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.
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.
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 I feel like there would be big demand for being able to read the format even if it’s been superceded, on account of all the JPEGs that still living people have.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.
Checksums. A good filesystem will do this for you, but you can do it yourself if you want.
If you sync a drive with rsync or something periodically, it’ll replace files with different checksums, fixing any corruption as you go. Then smart tests should tell you if there’s any corruption the drive is aware of. I’m sure automated backup tools have options for this.
I specifically don’t want to be touching previous files on the drive, it should be addition only. So I may need to write a script to do the checks, or compare against a mirror drive. I can do this with the right filesystem, but I’m worried that if I use a filesystem not readable by Windows then it may not be layman-proof enough.
Cloud can be surprisingly cost effective, as part of a 3-2-1 backup.
Check out storj.io
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.
That could probably work.
Were it me, I’d build a script that would re-hash and compare all the data to the previous hash as the first step of adding more files, and if the data comes out consistent, I’d copy the files over, hash everything again, save the hash results elsewhere and then repeat as needed.
Yeah I think I should do something like this. I really want to make sure the files are not getting corrupted in storage without me knowing.
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.
you need to use fat32 if you want normal people to access the files
Otherwise, they will get the “You need to format the disk in drive D: before using it. Do you want to format it?” dialog, they blindly click “yes”, then they will mumble to themselves “weird, he left behind a massive collection of blank drives…”
This is why I can’t/don’t have a lot of the “best practices” in my family archive. I’m not encrypting local drives, I’m not using BTRFS, or a ZFS pool. If I did I’d have to ensure my Will provided for the lawyer to hire a tech shop to help recover them. No, exFAT and NTFS, in the clear so those left behind can just plug them in and get to making their own copies. Otherwise the archive would die with me.
Does that mean someone could steal my drives and go through my family photos? Sure. I hope it brings them much guilt, something a garbled encrypted drive could never do.
Oh shit you’re right. Argh ok I’m going to have to rethink that. Two drives and something to compare against each other to check for errors. I’m not sure about FAT32 as there are some multi-GB video files. Shit.
exFAT is a newer and viable alternative to FAT32, with better size limits and some pretty good cross-platform capabilities. That said, if your primary access is through Windows, NTFS may have some better features and is at least read-only on other platforms.
I don’t use Windows, I’m just thinking of someone needing to be able to pick up and use a drive, and for most people it’s going to be Windows.
Maybe I just need to leave instructions that specify it needs to be my laptop they use to get the photos off.