Ask Slashdot: Best Medium For Personal Archive? 251
An anonymous reader writes What would be the best media to store a backup of important files in a lockbox? Like a lot of people we have a lot of important information on our computers, and have a lot of files that we don't want backed up in the cloud, but want to preserve. Everything from our personally ripped media, family pictures, important documents, etc.. We are considering BluRay, HDD, and SSD but wanted to ask the Slashdot community what they would do. So, in 2015, what technology (or technologies!) would you employ to best ensure your data's long-term survival? Where would you put that lockbox?
stone tablets (Score:3, Funny)
Re:stone tablets (Score:5, Informative)
... have always worked for me.
Here's an even better solution: Since this exact same question has been asked on Slashdot multiple times, and the topic has been beaten to death, just look in the archives and see what everyone recommended last time. Hint: The consensus recommendation was to pick at least two different media, and store them in a least two different geographical locations, then migrate to different media as technology improves.
The submitter is leaving out most important information: How much data? Storing terabytes is different than storing gigabytes (which will fit on a thumb drive). How long? The submitter says "backups" not "archives", which implies that long shelf life is not a priority, but many people use the terms interchangeably.
Re:stone tablets (Score:5, Funny)
... have always worked for me.
Here's an even better solution: Since this exact same question has been asked on Slashdot multiple times, and the topic has been beaten to death, just look in the archives and see what everyone recommended last time. Hint: The consensus recommendation was to pick at least two different media, and store them in a least two different geographical locations, then migrate to different media as technology improves.
The submitter is leaving out most important information: How much data? Storing terabytes is different than storing gigabytes (which will fit on a thumb drive). How long? The submitter says "backups" not "archives", which implies that long shelf life is not a priority, but many people use the terms interchangeably.
OK hotshot, how sure are you that the medium those *wonderful* answers are stored on hasn't deteriorated, resulting in us looking back on bad advice?!
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Assume it will, or that it already has. Which, has more or less been in all those answers which came before.
Buy 4 HDs ... back everything to all four, keep two at home, and keep backing up to them, put the other two in another physical location. Periodically rotate one of them.
If you have at least two backups of very recent vintage, and two of an slightly ol
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Assume it will, or that it already has. Which, has more or less been in all those answers which came before.
Buy 4 HDs ... back everything to all four, keep two at home, and keep backing up to them, put the other two in another physical location. Periodically rotate one of them.
If you have at least two backups of very recent vintage, and two of an slightly older vintage ... you're constantly making new backups.
Over time, assume even the ones you're still using.
In other words: Hint: The consensus recommendation was to pick at least two different media, and store them in a least two different geographical locations, then migrate to different media as technology improves.
Which is precisely what the GP said.
Don't assume you've made a static backup which will suffer from neither bitrot nor obsolescence. Plan accordingly.
This is literally a decades old strategy. The more important the data, the more discrete copies you keep, and the more regularly you do it.
What makes this Ask Slashdot different (it doesn't, but here goes) is that the submitter is asking for the best long term media for a personal archive, which implies storage untouched, for long periods. In other words, if I die tomorrow, how can I be sure my great grandkids will get to see my vacation photos in 2077 after my worthless kids and their worthless kids shove all my shit in their basement to deal with "next spring"?
It seems to me that the correct question is either: A) what backup service can yo
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I think that the question is, what medium will still be around and functional decades from now?
And I think the best predicable answer is Compact Disc, mainly due to the ubiquity of music CDs, which while not as popular as they once were, are still extremely common and will probably continue to be common. 12cm optical readers may eventually stop reading video formats like DVD, or Blu-ray, or other shorter-lived formats once new formats replace them, but there r
Re:stone tablets (Score:4, Interesting)
I looked into the reliability of CDs a decade or two ago. The consensus back then was that the lifetime of writable CDs (as opposed to the plastic disks with mechanically stamped pits) was unknown, but probably somewhere in range of a few years to a few decades. Worse, to avoid royalty issues, every CD maker used a different proprietary dye layer with different characteristics. Back then, it was far from a sure thing that a CD written on one drive could be read back reliably on a different drive even before the disk aged for a few years.
I'm not saying that CDs aren't suitable for storage, just that one probably ought to do some research about longevity before committing to their use as an archiving medium.
Really, same's probably true of any media other than punched cards.
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You can't commit to
Besides, you commit to archive that which is important, not that which is fleeting or trivial. For most people that will be pictures. For some it will be video, and CD probably isn't the best format for video, admittedly.
I don't expect any media that requires a s
Re:stone tablets (Score:4, Insightful)
I do have one hope -- the USB bus seems to still have devices that interoperate at USB 1.1 speeds, even now, almost 15 years later. This is a good thing. If those devices are still usable on modern systems, then a floppy drive, or a CD drive are usable and would continue to be usable. USB 3 definitely is different, but there will be adapters so that people's mice and other items will continue to operate.
The parent is correct though. Critical data can't just be tossed on some media and forgotten. Ideally, every year or two, it should be copied onto something new. At least every five years, it should see a new medium.
What comes to my mind are software products like TrueCrypt. Who would have thought that TC, something one had as a utility for over a decade, would be sunsetted with multiple, incompatible forks out there? Now is a good time to move data stored in that format to another secure format [1].
Tape pose two problems -- not just finding a physical drive, but what software is being used? This is a bit easier with LTFS (put the tape in, it has a filesystem that is mountable), but in general, is data stored using tar, or some vendor specific utility. AFIAK, NetBackup uses cpio, IBM TSM uses its own specific format, and so on. However, if handed a tape, it becomes a matter of guessing to find out what is stashed on it, and some formats like DLT, one also has to factor in blocksizes. However, if one documents and keeps the backups programs around, this shouldn't be a major issue, although it seems to be often overlooked.
[1]: If the data is static, and one isn't worried about an intruder knowing the data's size, gpg or PGP Zip come to mind. Drive images are harder -- since TC is gone, one sort of has to bet between VeraCrypt and CipherShed to see which one will continue versus which will be discontinued.
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Periodic Re-copying, because format rot bit rot (Score:3)
Moore's Law is only partly your friend here - storage keeps getting cheaper rapidly, but that also means that not only do devices become obsolete, but the interface specs and data formats also become obsolete. You probably don't have an 8" floppy drive anywhere, or a working 5.25", or the right kind of cable to plug the 5.25" drive into, or a Bernoulli drive, or a 9-track tape drive (800, 1600, or 6250dpi), or the Sun cartridge drive, or anything to plug those MFM drives into, or SCSI-1, or probably SCSI-2
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It took my friends months to find working 8" floppy drives they could take to Guatemala to decode the files the police and army had created during the dirty wars there. I don't want to have to buy a 9-track tape drive to read the one 9-track tape I have (if I find it again, and if it's still even readable.) (I gave away the Sun cartridge drive along with the Sun-2.)
Much more reliable to copy the data every couple of years to some current medium, knowing that Moore's Law means that it's not going to cost
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Hmmm...
Since /. comments seem to last forever, how about encrypting your data, running it through uuencode, and posting it?
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Data density is lacking. We could use glass though. It has a pretty good shelf life. The big problem though is that all the consumer grade stuff is absolute junk that barely works when it is new and goes downhill from there. You might have good medium with nothing to read it.
Archival grade BluRay (Score:2)
BluRay is hard to beat. The discs are durable and not worn by use. The drives are cheap and will almost certainly be available in 30+ years time (like you can still buy drives to read CDs), and the filesystem will be readable.
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As soon as Blu-Ray goes away as a media, probably driven by cloud, streaming and other non-physical data delivery, CD goes away too. I don't think any of my computers bought in the past five or so years have had optical drives.
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To your second point I don't want a device I use once every 3 months (or once
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Encrypted External Drive in a Fire Safe (Score:5, Informative)
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"my archive set is large (3+TB) and sensitive (taxes, bank statements, account numbers, passwords, etc)"
Surely tax, bank, account, and password data does not add up to terabytes.
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No, most of that is porn ... true fact, 71% of all global storage is dedicated to porn, and the rest is almost entirely cat videos. ;-)
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Soo....
99% percent of everything is crap?
External Harddrive (Score:5, Interesting)
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the problem with SAFE deposit boxes is that the renter of said box almost always has no contingency plan in place for access to that box when they die due to security restrictions on access that limit it to the renter only (and then only upon presentation of key, signature, identification, and perhaps a secret code and/or biometrics).
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the problem with SAFE deposit boxes is that the renter of said box almost always has no contingency plan in place for access to that box when they die due to security restrictions on access that limit it to the renter only (and then only upon presentation of key, signature, identification, and perhaps a secret code and/or biometrics).
Yes, but that is a PEBCAK issue, not a technical one. It would probably be the same with any other secure off site storage. In this case, the backup hard drive is probably the least of the families worries or at least allows for eventual recovery if the computer is locked and nobody knows the passwords.
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Base64 (Score:3, Funny)
It's an open format, so its usability will penetrate deep into the future.
I've already converted my entire porn collection to Base64 encoding, and printed it out on archival paper (acid-resistant for obvious reasons); I've grown so used to it, that sometimes the alphanumeric text is enough to make me extend my coffee breaks.
I just tell people the boxes filled with reams of paper are my late grandfather's WWII anti-NAZI code-breaking attempts.
Re:Base64 (Score:4, Funny)
I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead...
Laptop hard drives (Score:4, Informative)
Pros:
-High capacity
-Small form factor, will fit in most safes / lock-boxes
-Slightly more shock resistant than 3.5" drives.
-Fit my hard drive dock/drive duplicator
Cons:
-Slightly pricey because of the large capacity
Keep the anti-static bag it comes in and toss a few zip-lock bags around it for a little bit of water resistance. If the data is worth anything to you, keep a local offline archive and one at a friend's house. If anything sensitive is on it, pick your favourite encryption (truecrypt is still my goto).
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If you store the data encrypted and something happens to you, the files are worthless to someone else, maybe a family member, who might enjoy/benefit from their availability. Have you put the encryption key in your will / living will, or already given it to people close to you so they will be able to access your stuff when you're gone or incapacitated? Or are the files only for your own eyes?
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Don't know about the GP but for me my files are MINE. Not that I care much, the media disks I keep unencrypted for other reasons, but each family member who needs access to some of the pictures, documents, scans, whatever has access already on his own devices and his own way of taking care of what he needs.
Multiple Lock Boxes! (Score:2, Insightful)
Got to have 2 different media in 2 different locations away from the computer to be fool proof against all the vagaries of time. HDD is hard to beat and cheap. Blu-Ray is good and the newer denser disks coming out might work out OK, but we won't know for years. Hence, LTO tape has lots of adherents.
It's the egg and basket thing.... (Score:3)
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I agree.... more than one. If you're going for the "best", then loads and loads of them, and distribute them around the world, and build crazy robots to take care of it all for you, all to protect those sensitive family photos.
Original question should have been, "To all the psychics out there, how much money do you think I want to spend on backups?"
I don't know if "don't want backed up in the cloud" covers all networked technologies, but I personally think many of those are especially good for frequent, sta
Multiple formats (Score:2)
It almost doesn't matter as long as it's more than one medium, stored in more than one place. I keep copies of everything on HDDs (and sometimes tape) here at home, but also copy the most vital stuff onto 3.5" magneto-optical disks (Fuji DynaMO -- they never caught on but they've been super reliable) and keep that in a safe deposit box at the bank. $25/year is pretty good for getting my life's work back if my house burns down. If you do choose a removable medium, make sure you keep a spare drive too. It
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It almost doesn't matter as long as it's more than one medium, stored in more than one place. I keep copies of everything on HDDs (and sometimes tape) here at home, but also copy the most vital stuff onto 3.5" magneto-optical disks (Fuji DynaMO -- they never caught on but they've been super reliable) and keep that in a safe deposit box at the bank. $25/year is pretty good for getting my life's work back if my house burns down. If you do choose a removable medium, make sure you keep a spare drive too. It'd be a shame to have pristine media you can't read.
I've been using two HD copies and a DynaMO for years. Magneto-optical drives require both light and magnetism to write, and are predicted stable for 100+ years. However, I no longer have confidence that drives will be available when my primary and backup ones die. I'm shifting over to three HD's; at 59 years old, they'll last me long enough
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I've been using two HD copies and a DynaMO for years. Magneto-optical drives require both light and magnetism to write, and are predicted stable for 100+ years. However, I no longer have confidence that drives will be available when my primary and backup ones die. I'm shifting over to three HD's; at 59 years old, they'll last me long enough
I used to use DynaMO ages ago, but got burned multiple times. Yes, the media is stable for just about forever. But the fucking drives had failure modes that would corrupt the data on the media!
Time Capsule (Score:2)
Videos --> DVD
Music --> CD
Other --> USB Drive
Put the physical items in a waterproof bag.
Put waterproof bag in strong box.
Dig hole in backyard with kids.
Put box in hole.
Cover box with dirt.
Cover dirt with young tree or other large bush bought at local gardening store.
Come back twenty-five years and dig out treasure.
BD but getting cloudy... (Score:2)
This may be my last time, as I am now using AWS Glacier for all our personal photos/vids and that accounts for about 100G of the total 150G in content. I also copy everything to a mechanical USB drive and store it at my office. I think
Hard disk drives (Score:3)
I wouldn't put anything in a lockbox. Such media will be tested very rarely, and when they do fail, it's likely you won't know until it's too late.
I'd rather use a hard drive, hooked up (NAS or mini-pc, maybe) to a network and capable of rsync. You could place it somewhere in your home, or, if available, another secure location with Internet access. Run daily or nightly automated backups.
Don't forget top get a media grade lockbox (Score:4, Informative)
Problems are (Score:3)
The first problem, you don't said how long you want to preserve the data without transfering it on another support!
Because, the longer you don't use the support the more you have these problems :
with HDD, the mechanical part, even when not used risk to jam. Happen for me to a HDD stored in a safe in a Bank
with SDD and other flash drive, especially when not in use, the data (electric / magnetic gate) evaporates
With opticalDisk, except some old cd made in real gold, the data will fade aways is in contact with light.
with magnetics tape, the problem will be the same as the flash drive, the magnetics elements will evaporates.
And with all these technologies, you will need the hardware to read and connect them.
You today are able to find a computer with a 8 inches floppy drive or even a 8 inches floppy drive or a computer that have the ide connector to connect the 8 or 5 inches floppy drive ?
My solution, is to backup and copy often. I transfert my backup support every year or two to a new kind of backup support. First tape and CD, then DVD, then BR, Then HDD, this year TB SSD are cheap enough to be in my near vision for the next backup. And I keep my older backup.
How about USB sticks? (Score:3)
The USB 3.0 sticks are pretty fast and 128GB sticks are getting cheaper all the time, with cheap 256GB units on the horizon. They are light, small, have good retention, and make it easy to divide your data types into separate physical units so if you only want to retrieve the family photos you don't need to pick up the tax returns and such as well.
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When you buy today's latest model, you can't be sure they have good retention.
Amazon Glacier (Score:2)
I use Amazon Glacier with FastGlacier Pro for the non-confidential stuff (photos, docs, etc). http://fastglacier.com/ [fastglacier.com]
It costs me about $1/month for 100GB of storage, does differentials on a schedule, and I generally don't have to think about it (which is the best type of storage).
Transporter + a friend/colo (Score:2)
Get a transporter and put it in a friend or family member's house.
http://www.filetransporter.com... [filetransporter.com]
Supposedly it'll sync all your files automagically.
And you can host your transporter, too.
http://transporterhosting.com/... [transporterhosting.com]
don't know much about it except that it works.
Multiple copies (Score:2)
There is no single method. (Score:2)
There are multiple.
1.) simple sftp reachable cloud (very cheap, no need for special cloud software)
2.) root server (you can get these with ~4tb space minus the OS) for arround 20â (you don't need a power horse) even a vserver is ok, if it has the space and you can sftp into it
traffic is mostly multiple times storage cap
3.) having offsite sftp storage is great the connection+login/pass is encrypted + save the ssh-fingerprint and check for manipulation, only filezilla needed to retreive all data
otherwise
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M-DISC (Score:3)
Cloud backup after multiple encryptions ? (Score:2)
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How about multiple media? (Score:2)
There is no -best- medium:
Paper is always readable, but can be easily destroyed by water or fire, and stores the least amount of info per size unit than anything else.
The cloud will be present barring SHTF, but there are the security issues [1], so it needs encrypted via the endpoint.
Tape is an archival grade medium, but the drive is expensive ($3000+), it requires a fast computer to prevent shoe-shining, and either requires a program for backups/restores, or one can use LTFS to have the tape appear as a ha
hard disk (Score:2)
I don't trust any kind of cd/dvd/BR for archiving my stuff. I back up to hard drive, detached from the system when I'm not backing up, and I cycle the hardware every 1 - 2 years, because hard drives don't last forever either.
Hard drives are so cheap these days that backing up to traditional backup media just doesn't make any sense anymore.
Mirrored RAID is Probably Your Best Choice For Now (Score:2)
Get a large-capacity, multi-disk drive housing and set it up as a mirrored RAID. Over time, as each drive fails, all you have to do is swap out the failed disk and the RAID will re-mirror the data to the new disk. This is the most robust perpetual storage option. It is possible that the magnetic fields on the disks can fade over time if left in an unpowered state. The biggest downside is that the RAID is onsite, and if there is a catastrophic event such as a fire or a flood, the drive could be destroyed. A
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One thing I should mention about SSDs is that I have a couple of thumb drives that have been sitting around untouched for years that are still usable and the files are still readable. The only one that doesn't work is one that was sacrificed to a very powerful magnet in a demonstration of how vulnerable flash drives are to magnetic fields. So, perhaps an SSD drive will be more stable than I suspected.
Print it out (Score:2)
For anything that can be printed, print out a few copies on archival paper using an appropriate printer. Have photos professionally printed on Fuji Crystal Archive or better paper.
Unlike anything digital, we KNOW that paper will last several hundred years with only basic care.
Also, make more than one copy and store in more than one place.
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we KNOW that paper will last several hundred years with only basic care.
Well, we know that paper made hundreds of years ago lasted that long. That doesn't mean that modern paper has the same properties.
Online.... (Score:2)
There are a number of services that will store your data for you and it's well encrypted. Unless you are a confirmed cheapskate like me, and don't mind the headache of actually performing backups, encrypted online is the way to go.
If online doesn't float your boat or if you really think somebody will be interested enough to break into your stuff, then do what I do. I first back everything up to my NAS, then I backup the NAS to three hard drives. One drive is stored at the in-laws house and gets swapped
M-Disc (Score:2)
http://www.mdisc.com/
Writable DVDs and Blu-rays use an organic coating that degrades over time. M-Disc says you only have up to 7 years of reliability before you start loosing data. A pressed CD/DVD will last up to 100 years, but I've had pressed music CDs that the media layer burned from very little use. Also pressed CD/DVD/Blu-rays are not practical for backup.
Hard drives are designed to be spinning. M-Disc claims hard drives
Storage media is only half the battle (Score:2)
Here we go again (Score:2)
A related question (Score:2)
Here's a related question I've been wondering about. Assuming that cloud storage is used as part of a solution to archive personal data, what are some easy tools that can do strong encryption on file sets such as a directory tree? 7-zip looks like it may be a good choice, but is there something better for that?
It would also be nice if such a tool automated the upload/download process to/from the cloud, was open source, and was easily to compile on a variety of systems (yes, including Windows) in order to
Multiple redundant backups ... (Score:3)
External HDs are cheap these days.
Set up a robocopy script to backup to an external. drive Periodically backup to a second external HD.
Periodically cycle the external HDs into your safe-deposit box at the bank.
Accept that every few years your external HDs get cycled out due to age.
Don't try to make some permanent archival solution which will rely on technology in the future working ... keep them active and in the air. Two local copies, and possibly as many as two remote copies.
I think your specific medium over the long term is less meaningful when you can buy a 3TB external HD for under $100 .. especially if archiving those files actually is valuable for you.
Nowadays, it seems like redundant, offline backups for stuff you deem important enough is fairly easy to do.
The advantage of a robocopy is it will only copy what's changed, so your static data doesn't add too much.
NOT a fire safe. Safe deposit box is cheap. (Score:2)
Most fire safes are designed to keep the contents at less than 450F for a certain number of minutes. That's based on the temperature at which paper bursts into flames. Media such as tape and DVD will be ruined at 200F or less. So a 30-minute fire safe might last ten minutes with DVDs in it - your data will be gone before the fire department arrives.
A safety deposit box at the bank is cheap. You can also throw a USB drive into your office drawer if your office isn't at home.
Be a contractor/sysadmin (Score:2)
Get a job as a contracter/sysadmin, and store encrypted copies of all your stuff on the servers in your client's offices around the country.
I would also suggest their desktop computers. The executives desktop computers always have extra space, but they get upgrades too often. I suggest low-level management's and receptionist's desktops. They never get anything new.
NAS box +cloud sync (Score:3)
IMO the best (but not the cheapest) option would be to use personal NAS server with some level of mirrored RAID. Configure backup from all machines/data you wish to backup to the NAS server. Then sync it with cloud provider. Of course when picking cloud provider do check to have strong data encryption, 2F authentication, account/data access audit and DO backup your encryption case (in case you loose it there would be no way to acces your data) - just print it in plain text form and store somewhere safe.
If you do it right everything would be automated and you won't need to do any manual actions with it. Just monitor its status. And do test recoveries from time to time.
And YES - I've noticed you are against the cloud which is in my opinion silly. Decent cloud provider's DC will by much more secure (as in physical security, data mirroring) than any homegrown solution. What you are afraid of? If you are afraid of automated attacks like malware they will target your personal machine anyway, not your backup, backup is not the weakest link here. Also any profiled attacks on your person will target your client machine. So what is your practical point against using cloud storage?
Also worth mentioning that NAS server is not mandatory in such setups. Just it speeds up things a little and gives more control. Also it provides the "oops" factor protection (like incidentaly deleting something - which is satistically the most often case to need backup recovery anyway).
Still if you oppose to use cloud just exchange cloud option for offline media stored offsite (like safe at your friends house or bank). Which media to use is entirely up to you. As you haven't stated what your need are (like how much data, how often it changes, what would be your preffered policy as weekly, monthly etc.) I can't recommend anything. An uneducated guess would be to use external HDD drives in enclosures and rotate them. Or for the cheapest option BlueRay discs.
Screw the data! (Score:4, Funny)
Archival grade CD/DVD (Score:2)
Hardcopy, or maybe DNA? (Score:5, Funny)
Print all of your text documents on acid free paper in triplicate and store them in climate controlled facilities around the planet. Maybe even keep an extra copy on the Moon just in case. All of your digital files can be uuencoded before being printed out.
If you're really paranoid, you can encode everything into the DNA of some organisms and then distribute them throughout local and deep space with rocket ships and comets!
Don't go overboard... (Score:4, Insightful)
How much of your information needs to live significantly beyond your personal lifetime? My guess is you need not consider storage that will live beyond your children, who might have some need to review your papers for personal or practical reasons. Your grandchildren might like a handful of pictures, nothing more than than.
If your information is actually valuable (its creative or philosophical or similar) other people will look to its preservation.
I tend to split stuff up. For my profession life as a programmer I use github and one other git based storage. Anything worth keeping I'd migrate to whatever replaces git. For personal life I keep backups of photos and videos on local and networked (cloud based) storage. For tax stuff I just have a fireproof locker.
I imagine in 20 or 30 years the only stuff of value will be my movies and photos and written personal documents. After I'm dead none of that stuff will meant much to anyone, unless my son wants some pics of our dogs when he was young. And he'd be the last one to care about any of that stuff.
Try not to let possessions become too important. You are going to have it all taken away from you eventually.
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I have manually changed files and parts of files and had Multipar recover the originals; I have not yet physically scarred a CD/DVD/BR to see if it's recoverable via ISOB
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How persistent is the storage over time? I've had CDs become unreadable due to media degradation...though I don't know whether it was fading of the dyes or yellowing of the covering...or some other reason...but it wasn't scratches.
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He didn't really ask for cheap. He asked for the best chances of survival. Unless the lockbox is airtight and humidity/temperature controlled, your cheap DVD media could degrade over time.
The jury is out on how long it would take for optical media to degrade to the point of data loss, as many tests seem to yield varying results depending on the quality of the media used, but depending on the kind, (writeable vs rewriteable, etc), the general consensus seems to be that the survivability of most optical med
Re:DVD (Score:5, Informative)
I have DVDs that I've burned as a teenager kept in a nice, high-quality soft "archival" binder for the last 18 years. Nearly all of them, of varying quality/expense, are unreadable due to degradation.
OTOH, I've got old 500MB harddrives that read/work just fine and are just as old. I'd expect sealed HDDs to be as good as it gets - tape is nice, but maintaining a supported/working tape drive was always difficult (used to have one). But, unlike every other type of storage, harddrives are actually capable of warning you of an impending failure. (I've been *saved* by S.M.A.R.T. at least twice, over the years.) Add some rudimentary RAID, and you're probably good. The only way I can think of to go further is to use two/three, and cycle them between your PC(often/all the time), a nearby firesafe(When you are heading in that direction), and a safety-deposit box (seasonally?).
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I have DVDs that I've burned as a teenager kept in a nice, high-quality soft "archival" binder for the last 18 years. Nearly all of them, of varying quality/expense, are unreadable due to degradation.
Same experience as this guy. While I do have a handful of CD's that were written 15 years ago that're still readable, I have a ton of DVD's that have degraded and caused loss of data that were written less than 5 years ago.
Optical media, at least the writables we as consumers have access to are completely inadequate for long term storage. No comment on BluRay consumer writables however, as the loss of data from using DVD's for archival really turned me off of optical media.
Magnetic tapes or sealed HDD's a
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Optical media, at least the writables we as consumers have access to are completely inadequate for long term storage.
What about something like M-Discs? They're a consumer-available optical medium designed for long-term storage. They require a drive with a higher-powered laser to record, but will read in a standard DVD or Blu-ray drive. Of course, their "1000 years of storage" can't really be tested, but the idea of using an inorganic data layer seems like an improvement, and the discs passed some kind of DoD reliability testing.
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Put a USB adapter in the lockbox as well.
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It is not hard to find large numbers of cheap motherboards with IDE controllers...
Heck, you can still buy addin cards new with such controllers.
This won't be an issue for awhile and the data should be moved to newer drives by then anyway.
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Disk interfacing was messy up until IDE became the standard. IDE is no longer an option on my newer motherboards, but I have an adapter that allows me to access IDE drives via USB. Actually, I have 2 of them, come to think of it. One of them also can talk SATA. These days, external USB is popular for disk (and thumb drives) so I expect that it's probably going to have a fairly lengthy run, even as it mutates. I've got an external USB3 drive, but it can be used on USB2 systems.
Optical devices are not immune.
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I have DVDs that I've burned as a teenager kept in a nice, high-quality soft "archival" binder for the last 18 years. Nearly all of them, of varying quality/expense, are unreadable due to degradation.
OTOH, I've got old 500MB harddrives that read/work just fine and are just as old. I'd expect sealed HDDs to be as good as it gets - tape is nice, but maintaining a supported/working tape drive was always difficult (used to have one). But, unlike every other type of storage, harddrives are actually capable of warning you of an impending failure. (I've been *saved* by S.M.A.R.T. at least twice, over the years.) Add some rudimentary RAID, and you're probably good. The only way I can think of to go further is to use two/three, and cycle them between your PC(often/all the time), a nearby firesafe(When you are heading in that direction), and a safety-deposit box (seasonally?).
It's hard to ignore spinning disks if your archival requirements are in the midrange (2-4TB) where optical media would take up far more room. Just keep an extra drive around for spare parts in case you lose a motor or something.
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CDs/DVDs. No LPs, though :-[p
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I remember back when single CD blanks were $30 a pop and pirates still used them to copy games. I thought it was nuts then but people did it.
Don't assume that just because you are a luddite late adopter or intolerable cheap that the rest of us are too.
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Tape media may still be a good bet, and probably better than magnetic HDDs. Tapes are small, store lots of data, and are pretty resilient.
I wonder how long they require/expect the data to last for? Years? Decades? Generations?
The complexity of making a tape drive work has to be at best, 2x that of an off the shelf hard drive given the number of moving parts. And, unless you spring for the really really expensive version a tape cartridge wont come anywhere close to the density of a 2TB 2.5" HDD.
That being said, the only real obstacle to longevity of any medium is maintaining a good backup regiment. How hard would it be to, once every 2 years, purchase a new reasonably-priced USBx flash drive, copy the backup from the last flash
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For redundancy I'd go with a dvd and another copy on a flash drive.
Pair of external HD's (Score:4, Interesting)
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The first guy who suggested stone tablets did....
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Glass is if its obsidian.
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This new standard of storage engraves your information into a patented rock-like layer that has been proven to last 1,000 years
They mean, it's been tested for a few months at high temperature and humidity, and assume that translates to 1000 years.
They also claim in comparison your data is only safe on a hard drive for 1.5 years, DVD 3 - 7 years, USB drive 5 - 8 years.
Sounds like a crock of shit to me.
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So, basically, your solution is to make up a story about having a backup system that exceeds any rational person's in complexity, redundancy and cost in the hopes that everyone else will believe it and worship your e-peen.
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Or something like duplicati which lets you have the benefit of encryption without the downside of having to upload your entire volume every time you want to update it. There's probably a security trade off (I don't know of any specific attacks, but I assume a single encrypted volume is probably more secure), but to me it's worth it for the convenience.
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Ideally, you're going to want a couple of low-end laptops of a make and model known for reliability and able to run directly off wall current. You keep those backups for 20 years and you might find there's no OS or hardware that can handle your old media.
THEN I'd tend to store the data (and an image of the OS drive) on bootable USB flash-based storage. Just in case. You don't need the mechanical parts of the HDD failing after a long period in storage.
1TB thumb drives for $20? OK, I'll bite. (Score:3)
You can buy a 1TB thumb drive (Kingston HyperX Predator), but it will cost you around $1K.
You can buy thumb drives for $20 per, but they'll be 64GB, maybe 128GB if you're lucky and don't mind dodgy manufacturers.
You can buy a "1TB thumb drive" for $40 or so on eBay, but you'll find that it "redundantly" stores the last few gigabytes you wrote across the entire drive. In other words, it lies about its capacity, and just trashes existing data once you exceed its real capacity (likely 8GB or less).
Of course, i