Do you use external HDD? Cloud service? Flash drive? DVD? I am trying to make a choice, so I would like to see what other people do since I am a noob at data hoarding. All replies appreciated!

A large pile of flashdrives.

3 HDDs, one major backup and two mirrors.

Most people use external HDD's or a NAS (Network storage). Flash drives can "leak" over time if they're not plugged in for multiple years and are too expensive vs HDD's for +1TB of data. DVD-R's will work but can be a lot of work if you have a lot of games (especially games larger than around 4.5GB that need to be split). I do have a BD-RE (Blu-Ray) burner too (approx 23GB per disk), and it works fine and is reliable though you need to make sure you get HTL (high quality inorganic) vs LTH (low quality organic) discs as the latter are less stable vs heat, light, UV, etc, degradation.

A few external hard drives will do it perfectly.
Just make sure there is always a double backup available in case the first backup fails.


Cloud service isn't an answer. It's just one more service that can be terminated just like the service you are getting your software originally from.

Of course if you use some cloud in addition to hard drives, it doesn't harm to have online backups.

- 1 internal hard drive
- 1 external backup hard drive with daily scheduling
- 2 offline 2.5" mirrored drives for archiving

I don't consider downloading everything on only 1 drive a backup since GOG's servers aren't yours.

2x 3TB HDDs 3.5"

5TB external hdd

DVD-R are made of garbage material that degrade quickly.

I didn't start backing up my games yet, but when I do I'm probably going use a combination of a high-quality external HDD - meaning I buy a good HDD and an enclosure, and assemble it myself; the pre-assembled external HDDs are garbage 99-100% of the time - and a cloud service.

An external 5TB (2.5") USB hard drive. Quite easy to maintain and if I want to install a GOG game to one of my PCs, just connect that USB HDD to it and click on the installer.

Backing up your GOG game installers to an online cloud service sounds kinda... funny. After all, what is your GOG account, if not an online cloud service to keep your GOG games? :D The very reason I at this point keep my GOG game installers on a local HDD is that I don't have to download a game when I finally get the urge to install and play it, considering I only have a basic 10Mbps line. Another cloud service would not help with that at all, I'd have to download it from there then.

Also considering my GOG game installers take currently probably 3TB or so, I wonder which cloud services offer me such capacity, and for what price?

Joining the nothing club.

I don't feel the need to as the chances GOG will just suddenly die from one day to the next are close to zero. If they announce they are closing down THEN I will start worrying about backing everything up.

That's gonna be more problematic when EVERYONE tries to crush thier CDN all at the same time. You're better off doing it when there' sno risk. Rather than trying to 'make a run on the banks' hoping no one else does the same. You can easily get good bandwidth from GOG now. When everyone is trying ot download their entire GOG library at the same time, you'll be lucky if you get 1kb per hour the existing fork of gogrepo works fine. You just need to install perl (i recommend activestate perl as it kinda has everything you need out of the gate) then just run the download. Depending on your library size it'll take awhile initially but its seamless

Mines just on an internal 6tb drive

Very big external HDD drive (on the package it has 4 TB, in practice about 3,6 TB). Mostly for convenience to have everything in one place (I've also placed there my backups from Desura and DotEmu).

Synology NAS with 2x 10TB HGST drives in RAID 1 (mirror)