Where to keep your video collection: external drive, cloud, or both
How much space your Stripchat collection takes, the pros and cons of drives and cloud storage, and a simple backup setup that keeps it private.
Once your collection is on your computer, it’s exactly as safe as that computer. Drives fail, laptops get stolen, and “I’ll back it up later” has a way of turning into never. Here’s how much space you actually need, and a setup that’s cheap, private and hard to lose.
How much space it takes
As a rough guide, a 15-minute Stripchat video is 200–300 MB. So:
| Collection | Roughly |
|---|---|
| 50 videos | 10–15 GB |
| 200 videos | 40–60 GB |
| 500 videos | 100–150 GB |
Long private shows are bigger: an hour can go past 1 GB. If you plan to keep buying, double whatever number you land on.
Option 1: an external drive
The cheapest space per terabyte you can buy, and nothing leaves your house.
- Hard drive (HDD): big and cheap. Fine for storing and playing videos. Doesn’t like being dropped.
- SSD: smaller, pricier, faster and far more shock-resistant. Worth it if the drive travels with you.
The catch: it’s one copy, in one place — same fire, same burglar, same spilled coffee as your computer. An external drive makes a great second copy. It isn’t a backup plan on its own.
Option 2: the cloud
Your files live in a data center, so a dead laptop doesn’t take them along. There are three quite different kinds.
Sync services — Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, iCloud. Easy, with apps on every phone. But their terms have rules about adult content (mostly about sharing it), they scan what you upload, and there are reports of accounts being locked after automated checks. For a private video collection, that’s a risk you don’t need to take.
Encrypted storage — MEGA and Proton Drive encrypt your files on your own device before they upload (end-to-end encryption), so the company can’t see what’s inside them. MEGA’s phone app plays videos straight from your account. This is the easy, private choice.
Object storage — Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2, Wasabi. Built for backups: very cheap per gigabyte, very reliable, and with no app for watching anything. You copy files there with a tool like rclone or Cyberduck. Add encryption (below) and it’s the cheapest private off-site backup you can get.
Encrypt it yourself, whatever you pick
If a service isn’t end-to-end encrypted, encrypt before you upload. Two free tools make it painless:
- Cryptomator creates an encrypted “vault” inside any cloud folder. You see normal files; the cloud sees noise — file names included.
- rclone crypt is rclone’s encrypted remote. Ideal for object storage and for automating a backup.
Names matter here: Luna_Rose/Private show.mp4 says plenty on its own. Both tools encrypt the names, not just the contents.
A setup that works: 3-2-1
The rule backup people swear by: 3 copies, on 2 different kinds of storage, 1 of them somewhere else. For a video collection, that’s:
- Your computer — the copy you watch.
- An external drive — a copy you refresh once a month.
- Encrypted cloud — the off-site copy, synced automatically.
If you download with Collection Saver, every model has her own folder and new videos are simply added to it, so sync tools only upload what’s new. The first upload is the only slow one.
And watching on a phone or TV?
Backing up and watching are different jobs. For your phone, MEGA’s app plays videos directly. For a TV, the easiest route is a media server on a computer or NAS at home — Jellyfin is free — which streams your folders to the TV and phone over your Wi-Fi. Object storage like Backblaze isn’t made for playback: keep it as the copy you hope you’ll never need.
Haven’t downloaded your collection yet? Start here.