Ask Slashdot: Best Long-Term Video/Picture Storage? 499
First time accepted submitter (and first-time parent — congratulations!) SoylentRed writes "I recently have had my first kid, a wonderful healthy daughter who is now just over 6 months old. As one can expect, we have an abundance of photos and videos, and have started to scratch our heads about the best way to store these files and back them up long-term. My parents have asked us (funny thing is it was my mom — the least tech-savvy person among our family) what our plan is to make sure these files are saved and available for her when she is older — which made me realize that we don't really have a good plan! We are currently using TimeMachine on my wife's MacBook Pro; for now we are doing OK with that as a back-up. But my parents have offered to help pay for something that might be a better solution. We could burn DVDs — but that is tedious and gets to be a pain as we would need to back those up (or recopy) them every year or so to be sure we aren't suffering from degrading DVDs. Is our best option right now to pick up two hard drives, back up all our pictures and videos to the first, and then use a 3rd party app to mirror that drive to the second just in case one of them craps out? Is there an online solution that would be better? We are still a few years away from being able to afford the DVDs/CDs that are the 100+ year discs. Is there a better solution I haven't thought of?"
CrashPlan (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a fan of CrashPlan -- it can handle backups between different local media (e.g. from one hard disk to another), between one computer and another, between your computer and a friend's computer, and between your computer and their online storage service. In all cases, your data is encrypted so that the other party (be it the second computer, your friend, or the online service) has no access to your data.
One of the features I like is that the software does regular integrity checks on the backed-up data. Still, if the original data is corrupted, the software will dutifully back up that corrupted data, so that won't help you much.
If they're important family photos, I'd use keep the files on at least two local drives, as well as remote backup using something like CrashPlan. If you're particularly concerned, you might keep the photos on Amazon S3 -- they claim their storage infrastructure is highly durable and reliable, which could be beneficial.
Re:Hard copy (Score:4, Informative)
While it is true that digital data needs to be maintained, it's not a lot. If there ever comes a time when you won't be able to cheaply and easily store your digital files, you will have much more serious things to worry about than preserving old photos.
Over time, data gets smaller relative to storage devices. Something that seemed like a lot 15 years ago can easily sit in the slack space on your phone.
HQ printer with archival inks on acid free paper (Score:4, Informative)
go analog for longest life span.
HP designjet z2100 or epson stylus 4880/4900.
these printers don't come cheap, but over the lifespan of the printer, i'f your printing 100's or 1000's of prints RIO will be better than paying snapfish.
they are favorite entry level printers in the graphic arts and prepress market due to the fact that:
1) they can produce contone images at resolutions that make dithering imperceptable to the naked eye
2) color fast inks that can be archival for 150-200 years
3) wide color gamut using multiple inksets
4) FOGRA/GRACoL certifiably using approved rip software
many pro photographers are ditching the darkroom in favor of the class of professional inkjet printers for reproducing their images.
Re:Nas Drive, with offsite backup (Score:4, Informative)
Well there's a question about what you're trying to accomplish, yes, and RAID 0 is faster. However, what you should overlook is that RAID 0 drastically increases your chances of losing the entire contents of your drive due to catastrophic disk failure.
When you get 2 hard drives together in a RAID 0, either one could die and cause total data loss, meaning you've doubled your chances of losing all the data on that RAID. There are consumer-grade RAIDs now offering 4 drives, which means that if you use a RAID 0 there, you've quadrupled your chances. This is a problem, because it's really not all that rare for a hard drive to fail.
So the point of "safe" RAID configurations is not just to increase safety over what a single drive provides (which is what RAID 1 does) but rather to mitigate the danger created by putting the drives in a RAID. A RAID 5 is much safer than a RAID 0, for example, because the chances of 2 drives failing at the same time is rather slim. However, there is bound to be a point where, if you have enough disks in a RAID 5 (I don't know how many, and it would depend on a couple factors), then it would be less safe than storing data on a single disk.
So... yeah, if you need a lot of speed and space for cheap, you're really confident in your backup solution, and you don't mind the downtime of needing to restore from backup if your RAID dies, then RAID 0 isn't a bad solution. But on the other hand, I don't recommend that people rely too heavily on their backups.