I didn’t want to splurge on a 4TB SSD hard disk drive, but I need to secure my data. I have tried to procrastinate my hefty purchase for over 2 years, but my digital data is increasingly important to me. Much of my recent space hog is related to video tutorials, asset files, source codes, eBooks, DRM-free games, ISO images and 4K videos. I like to download and archive copies of digital assets that I buy and own.

My original intention was to re-organise my eBook library on my smaller 512GB SSD for hot-swapping between workstations. I have previously tried to settle with a microSD card attached to a USB stick, but I need reliability and high-speed data transfer speeds. I also opted for the SATA 3 over the NVMe, so I can hot swap drives using an external HDD enclosure without damaging the physical connectors at every re-connection.

I spent the past 3 weeks organising my entire digital assets. I am using mainstream cloud platforms from select providers to host secondary asset files. I am also using a specialised cloud platform which exercises a zero-knowledge policy on its service. Quite simply, I don’t want said company to scan or snoop around my digital assets in the cloud – and I am happy to pay for that privilege. Sadly, mainstream cloud platforms can scan and snoop. I am thinking towards future business endeavours, so I want to keep certain things close to my chest.

Essentially, I am choosing not to place all my eggs inside one basket, but to utilise local and external data backup pools. I am also deciding whether to go overboard and resort to hardware or software-based encryption on hard drives. I am leaning on the latter. I’ll thank myself in the future for the inconvenience.

I have never spent so much time creating granular folders and directories simply to arrange and organise every segment of data that I own. I still need to retrieve data from my LaCie, which is a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) – a Mac-only partition – but I am not desperate as yet!

~Richard