GrandFather, Father, Son archive startegy

It's December already and I'm still contemplating the Backtober idea. Something more distracting seems to arrive everytime I stop to consider a NAS (network storage) option, and I really haven't given trueNAS a real work-out yet either. What I have done is dropped back to the very old Grandfather, Father, Son  Archive strategy from the days when anything off the computer was stored on large reels of magnetic tape. In those days Backup was rightly considered as different to Archive. Usually the backup set was in two parts Full (everything import) and Incremental (only those files that have changed since the last full backup).

What has helped is I am recycling the older USB portable hard drives to store different sets of the data I am now archiving (Largely photos, some finished videos and some PDFs & documents). Swapping them around to fit the file organization. Where once I had the oldest files on the smallest drives (they have been there all their lives) and the newest files on the larger drives (I was moving files to larger drives as I filled them). I now have all the oldest (and theoretically less accessed files on the larger newer drive) and most recent files on the smaller (and older drives). I'm also now convinced that drives need to be exercised (Rather than letting them slowly fail in a cupboard un-noticed so I am now reformating the grandfathers as I recycle them).

The three disks on the green sleeve also act as my Backup set, they are kept on my desk under the shelf/alcove lifting up my monitor to eye level. They are normally not connected to any computer but can be. When I retrieve my grandfather copy from remote storage I immediately clean off the disk (a full format as that does checks of the disk for problems and will map out and mark any problem areas).

I then run copies of the master data and folders on my computer(s) to the freshly formatted disk, There is lots of software to do this, I just used windows backup and restore features built-in windows 10/11. This can take a fair while so best done overnight or in the background. The Incremental Backup can be run manually, just copying files and folders you have been working on to the Incremental disk. This requires a bit of discipline but easy to do at the end of the day or as a task is finished. When I load a batch of photos from my camera I also direct copies to the incremental disk. Alternatively, you can use specialized backup software to automate the process.