Next month I'll be buying an external SSD to properly back up my games instead of having them use space on my internal SSD.

Although I have 90-ish games on this account, I don't really care much anymore about a lot of them so I am only thinking of backing up the collection I play. Some of you have 100s if not 1000s of games on your accounts, I can't imagine you back-up everything...Right?

Yes I backup all my GOG offline installers (2680 games; backing up only English Windows versions of games).

How? gogrepoc.py. Just run a few commands to run the script, and it does everything for you. I refresh my collection (downloading any new games or updates, and removing obsolete versions) once every few months, not that frequently. Last time maybe somewhere in early January I think.

I have a 18TB USB hard drive for this purpose.

So yeah I am all set for the demise of GOG.

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/gogrepopy_python_script_for_regularly_backing_up_your_purchased_gog_collection_for_full_offline_e

I back up EVERYTHING on optical. I'm old school. Last year I finally got a blu-ray burner, up to 100GB storage. Once you close the disc it's permanent and can't be over-written with virus' or whatever.

Currently, I'm in the process of switching to M-DISC for more permanent storage.

I strongly recommend against SSD's, as they have a much shorter lifespan than traditional magnetic medium. I bought an external HDD that has a traditional spinner for that purpose, to store my games on and can just run the installer direct from HDD.

I have only 2 games on this account, but I bought nearly 70 games from GOG last year and had that account closed. But I backup EVERYTHING. I lost a lot of of valuable game cd's that I had collected since the late 90's. I had nearly 100 pc games on CDROM and lost them all in a move. I'm much more diligent about backing things up now, and having secondary backups as well.

I know everyone is about SSD's these days. But they do have a shorter lifespan. I've been building desktops and gaming since the late 90's. Trust me, traditional spinning hard drives are far more reliable and last quite a lot longer than SSD's. But they are much slower than SSD's though. It's a trade-off.

I think i heard in the news recently they are not making Bluray discs anymore?

Backing up to optical discs is a pain if you want to keep your collection up to date, especially if the collection is divided to several discs.

The most sensible and cost-effective option for archiving files, especially ones that need to be updated every now and then, is a big USB hard drive. No SSD, you don't need speed for archives, and USB HDDs are cheaper per GB, plus you can get them in much bigger sizes too (my main USB HDD is 18TB, there are bigger ones too like 24TB etc.). Why? Agreed, I don't think SSDs really give any big benefits for longtime archiving as the extra speed is not a real concern there usually. SSDs are for daily use, and maybe for temporary files on USB SSDs, to replace using USB flash memory sticks.

I have well over 1,500 games. A very few I didn't like I won't backup for the sake of it, but most of the rest I have backed up. I haven't found it anywhere near a big a hassle as some make it out to be considering for every very large +100GB sized Cyberpunk 2077 you may own, there will be hundreds of much smaller ones and the average size will end up a lot lower than the largest.

In fact the vast overwhelming majority of my +35 years worth of favourites are typically between 100MB to 10GB in size with some DOS games, eg, Crystal Caves, Arctic Adventures, HeroQuest, Elite Plus, Lemmings, Prince of Persia, etc, are literally under 1MB uncompressed installed size. Include those into the average and you can fit a lot of such games on even a single pocket sized 5TB HDD.

@timppu;

Verbatim is doubling down and will still make them. But mostly, the bluray exit is about commercial movies, not data storage.

I bought Cyberpunk v 1.63 last year here. It took 1 100GB bluray and a 25GB bluray to backup the installer files. It took me 3 hours to copy them over to my gaming laptop. I am currently waiting for a shipment to transfer them to an external HDD for convenience.

Optical is slow. But it's permanent. I'm not worried about bluray disappearing. If it does, I have other options.

So many were touting how SSDs are the future since the early 2000's. But it has been shown time and again they are not reliable. Look at warranties from manufacturers. They typically are half of traditional HDD's. One company, I can't remember now, Seagate maybe? Admitted that SSD's have about half the lifespan of traditional HDD's. That's being very generous.

I had one HDD, it lasted me two decades. In my older gaming laptop that had a Western Digital SSD, it died after 6 months.

Flash memory was originally meant for BIOS's, not hard disk storage. Yes, they are much faster, but they don't last as long. So backup everything is what I say. I like optical. With M-DISC they claim a thousand year storage. If I can have a couple decades out of it, I'm happy.

But to each their own. I'm just old school. Gawd, when I was in middle school we had those old computers with the green monochrome screen and 5.25 inch floppies. I'm old....

As much as I would like to backup the whole of my 500+ games GOG collection (minus a game or two that are massive pain points for me), I don't have the hard disk space or even the bandwidth necessary to pull it off. And I'm here on GOG to enjoy those installers too, not just the DRM-free aspect.

So admittedly I only keep the installers that I download now, and as for the rest, I hope that my circumstances change one day and be able to claim I have a 18TB external HDD full of games independent from any launchers.

18TB is crazy. Games have gotten so riducoulsy large these days. The latest Star Wars game, 155GB. Cyberpunk 107GB. It's getting insane.

I backup over one thousand games on gog. Only the most heavy games on size i didn't do it, 7 or 8 games about 50gb of offline installers, (mafia de, shadows of Mordor, ...).

Until last year i kept linux installers too, but last games i backed only windows.

I used two external drives, one of 1tb and other of 4tb (still one free).

Totally excluding demos and not mp3 soundtracks.

Everything. Online digital stores and physical media, everything, where possible. I'm not a collector; proud owner of games numbering into the thousands, so it is perfectly manageable. For physical consoles, normally the amount of games worth owning is perhaps a dozen or two, and their file size is almost nothing compared to modern PC games that can take up tens of hundreds of gigabytes. It was just a matter of taking a day to back them all up. So if I want to play a handheld console or PC game on disc, it is all in one known location, and I can just boot up a flashcart, emulator, virtual disc drive, etc instead. It also means I can play rom-hacks or some other mod on official hardware, should I wish.

Only Bloodlines.

I don't use Galaxy so it's not a big problem for me to backup dl games. I've over 1.600 (GoG), over 4.000 (Steam) and a hugh pack of external HDD's.

Of course I back up everything.
My games, my movies and all their extras.

People really need to understand, that "buying DRM-free" means absolutely nothing - IF you don't download and store your purchases somewhere, where they're save.

Save from both:
- external access by others
and
- the store (GOG) going under - denying you further access to your property.

And before someone chimes in, saying "well, GOG already said, they will TRY(!) to give us notice ahead and give us a few weeks to download everything"...

...if you've ever been around here, when a big sale was going on, and hundreds if not thousands tried to download their freshly purchased game(s), you know the result of that: the "loved by no-one" GOGbear.

Now try to imagine the same happening - but with several hundred thousands of customers, who are all trying to download their entire collections at once.

Good luck with that endeavor!

I wonder if it's possible to fetch your list of owned GOG games via your profile, then find the file sizes and tally up the full file size of all your installers.

Should be doable. Maybe we can have one such tool like that to compete with all the variants of the same tools but steamed.

I do backup all of them. Using automated scripts to make sure I do not miss updates.

Counting games from gog.com, humblebundle.com and itch.io (that’s most of my games), the total is over 5 000 games. All of that on a dedicated 12TB hard drive.

This storage is done on a (self-hosted) personal server, so I can access these games from wherever I am at any given time.