Online Accounts 2025: A Little Math (Premium)

I wasn’t expecting to write so much about getting my YouTube videos out of the service, but I encountered a few issues. Now that it’s in a good place, it’s intersecting with another part of this project, the NAS and how much storage I’ll need when I put that together.

First things first.

Initial YouTube backup

Without belaboring the point–this has already taken up too much of my time, and your time–the short version of the work I’ve done to back up my YouTube videos so far included:

• Getting a Google Takeout that I later learned was from my personal (and unused) YouTube channel and not from the Thurrott.com brand account.
• Figuring out a way to automatically download all the First Ring Daily videos from the Thurrott.com YouTuber channel when I thought that was most of what was missing.
• And then finally figuring out my error and triggering two different Google Takeout downloads after the first consisted of 1373 ZIP file, each about 2 GB in size. I also ordered a portable USB hard drive to temporarily store this data ahead of getting a NAS.

For my second Google Takeout (third, if you count the mistake at the beginning), I requested 50 GB files, which is the largest file size Google offers. Later that day, the email arrived, and I discovered this would require 64 file downloads. That’s about 3.2 TB of disk space, total, assuming each file is exactly 50 GB.

Google Takeout is a wonderful tool–I wish Microsoft offered something like this–but it can be tedious dealing with the downloads. You can only download these files with a web browser. You have to click a link for each download manually, in turn. (I use Ctrl + click because it would otherwise refresh the download list and you lose your place). And then you’re at the mercy of the browser and whatever quality and downloading issues it brings to the table. I connected the laptop to the router with an Ethernet cable for the best results and hoped for the best.

Unfortunately, I started this process with Edge, but it was horribly unreliable. Because of the file sizes, I figured I would try 10 at a time, and after kicking off 10 downloads and configuring PowerToys Awake to keep the PC alive for the duration, I went off and worked on a different PC. But when I checked back in, all the downloads had stopped. So I restarted each–that, at least, worked fine in that they continued rather than started over–and then babysat the downloads until they were done. This process took about three hours. I left it to run overnight, but all those downloads crapped out as well.

With that lesson firmly in place, I moved to Chrome, which proved to be more reliable, though I did later experience a few download quirks. Sadly, it wasn’t any quicker either.

I ordered the external hard drive on Wednesday, and Amazon said it would arrive on Friday. Wednesday evening, I predicted to my wife that the drive would arrive before I had downloaded all the files. And then I set out to try to prove myself wrong.

This morning, I tried to figure out how to split up the downloads across multiple PCs. As noted in the previous post, I don’t have a laptop here that can hold this entire download set, let alone have room to let me extract them all. (Almost no one does, I imagine.) I had started on a laptop with a 2 TB SSD and a reasonable amount of free space, and was able to get the first 30 of the 64 files downloaded to it by mid-morning. This left little free space on the disk, about 50 GB, so I’d have to unzip them one at a time, deleting each as I went.

But first, I had to choose another PC for the other downloads. (And hopefully only one other PC, it wasn’t clear if I would need more than that. Update: I will need three.) I don’t have many good choices here. My Surface Laptop 7 has a 1 TB SSD, but I had downloaded the previous Takeout and the FRD videos to it, which had eaten up a lot of the disk space. I could technically delete all that, but I wanted to hang onto it temporarily, if possible, and then do that after the new Takeout download was complete and unzipped. The other PCs here have 512 GB or 1 TB SSDs with varying degrees of usage. So I chose the one with the most free space and got going on the next 10 downloads (ZIP files 31 through 40).

That was going to take three hours or so, so I moved back to the laptop with the first 30 ZIP files to test my theory that the unzipped videos would take up about the same disk space as the ZIP files. I used 7-Zip for this process, and while it can be automated–with enough disk space, I could simply unzip all of those files at once–I didn’t have enough disk space. So I had to unzip each file manually, one at a time, and then permanently delete that ZIP file before moving on to the next one. Obviously, this requires a bit of attention. You don’t want to mistakenly permanently delete a file you didn’t unzip.

To get this done, I opened the folder of ZIP files in 7-Zip. Then, I right-clicked the first ZIP file and chose 7-Zip > Extract here from the context menu. Each file took a minute or two to unzip, so when that was done, I closed that, selected the ZIP file in 7-Zip, held down SHIFT, and tapped the DELETE key to permanently delete it.

And then I repeated that 30 times. It took a while. And that wasn’t even half the archive.

Every once in a while, I’d open File Explorer to check on the available disk space. It wasn’t obvious at first, but I actually regained space over time, not a lot, but enough, and better than the reverse. This process also gave me the confidence to just delete the FRD videos from the Surface Laptop 7, which freed up over 270 GB on that PC.

Work progressed throughout Thursday. After lunch, I triggered the next 10 file downloads on the second laptop (ZIP files 41 through 50), though that eventually ran into disk space issues too, so I went into 7-zip on that PC and started unzipping. I did finish unzipping the 30 ZIP I had downloaded to the first laptop with the 2 TB SSD–the total size on disk is about 1.46 TB, and there is now 65.5 GB of free disk space on that PC–but I have ZIP files 51 through 64 to still download (and then unzip) as I write this.

Storage needs

While that work was underway on Thursday, I started thinking about my total storage needs. The YouTube archive/backup is humongous, to be sure, but it’s not my only storage concern. The problem is that some of the data I will move to the NAS is on my current, out-of-date NAS. And that NAS is in Pennsylvania, inaccessible to me here in Mexico. This isn’t an emergency, I won’t buy any hardware until we get home, probably in May. But I am curious. Perhaps I could come up with a way to figure it out, at least roughly.

To come up with a number, I had to gather information from several different places, including some articles I wrote that described file consolidation and organizational work in recent years. I am definitely missing something here, but without knowing the total as I write this sentence, my goal is to get double the storage (quadruple, including the disk mirroring) that I need per NAS. So that should account for anything I’ve missed and give me years of headroom. He says, naively.

OK. Here’s what I found today.

Photos. My photo collection is 452 GB (138,085 files), plus I have other photos that take up 52.1 GB (14,738 files), and then our home videos, which take up 10.2 GB (431 files). These are all in OneDrive, and don’t account for the coming 2024 consolidation. Plus, this will only grow. But the total right now is just under 520 GB.

Documents. My personal and work documents are about 256 GB (304,000+ files). The current (to-do) and personal documents are about 57.5 GB (100,735 files). And the current books take up about 20.3 GB (22,191 files) These are in Google Drive, and this will also grow over time. It’s about 331 GB.

Music. I downloaded my music library from YouTube as part of the first Google Takeout, and that download is 48.3 GB (6174 files). But it’s likely incomplete. Fortunately, I wrote about consolidating this collection, so I know that the cleaned up version of it, on my current NAS, is 45.7 GB. So that’s the number: 45.7 GB.

Videos. I have a legacy collection of ripped movies and TV shows on the current NAS, and it took up 2.7 GB of space in 2021. That’s a long time ago, but I feel like I didn’t do too much to it, and it doesn’t matter too much to me regardless. But combined with 5.76 GB of other videos I have in OneDrive, let’s call this 10 GB.

Eternal Spring videos. I have most of the videos we recorded for Eternal Spring, and it’s about 110 GB (150 files) right now, and backed up in OneDrive for Business. So, 110 GB.

Thurrott.com videos. This is the wild card for now because I’m still downloading as I write this. But YouTube tells me I have just under 2000 videos. On the first (2 TB SSD) laptop, I’ve downloaded and unzipped 869 of those videos, and they take up 1.46 TB of disk space. Assuming a similar size per file and doing a bit of math, I calculate/guess that the full 2000 files will thus take up about 3.4 TB. Which is the ballpark of the total rough Google Takeout download size (where 64 files, each 50 GB, takes up about 3.2 TB of disk space). So I will call it 3.4 TB. (Meaning, the 4 TB external HDD I ordered is barely big enough, but should work.)

Add that all up and it’s about 4.4 or 4.5 TB. Double that is 9 TB. And so that’s the minimum size HDD I’d consider getting (x 2) for each NAS. But this figure is likely incorrect. And when I first wrote about the NAS yesterday, I discussed 8 or 12 TB HDDs. Given this, and the nagging feeling I’ve missed something, the 12 TB HDD is now the minimum I’d consider. But again, I don’t need to figure this out until we get back to Pennsylvania. I’m suddenly eager to see exactly what is on the current NAS. Ah well.

In the meantime, I’m going to revisit what I put where across each of the cloud storage services I’m using. Right now, I have different backups and working sets across multiple services, so I will want to know where everything is and ensure I’m using the best version of whatever data when it’s time to copy it all to the NAS. There’s no rush, and I have other online accounts work to do. But it’s all on the to-do list. There’s always more.

More soon.