MiSTer FPGA Forum

Heya all ...
at that point where I’ve nearly saved everything onto the SD card. It’s 64gb got 18 gb free space is not an issue. Should I get a bigger capacity sans disk ultra card and simply copy the games folder over to it after the format by mr fusion method installer ? What’s the best way of protecting or upgrading the mister files
Maybe thinking too much but any suggestions appreciated
Maybe just saving my game folder to the laptop but would it benefit me by getting a ultra speed sans disk SD

Are you basically asking about backing up your roms? DId you rip all the roms from your personal collection? If so, that's a lot of work and I would back it up. Copy it to a USB drive or something. Speed shouldn't really matter.

Just backup the ROMS and then you might want to do a periodic backup of your saves. MiSTer has a feature that can keep your saves in sync with the cloud. I haven't used it yet, but might be useful to look into. It's in the scripts folder.

I personally use "Update_All" since it came out to update everything and it hasn't really failed me yet.
Link: https://github.com/theypsilon/Update_All_MiSTer

The speed of the drive doesn't really matter all things considered because MiSTer itself is USB 2.0 only, so if you use FTP or SSH, you're limited in how fast you can transfer. 64GB is kinda small in the grand scheme of things, so another SD card, USB 3.0 flash drive would suffice.

MicroSD storage should be considered fairly volatile. If it's important, don't keep it on a MicroSD or a flash drive in general.

For preservation purposes if you care about your own roms, you should store them in multiple places. On your hard drive and somewhere in private cloud storage like google drive or something like that. That way if your hard drive fails, you still have your data.

Personally for saves I do a regular backup over the network with WinSCP (https://winscp.net/eng/download.php) - I just copy my saves folder over to my storage on my computer and my cloud storage.

Agreed on speed, that doesnt matter so much. Quality of the MicroSD can matter if you want stability. Sandisk Ultra is generally very high quality, but it's still a MicroSD and will fail eventually.

I backup everything of value to Amazon S3 using rclone.org, which allows me to encrypt before anything gets sent. Local storage media are far too fragile and I don't want to manage a schedule with rotating redundant media myself. All my files are encrypted, even their names, so good in luck to anyone who snoops along.

I get S3 at a discount through work, but at regular list price Azure blob storage is a bit cheaper but equally robust for backups.

SD cards and flash memory are volatile in nature due to the need for the presence of a static charge in order to keep the data bits "alive" but the time frame is normally around 10 years. That's a hell of a long time to keep something on flash memory, never to be touched and I find that kind of local back up unrealistic as a game rom collection is something that is most likely going to be updated on a regular basis. If we are looking at that 10-year time frame, the cost would be fairly high relatively speaking.

Local storage is fairly unreliable though, but the chances of running into an issue are astronomically small. It is games we are talking about here, not exactly unique or difficult-to-find data.

If I were to truly give my honest advice for backing up a game collection, I'd store them in whatever way is most convenient and available and then keep a text file list/spreadsheet of my collection and just redownload from "the internet" if I ever lose them.

That means you'd just be managing a small data file and not Gigs of roms.

OP hasn't said if they ripped the ROMs themselves. I presume that to be the case. If so, the original media is still there, plus the ROM backup, plus the actively-used roms.

This is all terrible advice though and everyone should ignore it.

Bas wrote: ↑Sat Apr 10, 2021 8:52 am I backup everything of value to Amazon S3 using rclone.org, which allows me to encrypt before anything gets sent. Local storage media are far too fragile and I don't want to manage a schedule with rotating redundant media myself. All my files are encrypted, even their names, so good in luck to anyone who snoops along.

I get S3 at a discount through work, but at regular list price Azure blob storage is a bit cheaper but equally robust for backups.

I do the same (encrypted rclone), but to BackBlaze. They came out much cheaper than Amazon for me.

Wasabi are another that do cheap object store.