Nene Quest is a more stable and fun game than Cyberpunk 2077.

Yes. Torrents for executables, not such a great idea...

You can consider whatever you want. But it's no different from e.g. having a Denuvo'ed game on Steam and considering both companies' servers as the places where you keep your games.
If you lose the GOG servers and discover that there's something wrong with that one HDD, you lose one/multiple/all games. Sure, something can go wrong with multiple local drives too - but at least you're spreading the risk.

I've no idea what the reason for the overly sarcastic response was but neither myself nor alexandros050 were promoting some mad download rush of what you're "replying" to. My first words in this thread were the literal exact opposite : "If you back them up as you buy, download & play them, the effort is virtually unnoticeable"...

It can happen to any 'file' on the internet.

Or better yet: make "addon language packs", so that if somebody wants 2 languages they don't have to download the main game twice.

Stuff that I can't download online again, yeah I keep them on two separate 1:1 hard drives. No RAID, simply manually rsyncing the hard drives every now and then.

I have some confidence in S.M.A.R.T. and such though, telling me beforehand if the hard drive is starting to fail. I recall only one incidence in like 25 years where I've lost a hard drive "just like that" without any forewarning. In all other cases there have been some symptoms for which reason I've backed up all the files from the hard drive elsewhere.

For instance, I currently have my GOG game installers divided into a 5TB and 2TB USB HDDs, and the latter (which is many many years old already) has started giving some warning signs, so I am in the process of replacing it, and I have actually already copied all the files from it to another 2TB HDD for now, just in case. SMART still shows green for that 2TB USB HDD and generally it seems to work ok and even running full checkdisk or reformatting it finds no problems (and all the files on it still pass integrity check), but SOMETIMES e.g. Windows reports it has no free space (while it has like 700GB free), and sometimes I've been able to unmount it in Windows, so I take those as signs that it may be failing soon. Dunno, better safe than sorry.

When it comes to more advanced technologies like RAID for backup purposes, I am actually more interested in bitrot-resistant filesystems like BTRFS and OpenZFS. I already have one test system with BTRFS running so for now I am concentrating to it instead of OpenZFS. They both have RAID-like features as well, without needing any RAID controllers or hardware.

The only problem is that they are more for Linux and BSD at the moment, but there are some drivers for Windows as well, I haven't tried them yet. Maybe I'll go with dual backup system that the main backup is using BTRFS in Linux, and the secondary backup is NTFS (so that I can more easily access it from Windows).

That reminds me, it would be nice if GOG offered the option to use p2p on their official downloader client, or even letting people use any bittorrent client to download their GOG game installers (where GOG acts as the seeder and gatekeeper, to make sure people can download only games they have in their account).

Humble Bundle store has offered that option for many years already, so apparently it is quite doable.

That would alleviate the problem of causing stress to GOG download servers where everyone would download everything separetely... when they would actually be mainly downloading the installers from each other.

One can always dream... I bet many would also get much better download speeds that way, than they currently get from GOG servers.

I used to think the same way (GOG cloud is one of my backups) until this stuff started happening (the newest only available installer may no longer be the most desirable / least buggy version). 14 months later, we're still waiting for a "good" DOS:EE offline installer without the skill book bug. Same with Obduction and broken cursor key rebindings post VR update. GOG also changed their policy to no longer provide offline versions upon request in a support ticket. So once an old offline installer version goes, it may be gone for good.

Agreed. That's probably the better solution.

Same here. And i have to buy another HDD.

Anything is possible, but I consider it quite unlikely both would happen at the same time so I had no time to react.

I routinely do check my backups (data integrity) that everything is still fine on them. That is the main reason I am so interested in more advanced file systems like BTRFS and OpenZFS, as they do their best to make sure data stays safe (barring hardware problems or misplacing your hard drive(s)).

I'm of the opinion that if you're not keeping offline backups, you're not really living the DRM-free life. Log cabins and suchlike. I do have a few outdated ones that could stand to be updated though, and probably one or two backlog games that I never got around to picking up.

I'm not certain you get the point of RAID-1. You're not making a backup, you're only protecting against unplanned harddrive failure which does happen whether or not you've experienced it personally or not.SMART is great and all, but drives can fail for reasons not noticed by SMART. RAID-1 is a little overkill yes, and it won't prevent you from deleting all your files or infecting them with a virus... but I've had HDDs fail on me only a few months after I bought them (despite SMART giving the all clear) so I'm a little paranoid.

I've been keeping mine on a 2TB external, but just got a 4TB in the mail because I ran out of space. It was, ironically enough, a combination of CP2077 and needing somewhere to stash a VM export that prompted the upgrade. That game is a big boi, no two ways about it!

So, about RAID 1 and S.M.A.R.T...

I once had a two-terabyte (or so) RAID 1 setup. One day, one of the drives lost power (bad PSU). So I fixed the PSU, started the machine again, and due to corruption, had to start a rebuild. During the rebuild, I decided to check the smart status of the other drive (there had been no errors or advance notification of any issues in the past).. and that is when that drive started throwing errors & timing out commands. End result, both drives offline in the middle of a rebuild.

I don't see though how having two or more local backups would help with that problem, as I routinely make sure my local backup(s) are up to date to the same versions as what is on GOG, and very rarely keep also some older versions of installers around. (I've done that for e.g. Myst 2: Riven, Among the Sleep and the Edna & Harvey games, just in case, but they are rare exceptions).

Usually at that point I realize I might have had some valid reason to keep an older installer around, it is already too late, I've already updated the local backups. And generally I just trust that newer installers are better.

That reminds me that e.g. BTRFS filesystem could possibly help with this problem as well, as it generally doesn't overwrite files, as it is a Copy on Write filesystem. So if you suddenly realized that you would have wanted to keep the old version of some installer, it might still be possible to go back to it.

RAID has several advantages (depending on the type), but I don't think that it's the safest backup (duplication) system. I'll always prefer an external drive (USB/DAS/NAS).

Did the drive just lose power or was it some kind of power surge? I've disconnected the power (or the grid is down) to my PCs many times and I've never had any issues...