General Forum

Continuing my Scanning Posts. I believe since I'm pretty much starting from scratch here with scanning, and my GigaBrix is relatively clean, going with a cloud like Google Drive makes sense. I like Google Drive but Dropbox, OneDrive or any other cloud would work for storage.

I spent the day putting together a flow chart of How I Plan On Using Google Drive. If enough members show interest I'll post a summary in my next post.

The scanning process continues..........I picked up a box of assorted color flash drives to set up my scan library. Once again keeping my computer clean, clear and speedy.

May I ask how much memory is your collection taking up so far? Also how many cards have you done? This is something I have thought about doing myself but been just trying to figure out the site up on how I want to do it 

Technically zero. But I have reserved some folders for permanent card related files. The original scans are only temporary, they can be deleted when they are either synched with Google Drive and/or saved to the color-coded flash drives.

So the number of cards really doesn't play a part unless you go over the Google free GB limit and/or exhaust the GB storage on your flash drive. If you continually delete them from your hardrive. If you have that many cards, it's relatively cheap to up GB on Google Account or buy more flashdrives [cheap]. Hope that helps. ~BOB~

I'm not entirely sure on what you're doing. But why mess around with a bunch of flash drive. Just get another hard drive and format it for storage. I have one hard drive that has my OS on it and photos, document, videos & music I have on a 2ed hard drive. I have a 1Tb hard drive for storage and if anything ever happens to my system or computer, I will lose nothing. When I got a new computer a year ago. I just took out the 2ed hard drive pop it into the new one and everything was right there. I've done that with both my computer. I run two at the same time and the 2ed tower has 3 hard drives. the 3ed hard drive is a backup for everything. 

You could also get a hard drive dock and plug it into a USB port and just leave it there. 

RJ, Yes I get that, but in my situation in moving from room to room, up and downstairs....portability is what I like.

They have portable external hard drives. They only require to be plugged into a USB port for power. I have a couple of them that are 1tb in space.

https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Portable-External-Hard-Drive/dp/B07CRG94G3/ref=mp_s_a_1_2_sspa?keywords=external+hard+drive&qid=1568939955&sprefix=exter&sr=8-2-spons&psc=1&spLa=ZW5jcnlwdGVkUXVhbGlmaWVyPUExQ1Y0Wk5QMDRDRUdJJmVuY3J5cHRlZElkPUEwMzM5OTEzQlVMTUdFUk1NVUxUJmVuY3J5cHRlZEFkSWQ9QTA1MjMxMzBFOEVXTTVaS0pJMEImd2lkZ2V0TmFtZT1zcF9waG9uZV9zZWFyY2hfYXRmJmFjdGlvbj1jbGlja1JlZGlyZWN0JmRvTm90TG9nQ2xpY2s9dHJ1ZQ==

I have Office365 Home edition (~US$90/yr), which allows up to 5 family members use the apps, which works for me. OneDrive has 1 TB of storage. There is a free Office edition for students, so buying a license may not make sense.

As someone stated earlier, I do not use flash drives for storage as those can be lost fairly easily, so these are only for transfering files when needed.

Another concern would be ransomware, which sadly is more rampant now. Having your files corrupted on your computer hard drive would mean your backup would also be corrupted if it syncs automatically (it should). 

Windows 10 has ransomware-protection features which prevent the OneDrive folder from being accessed by other apps. 

In the past I backed up on an external hard drive, but those can die too. OneDrive is easier for me since I don't have to worry about synching files. I can always copy files to a hard drive ever once in a while just for peace of mind if needed.

There is also the issue of encryption. Windows 10 Pro includes BitLocker which is a nice feature since the hard drive is not readeable from another computer(you want to backup on a cloud service for this). I don't know if Google Drive has any encryption features as I have not used it in a while, but it's a feature that I believe is coming later this year for OneDrive.

To recap, with cloud storage, I really don't need an external hard drive/flash drive.

Just my 2c, 

I have a couple of questions for you volbox with your collection being in your OneDrive is it just an excel spreadsheet or are they pictures of the cards? And if it’s pictures may I also ask how many photos you have and how much space is being used for it? It’s something I’ve thought about doing with my collection, but haven’t really had time to get around to it yet. Fingers crossed hopefully soon.