and i'm the only one who backs up to single layer Blu-Ray. if archival discs were consumer grade i'd be right on that.

On the moon.

...online. This is exactly something I don't need to backup and will never need to backup. In the rather unlikely and tragic event GOG closes down, there will be many more people volunteering their bandwidth because they won't be hurting a game preservation business by providing a free alternative.

Now, if you asked me "where would you get that specific hot wizard mod for Stardew Valley", the answer to that is "I hope my gf's little sister hasn't formatted her old laptop". It's nowhere on Nexus and I can't find it on the Chucklefish forums (where I'd got it from in 2016) either. This sucks.

"...online." Sounds illegal to me, unless you mean purchase it again from a credible source, and possibly a security risk (download dodgy downloads?). If I store the files I brought, need not worry about it again or spend the time tracing the files down - this is really one of the reasons why most buy again here, to avoid having to get things working and find valid safe files.

Guess how many fucks I give.

Why would I "purchase it again" if I have a license?

All downloads are security risks.

This still costs work-hours, electricity and storage space. Then updates come out and you may need to redownload.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying I assess personal risks and costs differently. Whenever I tried backing up games or movies, I never used the backups. Even with relatively rare commercial downloads that are small and perfectly usable in their "backup" form, such as a certain comic collection, it's more of a pain in the ass to connect the external hard drive than redownload it anew.

While this IS true, it's completely orthogonal to backups. When I decide what to play, I look through my GOG library (which is more visual than a list of folders and doesn't require maintenance like a personal database), and once I've decided, the easiest way to start playing is to click an install button in Galaxy (or download an installer if on Linux), not connect a backup drive and find a corresponding folder.

Damn!!! Good pic of myself Tiny! Thx brother! :P

That's correct approach, I think. I'll wait a while and if the whole problem will not be explained/solved properly, I'll do exactly that. Thanks for the suggestion.

I'm on Linux and I'm also somewhat familiar with python, so it's not that bad (my concern is usually excess of pythons, because I've got 2.x and 3.x branches installed and used for different purposes, so I need to be aware which one I use;).
Currently I'm scrapping my library and after ~100 minutes it's still 188/364...
Do I undestand correctly that after the step is completed I'll be able to execute "gogrepo.py download -dryrun" command and I'll get some data estimating space needed for full backup?

Yep. It tells what would be the combined size of all the files it is going to download, after quickly checking first what you already have on your target directory. If you don't have any gog installers or goodies files there that it recognizes as valid, then that combined amount of data to download is your whole GOG collection (by default only English Windows versions of installers + goodies, unless you specify otherwise).

Cool, thanks! However I've just found out that script stopped after 2h (232/364...). Well, I'll try again, seems that it's still worth trying, because any other (i.e. manual) way to backup such a large collection makes no sense.

Thank you for clarifications!

there's obviously a bunch of smart people here. some are using gogrepo to automate backups. of which i know nothing. so i have been backing up manually even though i have hundreds of games. just need patience to do it my way. currently have around 30 items i need to redownload because of the installer only updates but that's not a priority.

You may not want to redownload those with installer only updates. The way it looks now, those installer updates are not adding anything to gameplay, only bundling Galaxy in with the classic installers which increases (bloats in the case of non-Galaxy users) the files. If you only want or use the classic installers then you may want to avoid the new ones. They are reported to increase the download times, take up more storage space and lengthen the time it takes to install the game without benefit to the non-Galaxy user. These changed installers are also obfuscating files, reportedly creating many new directories and causing people using other or even some older OS's and some mods that require access to these files to no longer be able to play on their systems. There are support tickets and questions out to some GOG staff to see if some of this can be corrected - so you may want to hold off until we see what will happen as GOG may (need to) change the installers again.

Per some Goggers investigating this, the way to tell if the installer has been changed in this way and not gameplay changes seems to be if there is no longer a separate Galaxy version of the installer on that game.

Is there some ongoing discussion about that somewhere? I didn't see any mention (nor confirmation) of that in e.g. the "what has been updated" or "adam's WINE wrappers" discussions.

All I could see in those discussions was that (some?) games that have received an "internal structure" update are not offering separate classic and galaxy-embedded installers, but only the classic one, and in the case of Freedom Force, it was noted that the size has increased 40MB.

However, I didn't see anyone would have mentioned the new installers would now have Galaxy installer embedded, and no one seemed to have analyzed why e.g. Freedom Force size had increased. Could just as well be some added DirectX or Visual C++ whatever runtimes, who knows.

Can you name some games where one can see this (ie. the "classic" installer now includes a Galaxy installer)? Or what exactly did you mean by "bundling Galaxy in with the classic installers"?

I have a dedicated 5TB external drive for my games.
So would I honestly.

I thought they were or is that just a fake labeling?

https://www.mediasupply.com/jvc-iso-archival-media.html