick stainless steel or copper (so it cools stuff efficiently by itself), make sure its vented properly. Currently the reliable brands are WD and HGST (ex ibm, ex hitachi).

I have once tried to burn my data to DVDs and was not the pleasant experience. Apart from need to control the burn quality (plextor tools, or qpxtool currently), the DVDs are easily scratched with every use and the reflective surface wears in 5+ years. They were also very low capacity related to drives, it simply kills a lot of time.
But if you do it as hobby rather than need, then making own collection on optical disks is possibly lots of fun.
Post edited March 24, 2017 by Lin545
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yyywww111: Hello All,

Something that I've been thinking about a lot lately is my dependence on digital storefronts to access my PC library. Until a decade or so ago the majority of my PC purchases were on physical discs, and so I never had to worry about one day not being able to access them. ...

I was curious if anyone else had tried this before, and if so how it worked out for them. Alternatively how do YOU backup your games?
I'm very old-school in that I like to have local installation sources, and that's one of the reasons I have purchased so many titles through GoG and not Steam. Now in my case, I've not only been playing PC games for 30+ years, but have been making them professionally for 20+ years.

I've acquired many bookshelves full of boxed retails games, and to be honest, for most of them.. especially games after the mid/late 1990s, the physical packaging is not that interesting. So I've pared down my physical collection greatly, and moved the vast majority to digital. I keep the interesting stuff like the Ultima Series games, NOLF series, Early Blizzard games, some collector's editions and boxed copies of games I've programmed on.

But the rest? I've felt it liberating to move to digital and not be burdened by the physical packaging and media. Many of my earlier 1990s games came on 3.5" floppy disks, like the Ultima games, but if want to pull them out and play or examine (I actually do a fair amount of looking at old games as research for working on games in the same genre, etc), it so much easier (usually) to use the GOG installers from a hard drive (plus having DOS box for old games on current Windows). I also do some Mac development, so it's a bonus to get OSX versions.

So recommendation is: Put a big hard drive in your gaming PC. Download all the games to there. Then get an inexpensive external hard drive and periodically sync to it. I really like the 2.5" externals, which you can get up to 5TB in size now, as they don't have a separate power adapter.

As for burning the games to CD or DVD and making physical media? That takes even more time than money, and you still have the issue of CDR/DVD-R disks decaying with time. And as your library grows, so does the obligation if you feel the need to 'complete the set'. Instead, I would recommend this: Make a list of your all-time favorite games that have interesting packaging, manuals or other physical items, and go looking for them on eBay. Purchase the ones that are meaningful to you, put them on a display shelf - and when you go play them, get out the manual or other items and enjoy - like the spell books and cloth maps from the Ultima games.

Time is our scarcest asset. I have more games in my library than I will have time to play, so I pick and choose to get max enjoyment or usefulness out of them .

take care
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yyywww111: [snip]
If you really want to go down that route, knock yourself out here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1L3z0_mVvsYw9cklgZuhP0-Xb7FFXhCQL-FcG8tGVssY/edit?hl=en_GB#gid=0

Personally, I'm happy about everything that doesn't take up additional space and just put my collection on a harddrive and a clone (backup) of that.

Here is the old thread:
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/unofficial_dvd_covers_for_gog_com_games/page1
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/unofficial_dvd_covers_for_gog_com_games/post953
Post edited March 25, 2017 by Klumpen0815
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yyywww111: So then I came to the idea of having reproduction-esque physical copies of every GoG game I owned. By which I mean, going through the process of acquiring a DVD case, disc, nicely printed cover and possibly a manual (if included) for each game/series.
You want this post on DVD covers, It will full fill all your needs my friend ^_^ This one on missing manuals may also help you.

TLDR:
http://www.gogcovers.com/ http://www.replacementdocs.com/

Edit: already posted, oh well hot links are here for anyone that is curious in the future.
Post edited March 25, 2017 by Starkrun
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yyywww111: Hello All,

Something that I've been thinking about a lot lately is my dependence on digital storefronts to access my PC library. Until a decade or so ago the majority of my PC purchases were on physical discs, and so I never had to worry about one day not being able to access them. ...

I was curious if anyone else had tried this before, and if so how it worked out for them. Alternatively how do YOU backup your games?
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SpacemanSpiffed: I'm very old-school in that I like to have local installation sources, and that's one of the reasons I have purchased so many titles through GoG and not Steam. Now in my case, I've not only been playing PC games for 30+ years, but have been making them professionally for 20+ years.

I've acquired many bookshelves full of boxed retails games, and to be honest, for most of them.. especially games after the mid/late 1990s, the physical packaging is not that interesting. So I've pared down my physical collection greatly, and moved the vast majority to digital. I keep the interesting stuff like the Ultima Series games, NOLF series, Early Blizzard games, some collector's editions and boxed copies of games I've programmed on.

But the rest? I've felt it liberating to move to digital and not be burdened by the physical packaging and media. Many of my earlier 1990s games came on 3.5" floppy disks, like the Ultima games, but if want to pull them out and play or examine (I actually do a fair amount of looking at old games as research for working on games in the same genre, etc), it so much easier (usually) to use the GOG installers from a hard drive (plus having DOS box for old games on current Windows). I also do some Mac development, so it's a bonus to get OSX versions.

So recommendation is: Put a big hard drive in your gaming PC. Download all the games to there. Then get an inexpensive external hard drive and periodically sync to it. I really like the 2.5" externals, which you can get up to 5TB in size now, as they don't have a separate power adapter.

As for burning the games to CD or DVD and making physical media? That takes even more time than money, and you still have the issue of CDR/DVD-R disks decaying with time. And as your library grows, so does the obligation if you feel the need to 'complete the set'. Instead, I would recommend this: Make a list of your all-time favorite games that have interesting packaging, manuals or other physical items, and go looking for them on eBay. Purchase the ones that are meaningful to you, put them on a display shelf - and when you go play them, get out the manual or other items and enjoy - like the spell books and cloth maps from the Ultima games.

Time is our scarcest asset. I have more games in my library than I will have time to play, so I pick and choose to get max enjoyment or usefulness out of them .

take care
+1, exact same thing, ebayed 95% of my physical collection. Most stuff after 2000 isn't worth keeping, no manual or inlay or art, steam killed all that era.

To add, if you build a collection, you would be best off tracking it also. Save yourself a lot of hassel and get some software to do this. I would love to recommend launchbox, however they aren't really a db store, so I would say splash out on game collector which is what I use. You can use free things, or excel and I have done over time, but after spending days cleaning messed up excel data (it only takes a broken sort and the lot I worthless) and you realise the small amount on the software saves you a great deal of time.
I just keep my GOG stuff on a dedicated internal hard disk. Accidental deletion, bit rot or the disk breaking altogether are not a huge concern while GOG is still around, as it only takes time to re-download the bunch. lgogdownloader (or gogrepo.py if you please) makes it a breeze.

If GOG were to suddenly cease to be, I'd look into putting my eggs into more baskets.
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Lin545: Connor, ide, 170 megabytes, from 1990, has few bads, but still works.
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yyywww111: That is quite impressive! Or perhaps I have had bad luck with my drives...

Do you still use that drive out of curiosity?
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SCPM: My line of thinking is to have multiple redundant backups, so I have multiple external drives (one solid state and one hard disk) , in addition to keeping all my important stuff on multiple computers, and I semi-annually update the external drives. I think that writing to DVDs/Blu-Rays would take too long, and they would be just as, if not more susceptible, to damage or decay. I've already lost several of my game CDs to wear or bit rot, so I recently began backing up all my movies, CDs, and PC and console games to my hard drives. Every couple years, I swap out one of my external hard drives for a newer one, mostly out of necessity for needing a larger capacity.
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yyywww111: That seems to be a fairly full-proof system and a handy one at that. My main idea with the DVD's is that it seems to be the least error-prone medium of optical disc you could get at a reasonable price. More reliable than CD's, lack the weaker materials of DVD-R's and won't have any early batch issues like some BD's. I'll need to do more research on the different formats though
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tinyE: Cool avatar BTW! :D
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yyywww111: Lol ty!
He wished to have one like yours, I'm thinking! :D
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kbnrylaec: Internal hard drives are not 100% reliable, too. :-P
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WinterSnowfall: Yeah I agree, but they have a habit of not being subjected to as much mechanical shocks as external hard drives :P.
Depends how you are using the hard drives. I am quite sure that the external USB hard drives I have sitting on the table get less mechanical shocks than, say, the internal hard drives of my laptop. After all, I never move those external hard drives around (they always sit on that USB dock on the table), while the laptop is moved every now and then.
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yyywww111: I was curious if anyone else had tried this before, and if so how it worked out for them. Alternatively how do YOU backup your games?
I put each game on it's own USB drive, and put it in a box on my shelf, with custom artwork. You could just use DVDs/Blu-Ray if you prefer (and for large games like The Witcher 3, consider multiple discs; the download is in parts anyway). There's a decent selection of pre-made DVD covers for GOG games on these forums if you search for them, but the boxes I use are quite small; smaller than a DS case. I like the small cases as they use considerably less room.

https://www.premiumusb.com/content/images/thumbs/0063937_usdm-mini-flash-pac-usb-flash-drive-case-super-clear-with-logo.jpeg - These are the cases I use.

I've made my own covers; was time consuming but my library is less than 30 games, so it wasn't too bad. I like having my collection on a shelf where I can see it. Feels more real that way, and it's easily backed up. I can also take games to a friends house to show them if I want as I tend to buy obscure games (though I do try to encourage people to buy their own copy of the game when I do that, I like to think the trust CDPR puts in us here at GOG is respected, and that people don't just share their installer with people for free...)

So yeah. It's a bit extreme. It's also a bit pricey too as I have to buy USB drives. I often buy 1GB drives in bulk, which is good enough for most games I get, but the occasional one does require a 32GB USB which can be an annoying expense. Still USB drives are effectively solid state storage, and my collection is pretty much unique on the shelf now, and that is cool. It's a good talking point too when people see my collection and see these strange boxes with USB drives in them.
I bought an Toshiba MD04ACA400 today.
It is 32.67 GiB per USD.
I use an external hard drive myself, too. But i am thinking to turn a number of my GOG games, into a nice, good old retail package... Especially the collector items, like Witcher, or the removed games, like Blade of Darkness.

Besides the facts that external hardware can stop working for whatever reason and at some point internet connection can be lost (either for a long period or permanently), i always wanted to hold in my hands, an old style box with my game of choice! Damn i miss the old times...
Post edited May 15, 2017 by KiNgBrAdLeY7
I back up all my data to 2 external HDs. A 1TB western digital drive for all permanent/ semi-permanent data backups and a 70GB western digital drive that I bought way back in 2005 to hold non-essential data.

I'm going to pick up a third one for back up redundancy soon.
I used to save them on DVDs. Now I am starting over with GoG games. As soon as I get enough games, I will be saving them in external HDs.