I have backups on a backup hard drive and also synced to B2, but I am thinking about backing up to some format to put in the cupboard.
The issue I see is that if I don’t have a catastrophic failure and instead just accidentally delete some files one day while organising and don’t realise, at some point the oldest backup state is removed and the files are gone.
The other thing is if I get hit by a bus and no one can work out how to decrypt a backup or whatever.
So I’m thinking of a plain old unencrypted copy of photos etc that anyone could find and use. Bonus points if I can just do a new CD or whatever each year with additions.
I have about 700GB of photos and videos which is the main content I’m concerned about. Do people use DVDs for this or is there something bigger? I am adding 60GB or more each year, would be nice to do one annual addition or something like that.
I’m using blu-ray disks for the 3rd copy, but I’m not backing up nearly as much data as you are.
The only problem with optical media is that you should only expect it to be readable for a couple of years, best case, at this point and probably not even that as the tier 1 guys all stop making it and you’re left with the dregs.
You almost certainly want some sort of tape option, assuming you want long retention periods and are only likely to add incremental changes to a large dataset.
Edit: I know there’s longer-life archival optical media, but for what that costs, uh, you want tape if at all possible.
Same.
Bought a Blu-ray burner and “archive grade” disks for third location backups.
I made a list of files that is just a text document (3MB!) that sits on the root of the Blu-ray. There’s probably a better way of doing that, but it works for me.
Hmm I am keen for something that could be left in the cupboard for 50 years and still works when brought out.
What does it take me to do home tape storage? Do the tapes needs to be stored with climate control or are they pretty stable? Is it feasible for the average person to load the contents?
I’m thinking of pulling a suitcase out of the cupboard of all the baby photos, but digital files or photo and video.
Tape isn’t readable by normal people even if they found it tomorrow with a drive already configured to be used.
In 50 years good luck finding a working drive compatible with LTO4 when LTO32 is out (it’s backwards compatible only with previous gen).
Unless you write on the box “here there are the keys for 100k bitcoins” they’ll just trash the tape
Yeah from some other comments I think my initial plan (that I’ll research some more) will be:
This way I should get a chance to update storage medium as technology changes as well.
So, 50 years isn’t a reasonable goal unless you have a pretty big budget for this. Essentially no media is likely to survive that long and be readable unless they’re stored in a vault, under perfect climate controlled conditions. And even if the media is fine, finding an ancient drive to read a format that no longer exists is not a guaranteed proposition.
You frankly should be expecting to have to replace everything every couple of years, and maybe more often if your routine tests of the media show it’s started rotting.
Long term archival storage really isn’t just a dump it to some media and lock it up and never look at ever again.
Alternately, you could just make someone else pay for all of this, and shove all of this to something like Glacier and make the media Amazon’s problem. (Assuming Amazon is around that long and that nothing catches fire.)
Hmm damn. I don’t really think cloud is the right answer for what I’m trying to do.
I disagree that formats like JPEG won’t be readable in 50 years. I feel like there would be big demand for being able to read the format even if it’s been superceded, on account of all the JPEGs that still living people have.
Maybe I get a big drive. Each year I copy over files from the last year. Every X years I swap the hard drive for a new one, copy all data.
How can I tell if individual files get corrupted? Like the hard drive failed in that section, then I copy the corrupted file to the new drive, and I’d never know. Can I test in bulk? 50k+ photos and videos so far.
The format is the tape in the drive, or the disk or whatever.
Tape existed 50 years ago: nothing modern and in production can read those tapes.
The problem is, given a big enough time window, the literal drives to read it will simply no longer exist, and you won’t be able to access even non-rotted media because of that.
As for data integrity, there’s a lot of options: you can make a md5 sum of each file, and then do it again and see if anything is different.
The only caveat here is you have to make sure whatever you’re using to make the checksums gets stored somewhere that’s not JUST on the drive because if the drive DOES corrupt itself, and your only record of the “good” hashes is on the drive, well, you can’t necessarily trust those hashes either.
Ah good thinking. I am thinking a spare drive that I update once a year with new content and replace every few years with a new drive is a good idea.