Long-Term Personal Data Storage?

BeanBagKing writes "Yesterday I set out in search of a way to store my documents, videos, and pictures for a long time without worrying about them. This is stuff that I may not care about for years, I don't care where it is, or if it's immediately available, so long as when I do decide to get it, it's there. What did I come up with? Nothing. Hard Drives can fail or degrade. CD's and DVD's I've read have the same problem over long periods of time. I'd rather not pay yearly rent on a server or backup/storage solution. I could start my own server, but that goes back to the issue of hard drives failing, not to mention cost. Tape backups aren't common for personal backups, making far-future retrieval possibly difficult, not to mention the low storage capacity of tape drives. I've thought about buying a bunch of 4GB thumb drives; I've had some of those for years and even sent a few through washers and driers and had the data survive. Do you have any suggestions? My requirements are simple: It must be stable, lasting for decades if possible, and must be as inexpensive as possible. I'm not looking to start my own national archive; I have less than 500GBs and only save things important to me."

Comments

Not enough history

[mgkimsal2]

We don't have enough history on this tech to know what, if anything, will "last for decades". Possibly "paper" and "microfiche" might fit in that list, but those aren't the sort of things you're talking about. Best option I can think of right now would be to get a couple 500gig drives, put everything on both, and then put them in different areas. In 3-5 years, back them up to something newer, and repeat that every 3-5 years. Maybe in those intervening years, we'll have more data and newer tech that's demonstrably suited for what your needs are.

Not the media that's the problem

[jwilkins13]

Here's the thing. Flash drives will *probably* last long enough. I wouldn't at all be surprised if they were still readable in 20 or 30 years. But a) what's the odds of your current WinUx or iHoloTablet having a usb connector in 30 years? and MUCH more importantly, what's the odds of having anything capable of reading those historic Word 2007, Acrobat 5, or any other type of file format in 20 years? Yes, there are some folks technical enough that they can still read and readily interact with Geoworks, Wordstar, Xywrite, etc. stored on 8" floppy disks. But if you ain't one of them, and I'm happy to admit I ain't, the fact that the flash drive is physically capable of being read in 30 years simply won't matter. That's why I crack up reading various vendors' claims of CDs, DVDs, BDs etc. lasting 50 or 100 or more years. The disks will be readable but you'll have no mechanical or logical way to read what's on them.

An archive is not a long-term backup

[ewilts]

There is absolutely nothing that you can put away for decades and expect to be useful. Your requirements are not simple - they'll actually very, very hard to meet, even if you want to throw a lot of money at the problem.

You don't know that a jpeg, for example, will be readable in 30 years. The format may be so deprecated that there might not even be a viewer available. Like my old Microsoft Works 4.0 documents - although I have the data, I have nothing that can read them unless I want to spin up an old Windows image, assuming that I can generate a virtualized environment that can support an old Windows (Windows XP probably won't even boot on any PC being produced 30 years from now). And some of that data is only a few years old, not decades old.

You should store not only the data, but also the applications that created the data. And the computer you need to run those applications. And backups of those. And then every few years, pull it all back and validate it and update as required.

You may have only 500GB now, but 10 years from now that will be 5TB. And then you need a way to actually be able to find something you added to your "archive".

I deal with this at work regularly. An archive is not a backup that you keep for a long time. It's much, much more than that. Once you start thinking about all of the issues that come up, you'll see that the media is the least of your problems.