One of the most helpful changes I’ve made in recent years is recording *everything* I play. No matter how big or small the game, I almost always have a recording of my playthrough now. This is a massive weight off my shoulders as, frequently, I don’t know which games I will want to talk about or make videos on in the future, whether immediately after release or years down the line.
I really care about what is on screen almost every second of scripted videos (for better or for worse). So it’s always a huge shame when I think of an idea or script something out, only to realize I don’t have the footage to do so. And if I want to make that video, I’ll need to possibly play dozens upon dozens of hours of a game I already enjoyed to get the diversity and variety of footage I want. That’s time I could spend playing new games.
If I ever need Dragon Quest Heroes II Multiplayer gameplay that I accidentally had my microphone on for, it’s there and has been since 2018. I’m sure I’ll probably maybe need it someday never.
There’s, of course, the downside of space. I’m decently tech-savvy but far from anything super competent, so I don’t know whether my setup makes sense. I have a DAS connected to my computer, which is just a bunch of hard drives I access over a USB connection. Currently, two 12 terabyte drives are inside (with space for another 3.)
For myself, it wasn’t cheap to buy, and the hard drives are pretty hefty, too (though comparatively cheap historically).
I’ve managed to stick on these two drives for a while by using things like Handbrake to help compress footage (though it takes quite some time since I have years of backlogged video).
However, there is no backup. Meaning at basically any moment, all of this can go poof. And I’m sure my compressing the footage directly off the drives isn’t helping either. The reality is that I need to get more drives if only to set up a RAID for the inevitable death of one of them. And, of course, that doesn’t protect them from things like robbery or other environmental disasters (though in Vegas, we just have earthquakes at worst.)
I looked into some cloud solutions at some point. Still, I couldn’t find anything that made sense money-wise or provided a reasonable way to get terabytes of data onto their servers without destroying my ISP’s monthly data cap.
For now, I pray. But I really need to find some solution soon.
