AP 0850: Should I Use an External Hard Drive to Backup My Podcast Content Storage?

AskPat 850 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to episode 850 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.

We have a great question today from Jason, but before we get to that, I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is ZipRecruiter. Hey, if you're going to ever hire anybody, you know it could be very difficult to find the right candidates. You have to post your job online and it can just be cumbersome to do that. Well with the ZipRecruiter, you can put one job description of who you're looking for onto ZipRecruiter, and they do all the work for you. They send it out to over 200-plus different job sites, they'll help you find the right candidates, you don't have to juggle any emails or you know, anything like that. No phone calls to your office. They quickly screen the candidates for you. They rate them and you can hire the right person fast. Here's the deal for you. Right now my listeners can post jobs on ZipRecruiter for free by going to ZipRecruiter.com/Pat. Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com/Pat. Try for free. You'll love it.

All right, now here's today's question from Jason.

Jason: Hey Pat. Jason Bordeaux here from the Solomon's Porch Podcast. First I want to thank you for all of the amazing content that you provide for us listeners. I'm sure I speak on behalf of everybody when I say it is awesome, amazing, and it is greatly appreciated. I want to go ahead and ask the question. Whenever you post all of your shows and all your content onto Libsyn to have it fed through iTunes and all the other podcast playing places, do you also store it in a location that you own such as a hard drive or something of that nature? Or do you trust all of your content to be stored somewhere online I guess in the cloud? I was wondering because my computer's filling up with a lot of the files from my podcast, and I'm just wanting to know is there a place that I should keep ahold of it myself in case I need to repost it somewhere else? Or do I just leave it on places like SoundCloud or Libsyn? Is it safe? Is it trustworthy to keep them there, and am I able to go back and retrieve them later? For whatever reason, whether I want to put it on the disc to send to people or something like that. If you will, please let me know and I hope to hear from you soon. Thanks!

Pat Flynn: Hey Jason, thank you so much for the question. To answer your question simply: yes. I store the files that I record onto my own personal hard drive that is an external hard drive because my computer fills up really fast. If my podcasting content was on my computer with 850 episodes of AskPat with 250-plus episodes of the SPI podcast and all those other ones, well I wouldn't have any room and my computer would be slow, really slow. I have a one terabyte external hard drive that seems to not even be a quarter of the way full now, but it's just for video and podcasting content that I have.

Because yeah, it's on the cloud, right? On Libsyn. What happens if something happens to Libsyn? Or you know, they get hacked? You don't want anything to just jeopardize your content in that way because you potentially might not be able to recover it on the cloud. I always have some sort of back up that I have that's with me. I also have a back up for those files on DropBox as well. They just happen to live there too because my team and I, that's the tool we use. That's the application we use to kind of send files between different team members and what not. We have those files stored on DropBox as well. Just the final files for that, the MP3s, not the recorded ones that I can go back to and sort of reopen in Adobe Audition or Garage Band. Those are the ones I was talking about that I have on my hard drive, my external hard drive. The final files, actually my team members have those also on their own external hard drives, but mostly on DropBox too. We have many things in place to help us recover files if we need to. Of course, they also live on Libsyn or Buzzsprout, or wherever else we have them too.

But I know from my own personal experience that sometimes you can't control these things. The more you can control the better. With back ups specifically, I've had hard drive failures on my computer. I've had things on the cloud disappear. I've had companies that I have had content into just sort of go away including books and things like that. Be very careful. Better safe than sorry is what I always say. Jason, hopefully that answers your question. An external hard drive to solve your computer storage issues may be the right solution. There you go.

Thanks so much I appreciate you and I want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show as well, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.

Thank you so much I appreciate you and here's a quote to finish off the day by somebody unknown. But this is, “Never put off until tomorrow what you can avoid all together.” So important. All right guys, take care. Thank you so much and I look forward to serving you in tomorrow's episode of AskPat. Bye for now.