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Ask Slashdot: Best Long-Term Video/Picture Storage?
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?"
Every media I look at appears to suffer over time. My 10 year old burned DVDs are already exhibiting decay.
What's the life span on Flash RAM?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Select the best photos, and print them. It's cheap, lasts a long time, and you can easily print multiple copies for safekeeping.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Get a SATA dock and multiple bare HDs. Purchase SuperDuper! and set it to automatically dupe your HD to the external drive whenever you dock it. Store one in a fire/water proof safe at your home and one at your parent's home. Rotate the backups regularly and backup weekly.
The time machine will handle the daily backups.
That gives you 4 copies of your data (boot drive, TM drive, and two backup clones).
I do this, but with a few mirrored RAIDs as well.
Bring the kids over.
(no, not for video)
But a couple of years ago, I was cleaning out my parents house in preparation to sell. And came across old family photo albums from the twenties and thirties. Easy to browse through, and trivial to store.
I don't expect my current thousands of digital pics to be readable in 80 years without siginificant and ongoing work.
It does no harm to print the pictures, in case of atomic bombing or zombie attack they would be as doomed as any electric device; but they don't change the format every 10 years.
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Have all your video transcribed to post it notes. When you want to watch hire a local school kid to flip through the pages real fast and read the dialog aloud.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Every 3 months, never ceases to amaze me.
I would recommend you look at crash plan: http://www.crashplan.com/ It works great for me, I use their hosted service, although you could use crash plan to backup to a friends computer as well as their hosted service. Also if you start now it wont take you three weeks to backup your collection like it did mine (200gb)! I also use TimeMachine for local backups, that has also worked great for me. I used to use Mozy but switched when they changed their price plans.
there are various options available to you. you are smart and ahead of the curve when you realized that optical discs are not a good storage method. Maybe back 10 years ago. Not today. I have CDs and DVDs burned a decade ago that are 100% readable right now, and I have others that were burned less than a year ago and are already degrading. Personally, I blame this on piracy, I honestly believe they've tweaked the "recipe" for the disks to make them degrade faster.
anyways, online storage is something to consider, you can setup a Gmail or Live email account and get gigs of free storage right there.
If I was in your position, my backup method would be 2 fold. I would have an external hard drive or even a NAS box with RAID capability. Save the data on your timemachine box, but also back it up to the NAS box using RAID with parity, this requires more drives, but can recover any data lost if one drive fails. That done, I'd find a method to store it online,either paid or free, I prefer free. So I'd create a gmail or hotmail account, use a compression utility to compress and archive all the files, splitting them up into 5-10 meg pieces, then email them all to myself.
This way you have at least 3 locations with your data.
Use rdiff-backup to create incremental backups. This allows you to go "back in time" to any older version of the backup in the future if you discover some of your files became corrupt on the laptop, and potentially got backed up multiple times as corrupt files. Store one backup on one external hard drive which you update frequently (you can decide how big...I imagine 2 TB would suffice until it's time to replace the HDD anyway) and the other on another external hard drive, which you keep in a different geographical location (maybe keep it at your parents' house and update it each time you visit them).
Film - good old silver based film. 100+ years.
Forget long-term-backup (as in years and years and decades and decades).
Create some archive that is mirrored (at best offsite in case your house burns) and copy that every five years to "recent technology". Done.
Why should you bother with some super-solution (that will be outdated anyway regardless of what companies claim) if your collection keeps growing with the years (which means you somehow "use" it, even if you "only" add new stuff and never look at the old things). Also, your non-mirrored collection will die in a fire, flooding, whatever if you have not stored it somewhere else.
Therefore I suggest: Forget long-term storing. Have a copy of your pictures nicely sorted on some normal computer, make a backup once in a while (over the net or by burning a DVD of everything every year or every time you add something big), and have an off-site-backup "somewhere". Just move with the technology and the stuff will always be recent and you will never, ever have to bother if your collection can still be read with that ages old hardware in your cellar.
Storage is cheap and will only get cheaper, the internet is fast and will only get faster. Why bother to use something really elaborate, expensive, that is not that reliable in the end (for various reasons, some mentioned above, many not) anyway?
I invested in a NAS Drive which has Raid 0 AND I back it up once a month offsite through the web through an FTP script.
It was cheap (under $500 including upgrading my whole infrastructure to gigibit) and it's the "set it and forget it" variety.
Best part, it's scalable to whatever drives come out....wait that's a lie, that was my original plan but I just learned yesterday it's limited to 2GB drives (SCREW YOU SPARC!). Go with the more expensive expandable 4 bay x86 ones and it might push up the costs but worth it in my opinion.
As a happy bonus, I now get my FAMILY to backup their videos and photos to it as well over the internet in the same "set it and forget it" way.
Lastly, Once a year, I give a set of DVD's (Dual Layer) to my lawyer to add to the Will. Overkill yes, but hey you never know.
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
All the photos from when I was a kid are still around, and that was a LONG time ago!
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?
What happens if that first drive craps out in the middle of the mirroring? Now you have NO backups. The only thing to save you here is if you still have everything you've ever taken on its original location, your primary computer.
Best bet? Two external drives. Back from your PC to one drive. Then repeat the backup on the second drive. Every so often, back up to optical media.
I set up an FTP site that contains all of my child's pictures that we want to keep. My parents hit the ftp site and download anything new. This adds a remote backup as well.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
You have your main backup drive, and then occasionally back it up to the secondary drive. Since you are not using the 2nd drive as much, as long as you keep it in a safe place (not knocked around, good temp & humidity control), it should last for a long time. Using SSDs could also be an option, but others should chime in as I'm not very conversant with the state of tech in regards to SSDs.
Online solutions are an option, but then you are at the mercy of the company that is storing that data. Not a bad idea for a 2nd/3rd backup. But this all depends on how important all this photos & videos are to you.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
I considered the online cloud solution but for long term i just wasn't comfortable with that. I bought a NAS product that mirrors one drive to a second. Many of these offer backup to a remote NAS drive that runs as a croned rsync across the internet. For my dollars this makes the most sense. Optical data is a pain and degrades over time. My setup I just swap out the drives as they fail and they get re-mirrored. But the backup to the backup is to sync to an external drive once a month or so and keep that offsite. My biggest challenge is having all the computers in the house access the same file set without danger of corruption. I just let my wife edit files on her local machine then once every few weeks copy her file set onto the NAS. When you get to the part of the project about how to best keep metadata about your photos come back-i'd love to have help in that area as it is a total mess in the marketplace. Congrats on the baby!
Realistically the best long term storage solution is proper film prints. I have pictures from my parents and grandparents that are 60 and 70 years old that are still very viewable. Funny how that works.
But to answer the question you've actually asked, I'd probably sort them all out on a hard drive and keep that synched up to some online system, be it cloud or otherwise. The goal being that you can occasionally move the home archive to a new a nice new drive once in a while, and if you lose that you can just download them all again.
Or were you wanting "Buy this hard drive, install that software, and sync to this other online service." ?
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
highly recommended. They have an option to backup to a friend's computer, for free.
backing up to a remote location is so much safer than having backups in your house.
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.
Multiple external hard drives are a good start. Additionally a home file server so that a backup of the files are on an active file system would be a nice touch. Then to finish it off get some free disk space from google and upload them there also. For syncing to external hard drives and/or home file server take a look at Syncback free edition, it works pretty well.
We use Backblaze for our online backup solution. It has been fantastic and saved my data once already. It's very reasonably price, but there are many players in that market so you should shop around. The number one drawback, it takes a long time for the initial backup to complete. It helps to bring your laptop to work and utilize the upload bandwidth offered.
Forget this whole notion of printing pictures or burning videos onto DVDs. Just pass on the memories via word of mouth. Bed time stories, campfire songs, etc... The best part about this is by the time your great-great-grandkids start reminiscing about you and your family, (as far as they know) you'll be 10ft tall nobel prize winners who vanquished dragons and discovered the moon.
If what I just said sounded like a troll, it was probably just a failed attempt at humor.
Probably because nobody ever replies with a reasonably affordable solution that is guarenteed to last for atleast 20 years.
I do use those 100+ year DVD's (they're not as expensive as TFA implies), but whether I can trust the vendors' claims, I'll just have to wait and see.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Drives break. Accidents happen. DVDs degrade. Consumer grade storage just isn't a good idea for anything long term.
Pay for Mozy or Crashplan or some other commercial service. Your stuff can go on whatever ridiculous combination of disk arrays and tape backups they use for you and anyone else who is paying the $50 a year or whatever it is to keep your stuff available. This is by far the least hassle of any available option.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Similar situation here. Since my son was born 20 months ago, we've amassed nearly 100G of photos, and somewhere between 300 and 400G of video. Currently, we have a Drobo with two 1.5TB drives in it (expandable on the fly for up to 4 3TB drives) and we back that up online with CrashPlan. Cost of CrashPlan is roughly $6/month for up to 10 computers for unlimited storage if you buy a 4 year plan.
Carbonite seems to be a good service and it's not expensive at all
K Man
Optical media is not all that bad for storage, especially if you get high quality media and make more than one backup.
I've recently cleaned out my computer closet, and in the process of getting rid of about 500 old / outdated burned CDs and DVDs my OC nature had me backing up as many of them as I could before discarding the old discs (90% of them were CDs and hard drive space is abundant..)
I was genuinely surprised how many of them were readable without problems given the things I've heard. Only discs with actual scratches on the media where I could see light come through holding it up to my monitor had read problems. Luckily even for some of those, I had multiple copies and I noticed my image extractor (ImgBurn) was perfectly happy to have me swap 2 dirty scratched up discs back and forth in the reader to overcome any unreadable sectors from a single disc. Any disc that was kept in good storage conditions (in a sleeve, out of sunlight) read back perfectly, and that includes my very first burned CD from back in '97.
I'd say doing online storage (either raw file storage or image hosting like picasa), combined with live storage on your hard drive, and a once a year optical backup (don't worry about re-copying your old discs, just make a new copy once a year) would be a pretty safe bet.
You are right. I've been a consistent reader since the beginning and these types of posts crop up repeatedly. I'm very interested in the subject so I don't mind as much, but perhaps we can come up with a better solution. I'd like to see Slashdot and The Long Now Foundation issue some sort of joint, annual report on the current state of the art when it comes to long term media storage and management. Hey, it might even be worth paying for!
ninjason
Cloud (offsite) + NAS + RAID + Backup drive. Seriously, why does this question in various forms keep getting posted on Slashdot? I'm sick of it.
Even hard drives have bit-rot. However they're large, cheep, fast and offer random access. If you value your time at all an array of external hard drives is really the only modern answer.
You need at least two, one is a backup of the other. You should have one on site and one off site (like in a safety deposit box). Every so often (a month or two? What can you tolerate loosing?) you should swap the drives around and copy the stuff that was not on the remote drive to it. If you have family members with HSI you might use your family/friend as your backup instead and have it online (however that won't save you from area wide disasters or user error/virus infections; weigh your risks).
This is the important part; you backups are always /active/. You must validate that they can still be read, and proactively repair them. Every few years you'll need to replace the drives as they near their end of life; at the very least you should fully re-write the material that's on them to refresh the magnetic pattern. This is a great time to upgrade to larger drives.
Nothing really for video outside of the old fashioned stuff will last. Current stuff who knows, but it generally breaks down fast under 15 years get sticky and the recording surface will bind to the backing. Old style developed frame-by-frame 9/10mm video films can have the same problem, but generally wear better if stored properly. Stuff that was made in the 50's is viewable now with little trouble, same with reeled audio. So that's 60 years. Printing and storing is the best right now, as long as it's in a proper environment. I mean I've got pictures that are pushing 80 years old. They've been kept in a cool, dry place that's dark. The real problem is, is that photography paper has changed a lot in the last 10 years, so finding good photopaper will be the challenge.
Electronic stuff? Well CD's/DVD's will degrade, you also have the chance of having the fungus eat the discs for you, even if you do get more than 10 years out of them. Electronic WORM-state will last 10 years, regardless of whether it's SLC/MLC based.
Electronic storage is still in it's infancy, it'll easily be another 10-20 years before we find a good long-term storage medium by my guess, especially since we're getting close to the age of infinite storage redundancy. Well with that I suppose you could always build a NAS-raid5 array.
Om, nomnomnom...
1) Never use DVDs. Ever. They eat data like no tomorrow.
2) Guard against bit rot. Make sure you have checksums of all files so you know when your media degrades.
3) Maintain at least three separate copies in at least two different locations.
4) Ideally, have offline storage, as well. Check on it twice a year, but else: do not touch!
5) As of today, git-annex is your best bet to automate all of the above. Make sure you use the most current version and prepare for a somewhat bumpy road if you don't know git, yet.
What I've done is keep them on a RAID array, and back them up to external media routinely. This has worked well for 7+ years, so far.
However, the better pictures often just 'disappear' in the gigs of files. Knowing which is which is not always so clear. What I plan to do is go through at some point and have the better ones printed out for safe-keeping in a physical photo album (like my parents did, and their parents). This does not really address the 'video' situation, however. We mostly just keep those on the original DV tapes, or encoded on the same system the holds the photos.
Professionally, I'm faced with the same problem, and have seen people implement the solution in a similar fashion: lots and lots of storage with backups to secondary storage.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
1. Print; if within your means, print more and give it away to those who matter.
2. Backup using CD, DVD or external hard disk. Always have at least two sources of backup media...
3. If the assets are important to you, do a backup of your existing content to newer media (disks, external drives etc) very 6 months or so. This has to be a conscientious effort.
4. Backing up data on one media and expecting it to work 15 to 20 years is risky.
I didn't want to promote their product after catching them astroturfing, but an M-disc is a perfect solution for this.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Acid free paper is the best bet at the moment, it can last several decades to centuries. But then you have to be sure the inks/toners are stable etc.
Digital storage is "brittle" it relies on all sorts of technologies and assumptions which are not valid over a longer term. Basically when the power goes off, we as a civilsation are fubar.
Deleted
Disc media, e.g. DVDs, are not necessarily as reliable as people may think. Your time machine is actually already a very good solution. The likelihood that both your hard drive and your time machine would fail at the same time is low, and one can be used to restore the other. The only thing that might improve your backup is adding off-site backup; for that, you could add backup to a cloud service.
With regards to a cloud service, you need not choose a service that is explicitly about backup either. It could be a service that is aimed at media sharing (photo + video), and in this way you could use the service as not only a means of backup, but also for sharing those photos and videos with friends and family.
I've got gigs and gigs of pics stored in Amazon S3. ;like 15c per gig per month).
It looks just like drive J: and their rates are very low (something
It also runs an automatic backup on each of my machines every night.
Compared to an onsite NAS (no use in a fire ) or DVD/tape (who ever actually keeps them up to date ?) it's a piece of cake.
Stick them on an HDD until Google or Amazon start offering to keep everything for you for free. The more I think about it, the less I think anyone will keep any data at home in the near future.
You can very quickly generate a lot of data with pictures of your kids. I have on the order of 80 GB with two kids under 5.
You definitely want multiple layers of protection, both locally and remote. For remote storage of pictures and videos, Flickr can't be beat price-wise. It is *unlimited* storage for $25 per year. And you can always retrieve the original file, and there are tons of APIs and clients available.
It's also useful for sharing photos and videos, with a strong security model that lets you control who has access to pictures of your kids.
Flickr does have a 500 MB per video file limit for uploads, and a 90 second limit for playback (you can download the original longer than 90 seconds, but no one else can view more than 90 seconds), but splitting videos up can be scripted with tools like ffmpeg, of course.
The key, though, is to *always* have more than one accessible copy of the originals in different physical locations. (i.e. two hard drives in your house doesn't count)
I also use an online backup solution. Look for unlimited storage for a reasonable price. I settled on CrashPlan+ Unlimited for $50/year, but there are a lot of options out there, now.
Digital copies will be the easiest to transfer from one medium to another, copy them to a drive and make a backup. As someone else pointed out, remind yourself to update the medium on which you transfer the files on an occasional basis in order to ensure compatibility with current technology and hedge against hardware degradation.
Pay for an online storage solution or two. Secure home storage takes a lot of work, and while you may be able to keep it up for a while, there will eventually be a time when you are too lazy to take care of a problem (say with RAID, for example, a disk goes bad, and you don't replace it right away, and then another disk goes bad, and you lose everything (or a third disk in the case of RAID 6)).
If you can trust your future self to take care of such problems, I'd go with a couple of home NAS (with RAID) products. Get 4 hard drives, 2 (different) 2-bay devices, set them up with RAID 1 (this way you'll have a definite way of knowing if/when a disk goes bad). Make sure they aren't both mounted at the same time (human error is a major cause of lost data). Replace the drives when they go bad (be sure not to get all the drives from the same production batch), and upgrade your NAS devices when they get old.
TimeMachine for daily back-ups. Every couple weeks everything is backed up to another external drive which is put in the safe (HQ gun firesafe). No guarantee it will survive, but it is added protection from fire/ theft. A lot of the pictures we like are uploaded to FB or blogs. Others are emailed to family. They are not HQ but they are something.
Yes, might loose some in ABC disaster, but it is far better odds than in past generations. Despite era of information, I'm not concerned about saving every scrape of my life.
My answer for video is slightly different than pictures, somewhat, but basically, the best guarantee that the files will still be around is to have lots of copies, and they should never all be bad at the same time (at least, with some maintenance).
Got a home video (or collection) you want to save? Make a DVD or BluRay of the video (or collection of shorter videos). Give a couple copies to mom and dad. Give a couple copies to any sisters/brothers/aunts/uncles/cousins you may have. Give a copy to your best friends (you were gonna anyhow, right?). Of course, those burned copies might only be good for 5 to 10 years. Keep copies on a giant external HDD (USB, Firewire, Thunderbolt, or eSATA). You can fit quite a few movies on a 1 or 2 TB drive.
Of course, none of those will last forever. Plan on copying the HDD once every 2 or 3 years to a new drive. On your kids 8th or 10th birthday, re-copy all the movies to new DVDs, BluRays, or whatever media is current by then (10 years from now, optical drives might be as common as floppy drives [that is to say, almost impossible to find], so of course, move the copies to whatever's current before it's too late . . . this is also why I laugh at the idea of a 100 year DVD disc - great, you've got a perfectly good DVD, now try to find a drive or player to read it in 20 or 30 years).
There's a reason the bible, and many other texts, which have at one time or another have been tried to be suppressed, still exist - not because of the durability of parchment or paper, so much, as copies, copies, copies.
That's true of pictures of course, too, but pictures are more practical for saving with online backup systems (good luck backing up a 4GB DVD home movie online - it can be done, but might take 3 days per movie).
Time Machine is great until something goes wrong and you find out that your entire iPhoto Library never got backed up at all (as happened to a coworker of mine). In other words, don't trust Time Machine as your only backup solution unless you have inspected the Time Machine backup volume on another machine and confirmed that everything you think is in there actually is.
For photos and video clips, the simplest backup is to never delete the originals. Flash is cheap. Memories are priceless. Never wipe your flash cards. The odds of both your hard drive and a flash card failing at the same time are pretty minimal, and the odds of your hard drive, a flash card, and your Time Machine backup failing are close enough to zero that it probably isn't worth worrying about. For added security, back them up to an online photo sharing site.
For non-media files, since they are usually fairly small, you can probably keep a backup copy on a flash drive.
Of course, you should take my paranoia with a grain of salt. After a hard drive crash cost me a fair amount of work on a novel I was writing, I've been rather insane about keeping backups:
So at any given point in time, pretty much every photo that matters to me exists on at least one flash card and four different hard drives in two different states, one of which is in a fireproof enclosure. I'm protected in the event of nuclear armageddon. Are you? :-D
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I am a big fan of online backups. Your costs are trivial and the host company takes care of all of your infrastructure worries. The main concern to have (which can and probably will be an annoyance) is if the company that you choose goes out of business so here would be my advice.
1. Choose a "big" provider, Amazon comes to mind, but Microsoft has an online storage offering and even Google is supposedly coming out with one. I am sure that there are others as well and none of these is in danger of going away anytime soon.
2. Pay attention, odds are if/when whatever host you choose does go out of business you will probably have some warning be it a letter, email or something else. This will give you an opportunity to move your backup to a new provider. Remember, loosing a backup is not a big deal, as long as you know about it and immediately take steps to solve the issue.
3. Archive, assuming you really want to ensure that you save these pictures, you can never have too many forms of backup. I would periodically archive your whole collection as well to some physical medium either a hard drive, SSD, DVD, or anything else that you want to use. This ensures your data against unforeseeable occurrences or even accidental deletion on your part. I would never entrust important data to just one backup, in essence you should have a backup of your backup.
Hope this helps.
It's always a balance of cost, security, and access. I say back it (all) up with multiple hard drives, duplicating the drives every so many year with new harddrives. Also copy select files to share online (which also serves as a back up). Finally take a look at the sandisk memoryvault.
[FUCK BETA 2.6.2014]
If you're going for the really long term and want ways to share with others, I'd take a look at Amazon S3. It's relatively inexpensive and they even have a free tier of a couple gigs for a year so there's almost no downside to trying it. It's easy to upload (just create a bucket, select your movie and go) and fast to download, as long as Grandma's not on dialup. Secure, easy to configure privileges, and very reliable/durable. Heck, they guarantee 99.999999999% durability now; you're not ever going to match that without building your own concrete bunker and co-locating on Mars.
The only two downsides, neither of which I think is a dealbreaker. One is that if you're really into the photo thing, you're probably going to want some sort of tagging/categorizing system. A possible solution to this is to use Gallery3 and the Amazon S3 plugin (run Gallery on your local server, store your photos in the S3 cloud.)
The other issue is that while S3 is relatively inexpensive for bandwidth and storage, it does add up over years, especially when it's so easy to put stuff up there. The best advice I'd give you here is don't save everything. Really, pick the best photo of Johnny's piano recital, not all 794 that you took. I have a friend who's wife is a compulsive saver of such things, and it's just sad... they have a full basement of memories in the form of photos and scrapbooks and old school papers that nobody will ever look at, because all the crap is mixed in with the real memories. Frankly, I would target no more than 100 photos/kid/year as an absolute maximum.
I lost the 4 years of my daughters' life in pictures (and she's 8 now). I had thousands of pictures (first kid and all) burned to CD and DVD. I had an external drive. I had raid 1 hard drives - mirrored drives, identical in every way (manufacturer - bought 4 months apart -, drivers, etc). I had 4 layers of protection.
My primary HDD drive died suddenly. Loudly. I immediately began to back up the second drive until the replacement drive came. During the backup, that one died in the same way. Nothing was saved. I went for the external drive... which had been moved to a box by my wife. A box with a set of speakers. Speakers with earth based magnets. I had to use a screwdriver to separate the HDD from the speaker. Toasted.
My new drives arrived and set to work restoring the DVD's (my latest backup). All of them were corrupt. I don't know how, as they were less than 4 months old - but all were unreadable. Wouldn't even load. I grabbed my CD's. All had deteriorated. The image files are there, but they are unreadable.
My sister in law brought over her 'ibook' something or other albums about a week later. She produced albums of her kid (same age as my daughter), had them printed and sent to her. She makes a photo album about every 3 months, pays about $20, and has it sent to her. It's professional looking, permanent, and reliable. PRINT 'EM. (Should also help cut down on the 500 pictures of your kid farting / smiling).
I use MOZY and like it pretty well. I was running it on a Macbook and switched to a Win-7 PC (no innuendos intended here) I was able to switch the service over to my new computer (and all the files with it) pretty easily. It costs a bit (I think it was $150-ish / yr - don't remember exactly), but I'm glad I have it.
skip the DVD world. You don't have any 5.25" drives anymore, the disks are useless. you always want a solution that you can simply plug into any computer forever.
right now, a thirty year-old IDE drive with a 10 year-old IDE controller card will still work on a modern motherboard.
today, what you want is the pair of drives that you mentioned -- in external enclosures with SATA & USB interfaces. SATA will be around and supported for another 20 years. USB likely for longer than 40 years from today. You'll use the SATA today, for writing and such, and the USB as the fail-safe.
down the road, think every 10 years, you'll buy a controller card and stick it in a closet. nothing more. so when SATA is no longer on modern motherboards, you'll buy the whatever2SATA controller/adapter/dongle. You'll then have another 20 years to care about copying your stuff to a then-new drive. But you'll want to anyway, because the 3TB drives you get now will be full by then, and you'll want a 3EB drive to quickly expand your library.
It's all about retrieval. A real, live, active drive makes that a breeze.
Automatic offsite backup services like Crashplan, Mozy, Carbonite etc ensures your data will survive both media failure, theft and fire. You may also choose to keep a local copy of your media, because downloading hundreds of gigs over the net takes a while. But: I'd first put my money into one of these providers, and if I felt I still have too much money then I'd consider a NAS/Time Capsule kinda solution as a supplement.
And never, ever, ever exclusively store data you care about on DVDs and external hard drives.
For the first time in history, our pictures and videos can live forever - completely without quality degradation. It's amazing. And it's disappointing how few people take opportunity of this.
(Of course, you should take care to double-check your new computer can play back whatever media formats you have used - and convert if necessary. )
Stop the brainwash
I have 15 year old media files already.
Been there. Done that. It's really not as hard as people try to make it out to be.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Whenever something like this comes up, lots of people go straight to thinking about which media will survive for 100 or 1000 years, but I don't think that's the right line of thinking. First, even if you buy a DVD that theoretically *can* last 100 years, that doesn't mean that your particular disk won't fail after 5 years. You have the possibility of improper storage, physical damage, manufacturing defects, or just... whatever. Random failure.
Mostly, treat it like other data. Create a backup plan, and make sure your backup plan is one that you'll actually stick to. People constantly come up with backup plans, do the backup once, forget, and then 2 years later their hard drive dies and they've lost everything in the last 2 years. In order to be a real backup, you need to keep backing up on a regular basis. The backup needs to be on a separate physical device, and you should periodically check the backup to make sure it's working, and that your backup copy hasn't been corrupted.
Ideally, you'll periodically send a backup offsite. This protects you from things like fires, floods, or other disasters where your entire house might be ruined. If you're writing stuff to a hard drive or DVD, periodically buy new backup media and send the old one to your parents or something. Or if the required storage is small enough, buy an online backup plan.
But the point here is, don't create 1 copy somewhere and expect that that copy on that medium will be around in 50 years. Instead, plan on moving the data to new media as newer/faster/larger media become available, and don't expect any medium to last more than 5 years or so. You'll get a new computer with a bigger hard drive, and you'll move the data to a new hard drive. The key here is to make sure that you don't lose your copy by accident, so keep good backups!
I've been doing this for a long time, and have settled on the concept of a long term data archive for this purpose. It contains approximately half a terabyte of data that I consider to be 'important', and a few hundred megabytes of data that I consider 'very important'.
The first thing to be aware of is that a data archive is useless if it's not readily available 24/7. You don't back up data by putting it on tapes and throwing it in a box in the closet. Putting tapes in a closet is useful, but it should be considered a 'catastrophic recovery option to be used as a last resort'.
The main machine that houses the 'live' archive contains two large drives, each with a full copy of an operating system and the data archive. The currently booting disk is considered current; its archive is live. The second drive is an older copy of the archive, and is generally only a few days out of date. Rsync via atq automatically mirrors the archive and operating system to the second drive every few nights.
The backup machine has a similar setup, but it has older versions of the data archive. I update each archive on the backup machine every two months, staggered so there's always a copy of the archive about a month old, and always a copy about two months old. Having older versions of the archive available helps in the rare situations where you blow away something you shouldn't have. The backup machine should be off site if you can manage it.
For the 'very important' data, I keep copies on a handful of external machines and maintain them either via revision control or rsync. In the 'catastrophic backup' regime, I keep decommissioned disks containing old copies of the archive off site, usually in the hands of reliable friends and family.
It should be noted that I've found it important to run a nightly MD5 or SHA-256 checksum of every file in the archive, even if you don't do anything with it. (I actually compare against previous values, but that's not the important part.) This seems to greatly extend the lifetime of disks and reduce disk failure; I don't have a good explanation for this, but I suspect that reading from the bulk of the disk periodically allows the drive to identify and rewrite refresh questionable sectors before the data is unreadable. The disk need not go bad or have a catastrophic failure for data to become unreadable; mechanical aging and magnetic decoherence can simply put a sector above the ability of the FEC in the drive to recover, if left too long.
I don't use revision control on the bulk of the data in the archive. 95+% of the archive is considered long term read-only storage. Your usage may be different, and you may choose to use revision control on the entire archive. That doesn't really change the nature of the backup process though.
Alter Aeon Multiclass MUD - http://www.alteraeon.com
> Every 3 months
Aye.
> , never ceases to amaze me.
Not me. I care deeply about this topic and all the common answers/options are shit.
My advice is to cover several bases cheaply. Namely:
1. Get a couple of external drives, backup your pictures and video to those. Keep one locally in case your drive crashes and leave one at your parents' place in case something happens to your home.
2. Consider cloud storage. I know that's a dirty term on /. but it's a very easy and cheap way to keep backups. And, since you have external drives too, you're not relying solely on the cloud being there tomorrow. Services like Ubuntu One let you easily publish photos for your friends/family.
3. Print off your favourite photos. DVDs degrade, hard drives fail. A photo stuck in a physical album will last decades with no checks or maintaining. If you don't have a high end printer most big-name chops will take digital photos and print them for you.
I would recommend mixing the media types because you really can't rely on just one solution. I personally would go with a media server with a few 2TB drives and then an Internet-based solution like Carbonite. They offer unlimited storage, but you are limited to one computer and can only backup items on internal drive space (hence the media server with internal HDDs). Carbonite doesn't allow you to delete from your computer but keep a copy on their service (not longer than a month, anyways), which is why I say you should have a few 2TB drives.
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Which tells us that no one cares about the past anyway, unless it concerns you or your family.
Skype is too convoluted... Now I'm reverse-engineering the Kyoto Protocol.
I use multiple media for backup. I have a primary backup which is a RAID 1 1T drive. Periodically that is backed up to a eSATA external drive that is then rotated off-site (my mom's house). I also make periodic backups to optical (blueray). I also use SHA ckecksums to verify the integrity of the files when they are copied. I started using the blue ray when I read that the Solar disturbances that are peaking next year could possibly damage flash or magnetic storage. I haven't, but an online service would be an alternative. I am not confident with these, yet.
Keep them on your main home computer's HDD and set up daily backups to a separate drive (you should be doing this anyway - and forget RAID, it's not a substitute). Integrate the movies into your normal computer usage lifecycle (new machine, new drives, etc) and they will be preserved for as long as you own and use a computer.
Get a good consumer NAS for storage that can mirror. Then backup offsite (cloud storage or Blu Ray disks). If you lost your backups, create new ones from your NAS. If you lose your NAS, use your offsite backup. Cheap and elegant.
If part of your archiving strategy is to burn data to disc, make sure that you pad those discs with dvdisaster error-correcting data. Optical discs generally fail in a way where only part of the data is unreadable. Without extra error-correcting data, then those parts are gone forever. However, with dvdisaster, you'll:
1) Know when a disc is failing before it's too late
2) Be able to recover the data
3) Be able to migrate the data to fresh media
http://dvdisaster.net/
See subject.
The USB Standard is going to be compatible with new hardware for a very long time.
They can store a ton of stuff, only have one cable, and are small and portable.
Pick a random picture or a video and test that you can recover it. You will be amazed how few people do this. I have seen people backing up "pictures" only to find that the photo album software was storing them in c:\Windows\App.... .Regardless of media or service you use, please, please, please test it every once in a while. April fool's day task?
Do you suppose that maybe, just maybe, that's because no such solution exists?
Seriously, if there had been some manner of breakthrough in storage technology that would radically have changed the replies people gave 3 months ago, 6 months ago, 9 months ago, 12 months ago, etc. don't you think it would have been not only front page news at Slashdot but on practically any technology website worth its salt?
No, I'm with GP. Stop asking the same question if you can reasonably expect the answers to be the same, too.
For those needing car analogies:
Slashdot is the car. The editors and commenters are the drivers. The people submitting these types of articles are the whiney kids going "Are we there yet?".
Unfortunately, the drivers in this case are horrible parents and humor their kids with "No, not yet." / "No, but we are somewhere else and let me tell you all about it even if it's not what you asked about.".
A sane parent would have done the "No. I'll tell you when we're there*. Now stop asking or I'm going to pull over"-threat thing.
( * I.e. by posting about the aforementioned technological breakthrough. )
...
Facebook NEVER deletes or forgets ANYTHING, even when they claim they do.
It is probably is the safest storage there has ever been.
As sad and funny as this is, OP is actually right.
I, however, trust my photos to Google with picasa. Private storage of photos and videos, would be another thing though. I'd just say RAID or NAS.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Send in all your data to "Ask Slashdot". It will get repeated every couple of months for all eternity. It's not lossless as there are tiny variations, but they are usually to small to notice.
Except that they downgrade your photos.
http://millenniata.com/ Supposedly permanent backup via DVD-like media. Seems pretty cheap for a decent long term storage/backup solution. Interested to see if anyone else has an opinion on this product.
Exactly. Pretty much we have only a few solutions:
1: Tape. DLT and LTO tape will last 10-20 years, but tape drives are expensive ($3000+), require a fast connection (SAS minimum, likely FC), and one will need to know what software was used with what settings (like for tar, what blocksize, etc.)
2: Archival grade CDs/DVDs. Like the parent, it sounds good and isn't that expensive, but time will tell if the advertising holds true. Then there are factors like what burner is used and what dyes that may make or break things.
3: Copy files to hard disks, and keep copying them every so often to new media. Likely the best way, but takes time and trouble.
4: Use an offsite provider. The usual stuff about losing access, security, and reliability of the offsite provider apply.
Probably the best archiving technique would be a dedicated CAS appliance that keeps multiple copies of content stored on multiple iterations of media (stored with ECC, as well as SHA summing to check for corruption), copying/migrating data to new media periodically, and periodically checking that everything in its media database is readable.
To the user,it would appear as a volume, but will periodically ask for both used media (drives, tapes, CDs, DVDs, etc.) as well as new media to keep the data always refreshed. It would also cryptographically sign/timestamp all files so one knows that their 10 year old copy of their master's thesis has not been tampered with.
I use a Synology NAS with two 2 GB hard drives in a mirror RAID. I load all of the pictures onto Google Web Albums at native resolution, which makes it much easier to share with friends. I'm not sure about the videos. It's just not feasible to backup a terabyte of information on the web.
Personally, I use two Synology NAS at two different sites. They are configured to mirror each other using RSYNC. The web based GUI that Synology provides is very advanced and is pretty awesome. I know it's pretty costly but it probably beats uploading all that stuff online and then downloading it again when necessary. It also supports transparent AES encryption.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
I've been very happy with smugmug. It's very affordable to have unlimited video and photos, and you can order backup DVDs to put in a safety deposit box.
http://store.millenniata.com/default.aspx
Buy a m-disc internal re-writer, 1000 year lifetime and some M-DISCs for $15 for a 5-pack which can be read in a regular DVD player.
$200 for a re-writer
$15 for a 5-pack
problem solved
Go crazy! Hire some dude to write a worm that infects millions of computers with your family photos! Never again will you lose your files.
Or a little less crazy, embed your images inside other images that are funny and post them on 4chans /b/ board, reddit and various other sites. Instantly permanent.
I call it Memetic Storage. Patent Pending.
You can use high quality media; we backup important stuff on Taiyo Yuden DVD media and I don't think we've ever had a problem reading the data later. That doesn't stop us from making quarterly snapshots and sticking them in a safe deposit box, which helps to ensure that there are many readable copies of the data available.
The question is really how much data do you need to protect long-term. For us, where the total critical data pool fits on a few DVD's, this is fine. If I was going to back up 1TB of photos, I'd probably choose a hard-drive based strategy of rotating drives out to the safe deposit box.
Daguerreotype, it'll last a couple hundred years. Even for video.
Maybe consider hiring a sculptor for those likenesses you want to keep of your child for over a millenium (no guarantees about the arms though).
I used this strategy when transferring all my floppies to a CDR a few years back, and repeated the process recently by copying all my CDR's to a HD :) No risk of old media going bad and no need to keep around boxes of it.
Run Dropbox on multiple computers, that way it is in the cloud, and, in my case on my home and work computers. You can also install it on your parents computers, share the appropriate folders, and they are always up to date as well. Just don't put any of those "fun" videos you made with the wife on there !
I was just talking about the approach I use the other day. The short version is that you want more than one layer of defense. Something like Raid-1, followed by archival CDs, followed by cloud based. That'll always be better than a single layer. The long version is here.
You either;
1. Put it in someone else's hands. Then trust them.
2. Manage it yourself and copy the data to new formats as they become mainstream. Not hard as each new tech stores more than the old. Keep hard a hard copy on paper stored somewhere dry / secure.
There is no bullet proof storage that ensures it will be readable in 100 years. There could be wars, natural disasters both planetary or galactic. Language could change or be lost.
Where do you stop. It pretty clear a hard drive today will not be supported in 100 years. Something better will be available or we will have devolved to not be able to read a current hard drive.
I almost lost all my kid pictures a few years back and now it's a bit extreme what I do. They're all on my wife's Windows box.
1) With mirrored drives - In case of failure
2) With automatic backups by Ghost, incremental dailys and a complete image weekly to a big internal drive - because humans operate this and mistakes happen
3) Monthly I put a complete ghost image on an external USB drive and take it offsite - my house can burn or be burglarized and losing the whole computer shouldn't matter.
Ghost is nice because it's all transparent and completely automatic except for getting the USB drive to plug in once a month. If I do have to restore I'm also saved the pain of reinstalling everything since it's images. Naturally her system has worked flawlessly since this was setup.
I rsync all my pics to 3-4 machines periodically.
I also upload the good ones to picasa, so that counts as a partial offsite backup.
I also learned after yahoo pics went down to keep all the sorted/copied "good ones" in separate numbered folders in case I have to move my web pics.
I would absolutely go with a NAS Device. Something like this would work great: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132034
Then add either 4 2 TB HDDs or 4 1 TB HDDs: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136514
This assumes that you have a desktop PC. If you only have laptops check and see if your computer has an Esata port on it. If not youll need to get something like this to make it work with your laptop : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16839158030&Tpk=pcmcia%20esata
Set it up as a RAID5, back up and your data. And only run it when you need to do more back ups. A RAID5 will give you 1 disk fault tolerance which means that 1 HDD can die in it and the data will not be lost. You just replace the broken disk with a new one and it will rebuild the data.
Another option would be Carbonite online backup. For 59 dollars a year you get unlimited offsite data backup. In the long run this would be more expensive but may work for a short term until you can get something else figured out. Good Luck!
Large hard drive inside (or attached via USB/eSATA) to a computer with a Backblaze subscription.
Stone tablets can last for millions of years if not exposed to weathering processes.You can't get anymore long term than that. Although that's only good for pictures.
You are looking for Boar, an open source project providing "Simple version control and backup for photos, videos and other binary files". The philosophy is that version control is necessary for all vital data, be it code or baby pictures. And when you have all your files in one large, nice pile, Boar makes it easy to create and maintain verified copies on external HDDs or whatever. Splitting your data on a bunch of DVDs is a sure way to bring chaos to your files.
The project page is on google code at http://code.google.com/p/boar/
Disclaimer: I'm the author of Boar, and I think that absolutely everyone who values their files should use it. Or something similar, although I haven't found anything else that fits my needs.
And you can request a CD hard-copy whenever you want.
Perfect!
That's a good idea for photos (costco photo center is a personal favorite), but it's much more difficult to print videos..
Nah! Send each frame of the video to be printed as an individual photo, go rent a truck and pick up all the prints of the video and then put them into books. When you want to watch the video, just thumb through them like a giant flip book. You know, like the animated cartoons you used to do as a kid with a pen and pad.
The downside is switching volumes for each couple of seconds of the video and the damn blisters on the thumbs!
Rather than FTP, use rsync. Protect the data with PAR2. I use a Calvary SATA cradle with RAID 1 (mirroring) between two identical drives. I bought the USB model for $40; it's fast enough to burn a DVD at full speed.
Google did a commercial for their email system recently. Someone was emailing baby pictures, videos, announcements, and other stuff about a baby to an email account. It was a Dad emailing to his daughter all the moments he profound in her life. My mom still has the 'baby book' that has a lock of my hair from my first haircut, my first tooth, and various other milestones in my life. It's over 50 years old. The google email account might be the digital equivalent. Plus the cloud backups and on-site drives (keep one in a safe deposit box that you change out quarterly).
It's interesting that this came up (again) right now. I've just spent the past week finally digitizing some old VHS home movies that turned up in my parent's basement. We just never got around to doing anything with them, and VHS players may become fairly rare in a few more years. I still haven't snagged a cheap Beta player so the movies from my earlier childhood are mostly locked away for now.
Back in the day, tapes weren't exactly cheap. Nor did many people own a video camera. So mostly what we have is a 2 hour tape of a single weekend, taken with a borrowed/rented camera. Then another tape from several years if not a decade later. The quality of the media, plus degradation over time, means some of it looks pretty awful. You can mostly make out who people are but it can be tricky. Etc. I've also started looking into scanning all of our printed photos, of which there are many more - everyone owned a camera in the 70s/80s - but still, maybe 5-10 pictures for any given event or day, and many things were simply never photographed because they didn't seem important at the time, or we ran out of film, or whatever.
And looking through all of this makes me realize how precious these relative few records of my past are. There's maybe 2 hours of video with me in it and a few hundred photographs, spread over decades with large chunks of time completely missing. So when I look at these things, it's remarkable. Some of it I haven't seen in years, some I've simply never seen. I'm at the perfect age where it's not completely unheard of to have video of one's self, but it certainly wasn't common nor made in quantity - so you take what you can get, and there's a sense of fascination with it.
I contrast that to kids growing up today. Damn near every single day of their lives will be recorded, in high quality audio, video, and images. By the thousands of hours and tens of thousands of pictures (hey, digital storage is CHEAP). They will continually be exposed to it, if my friends and family are any indication - some of them constantly re-watch videos of first birthdays, first walking, first vacation etc etc etc. For most of my life I've had to rely on memory alone, with a few pictures to remind me of what any given house looked like, or the yard, or my friends at the time, or what have you. This next generation will have it in their face at all times, and accessible throughout their lives.
Just got me philosophical, I guess. I'm completely fascinated that video of me even exists from when I was 10. My nephews right now have a hard time understanding why we don't have video of their dad through every single month of his life.
As for storage, I'm digitizing everything to whatever open and widely readable format works that has enough quality considering the source material, keeping it on hard disk (backed up to another), and sent out to several family locations on burnt DVDs. Within a few years the space will be almost trivial and I'll probably add a backup to my keychain. But my entire recorded life can be stored in a few gigabytes. Your kid's first week probably contains more. I think what I'm hinting at is that you might want to consider not keeping every single last video and photo if it becomes too much of a burden. If there's less around, it will become all the more precious and fun to look at in the future.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
OP already has it basically figured out. Continue using Time Machine (and continue or start verifying the backups periodically). Rotate external drives through as your TM backup disk. Have your parents get you a safe deposit box somewhere convenient. Keep one or more backup drives in there and just get on a rotation. Anything beyond that that you might need is basically just file management.
Who are you saving them for? For what occasion? Do you look at pictures of yourself as a baby, ever?
A DVD holds an hour of video, give or take. At what point in your daughter's future do you think she'll want to sit and watch an hour of her "ooo, lifting her head!" "ooo, sitting up!" "ooo, toddling about!" "ooo, wearing a costume!" "ooo, petting the cat!" That's just a single DVD edited for highlights. Do you think she'll watch it when she's 17? Getting married? Raising her own child?
Now, how many DVD's do you think you can fill with daughter-related media?
Video and pictures of children are for NOW, so that you can send them to grandparents in email, or mail on discs to friends. All those copies you send out to other people, you know what those are? Off-site backups. Those are already the selected highlights that anyone might want to look at later (say, when you are making that inevitable wedding video collage).
I am a data hoarder myself. I have email archives dating back more than 20 years. Do you know what good they are? None. Back up the data to an external drive so it's on two devices. Buy another to give to grandma and sync it on holidays. That's more than paranoid enough. You will always be more interested in your daughter's present and future than in her past. Don't worry about it too much.
Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
It sounds like Flickr Pro at $25/yr is easier, cheaper and safer than doing it yourself. Bonus 1: Unlimited storage. Bonus 2: Easy interface for organizing, viewing and sharing.
that's what it's for.
Keep the files locally on a spinning disk, and subscribe to a cloud-based storage service, i.e. Mozy or Carbonite.
If your house burns down then you can restore from the cloud, and if the cloud goes down (or rather, these days it seems... WHEN it goes down) you'll have your local copies.
This solution is simple, easy, and inexpensive and still provides very good reliability. For my personal files, this is the route I take; my laptop holds 90% of my "important" files, and my unlimited plan at Carbonite gives me piece of mind should something happen to my laptop.
The point is never rely on one single solution. And you want your data to be physically redundant in case of a physical catastrophe--fire, theft, user stupidity--so you'll have the other physical location to fall back on. There's always the chance both your laptop will catch fire and Mozy's servers crash, but data reliability is focused on mitigating risk; removing the risk completely reduces the options available that fit into easy, simple, and/or inexpensive categories.
Truckin like the Doo-Dah man...
Use harddrives. They are cheap and fast. And if you store them under decent conditions and dont let them run all the time everything will be fine. In three years copy them to the next generation harddrives. If you are willing to pay in average $100 per two years it should be fine.
it is really nice that you shared your method with us.
Then your picture will be all over the web and all you need to to is google yourself and there will be an incredible number of pictures/videos available.
Flickr doesn't, with a "Pro" membership. With the free account, yeah, the original is not available to you. They actually store the originals, even with the free account, and if you add "Pro" later they're there.
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
Backing them up is important, but make sure you know what the pictures are, from when and where... I have a script that copies the photos and movies from the SD card and puts them into a folder by date (YYYY-MM-DD). I then add in a description for each directory, so I end up with "2011-02-14 (Valentine's Day at Grandmas)" For backups: I use a RAID 1 (mirror) to store all my important data, including photos. Each night, the drive is rsync'ed to a USB drive. I have recently gotten some additional drive space for Picasa and plan to write a script to upload to new albums with the dates and descriptions stored as the directory name. Every 18 months or so, move to the next HDD size, store the previous USB HDD somewhere safe and re-use the two old RAID 1 drives for something less important. This protects against pretty much anything, save Armageddon (or the end of Google)... And lastly, print out some of the photos! Take a little bit of time to go through your recently downloaded pictures and have a few of them printed out.
If you have a second kid you'll be way too preoccupied with the kids to take any more photos.
It's very good you're asking that question, I shudder to thing how many people I know have no backups of their all-important memorabilia.
The best solution by far is a dumb local backup. Not raid, not cloud, good old-fashioned backup to a second hard disk. As long as everything fits in 4TB, it's easy, since it fits on a single hard disk. If you start to have to juggle several hard drives, or buy expensive multi-disk enclosures, this becomes a pain, but is still the only long-term-proof solution.
Important things about backups: they are
- offline, so that a virus, clumsy nephew, vindicative ex, half-asleep self, can't delete/damage/contaminate them by mistake or willfully
- off-site, so that a burglary, fire.. doesn't destroy the backup as well as the original. Keep it in your desk at work for example, or at your 'rents.
- tested, I've come across several instances of people who *thought* they had a backup... and maybe they had, but... they couldn't restore it.
- multiple, because of murphy's law. Now that can get expensive.
Other remarks:
- most real-life problems are "user" problems: virus, accidental deletion, even file corruption.
- optical disks are not very good back-ups. My 10 yo CDs, brand- and no-name, have a very high failure rate (30% ?). There are archival-grade DVDs/BR, I have no info on them.
- RAID is not a backup: it's online (so any goof-up, virus.. destroys all your files), on-site (so burglars take everything), un-tested (so a bug in the OS, RAID driver, app, user... can contaminate your files for weeks, months, years w/o you realizing it), and less than single let alone multiple (it's not even a backup)
- online as a second backup is nice. Not as a primary backup, you never know when you'll be cut off
- don't use fancy backup formats or software. Plain old rsynch / xxcopy / synctoy work fine, do reliable differential backups, and leave your files in their original formats, which is much easier to fix/salvage in case the backup gets corrupted.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
So if it's the oxygen we need to worry about destroying our optical media, how about storing discs in a case which we can fill with something that's not oxygen? Better yet, a light-tight, insulated container with a mechanism to replace the oxygen with, what, nitrogen or something. Would this solve the problem of degrading DVDs?
Set up a ZFS 3-way mirror. Scrub weekly. Sync with offsite for "just in case."
http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/Using+OpenIndiana+as+a+storage+server
Cheap, easy, fast.
I use TimeMachine with one of these:
http://www.g-technology.com/products/g-safe.cfm
I have 3 drives - I swap one out weekly and keep it at work. That way, if the house burns down, I have a copy of all my data offsite.
Ironically, VHS on near-archival-quality tapes stored in a safe-deposit box are probably the best "home" solution available for generational storage. VHS players and monitors will be around in 50 years, if only in antique shops and libraries.
Another option is to make 2 or 3 copies to "DVD-player-format" DVDs on archival (50-year) media and store them in different locations. In each location, store a DVD player and a monitor. Odds are very high that at least one of the disks, at least one of the players, and at least one of the monitors will work.
I won't make the same guarantees for 100-year-plus archiving.
For stuff of "National Archives" importance, "printing" to black-and-white movie film with color separations and storing in archival vaults is probably the way to go. Make at least 2 copies and store them at least far enough apart that they won't be damaged by the same man-made or natural disaster that doesn't end civilization as we know it (e.g. major tsunami or earthquake, single nuclear explosion, but not end-of-civilization war or asteroid impact).
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Many services don't. We were talking about Facebook...
I have a four tier strategy, based on the fact that discs are cheap. I call it 6666 as in 6 inches, 6 feet, 6 miles and 6 thousand miles. I developed it based on a need to backup several hundred GB to few TB of data with respect to the privacy but still allowing sharing with my family.
Tier 1: 6 inches
RAID 1 in my desktop All important files that cannot be duplicated are stored on RAID 1 disk array. If a disk fail I have a local copy immediately available for restore
Tier 2: 6 feet
Local online backup. Each important file is duplicated between my desktop and my file server. On file server the files are stored on a RAID 1 array. If my local desktop break completely (e.g. motherboard burns out and takes the disk controller and disks with it) I have the file server immediately available for restore. The replication is done on a scheduled and manual basis.
Tier 3: 6 miles
All important files are from time to time copied to a portable hard disk that is stored in a safety deposit box. This disk is updated every few weeks/months. If my house burns down I have majority of my data locally available for immediate restore. The data which are not present are restored from the remote backup in tier 4.
Tier 4: 6000 miles
All important files are remotely copied to a file server at my parents house on a different continent. It servers, two purposes. If for some reason my immediate locality is affected by natural disaster (fire, flood, tornado), my files are safe. Also if my parents wants to see my HD videos of my kids, they have them locally available and I don't have to share it with them. The replication is done on manual basis.
I have experimented with many different technologies how to implement this strategy (CrashPlan, HW RAID, SW RAID, rsync, etc.) and this is what I have settled on since it is foolproof, non proprietary and can be implemented (in case of remote backup) by non techie.
Tier 1: SW RAID using mdam on Ubuntu 64b Desktop encrypted using LUKS
Tier 2: SW RAID using mdam on CentOS 64b Server encrypted using LUKS. Populated manually using rsync every time I upload new pictures and videos to server. Home directories and documents are rsynced automatically every few hours.(Before I used CrashPlan)
Tier 3: Truecrypt on portable HDD populated using rsync manually to review changes.
Tier 4: PogoPlug modded using http://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=pogoplug+arm+linux&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 to provide remote ssh server and local Samba server. Data are copied manually using rsync every time I update tier 2. The local Samba is used for local sharing of the multimedia (pictures, videos) at the destination. The beauty of this solution is that is is completely plug and play and my parents don't have to know anything about technology. I gave them 2 pieces of hardware (pogoplug and hdd), they plugged in 4 cords at their location (1 network, 1 usb, two power) and I configured their router.
Cost
Tier 1: 1 extra internal HDD (assuming desktop computer is already present)
Tier 2: 1 extra internal HDD (assuming you are already running filer server for your household)
Tier 3: 1 portable HDD
Tier 4: 1 Pogoplug ($30 on sale) + 1 portable HDD
If you start with 3 TB disks in each computer. This solution required 4 extra 3 TB disks + 1 pogoplug and little bit of manual effort.
I'd like to push my own project for a moment, as I designed it to handle just this problem. It is called Boar, an open source project providing "Simple version control and backup for photos, videos and other binary files". The philosophy is that because human errors are just as problematic (or more) than hardware problems, version control is necessary for all vital data, be it code or baby pictures. And when you have all your files in one large, nice repository, Boar makes it easy to create and maintain _verified_ copies on external HDDs or whatever.
The project page is on google code at http://code.google.com/p/boar/
(I mentioned my project in an earlier answer as well. Sorry for repeating myself, but I really think this project is the solution for a lot of the problems people are talking about here...)
Rsync all the computers in your house to each other, have another offsite. As you upgrade your computers the data gets moved to newer and newer hardware. Is that so hard?
What, is it 1996?
I think you meant 2TB.
What's the current common length of time before any particular computer service goes out of business?
As long as you don't object to them owning the rights to your pictures.
Totally agree with you regarding photos. I use iPhoto to print out books of our family trips, then send copies to the grandparents. You have off site storage, and don't have to worry about finding the correct media player. The kids are able to read it whenever they want to. It's fun to watch my kids snuggle up with their grandparents on the couch with books, not as easy with a laptop or tablet.
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
These are specially made for archiving and are supposed to last 300 years (in optimal conditions, of course, so you'll need to refresh them every decade or two). They typically cost more than your average DVDR, but not much (say, $5 a pop). Have plenty of redundancy -- three or four copies of everything if possible. Keep in mind that when an optical disk goes bad it doesn't all go bad. Even if all your copies fail, you may still be able to reconstruct the original files from multiple sources. Try not to store all copies in the same place/conditions. Good luck.
I'm about 6 years ahead of you with the same problem. Lot's of pictures and video. Here is my current (and evolving) plan.
1. Everything is live on a NAS in my house. I don't do anything fancy like RAID. It's just a cheap harddrive. I do periodically swap out the hard-drive for a bigger one every few years and haven't had a failure yet...but that is just dumb luck.
2. I store everything in common formats, DVD images and jpeg. I figure that I'll notice if JPEGs or MPEG2 video becomes hard to decode and at that point I'll spend a weekend converting to something more "current".
3. Everything is backed up to a USB hard-drive that I keep in a fireproof media safe that is certified for media (hd, optical etc.). A standard safe won't stay cool enough.
4. Offsite backup using Crashplan. I like Crashplan but Mozy or Carbonite may work as well.
The USB HD in the safe is probably redundant as I really don't know how well it would survive a fire and is also the most likely to be out of date as the backup is a manual operation. I just can't put all of my trust into an external company that I pay $50/year to.
In general don't trust too much DVDs and the Cloud (what happens if they loose your data? we've seen some examples lately...)
As for versioning, sorry I can't give any good advice. I still have to find a good automated solution. Currently my photo workflow relies on directory structures and a naming convention.
OK, maybe I'm just being dense (wouldn't be the first time), but I don't really understand your problem here. You've got the files stored locally on your Mac, and you are backing the Mac up to a Time Machine (which is basically a special purpose NAS, like what a lot of people are recommending here, albeit not a very flexible NAS). What, exactly, is the problem you want to solve, then?
:)
If the Time Machine dies, you've still got the original files on the Mac. If the Mac dies, you've still got the files on the Time Machine -- although I'll admit that, while I own both a Mac and a Time Machine, I've never had to restore data from one Mac to another, so I don't know how difficult that would be. Yeah, at some point in the future, you'll need to export all of your data off of your Mac onto a new computer, but that's not exactly a difficult proposition: if going to another *Nix machine (including Mac), just open up a terminal window and run...:
rsync -av ~/Pictures <user name>@<ip address of the new machine>:~/
(Actually, I can't remember offhand if it's ~/Pictures or ~/Photos since I spend a lot more time on Linux than OS-X, and you'll probably need to rsync ~/Movies as well).
This will work on a Windows machine too, but you'll have to install cwrsync first, and you'll probably have to play with the directories to figure out exactly what paths to use.
To be completely honest, I actually use the shotgun approach to archiving photos and movies: I have a desktop machine at home, a laptop at home, plus two work laptops (one of which is the Mac) and a work netbook. My photos are archived indiscriminately across most (if not all) of these machines AND I've got many of them stored on Picassa, too. When you upgrade from one computer to another, assuming that it's not because the old machine died, you can use the old machine(s) as glorified NAS boxes and rsync between them to keep multiple backups of your files. It's not elegant, but it works
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Take the best pictures and get metallic prints made on Kodak Endura Metallic, Fuji Metallic or Fuji Pearl. Those will last a lifetime and, under the correct lighting, almost look like they're back lit.
I understand the point here is digital storage, all I'm suggesting is there are some advantages to going retro and getting actual lab prints made of the best shots.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
4: Use an offsite provider. The usual stuff about losing access, security, and reliability of the offsite provider apply.
As people get more and more connected, the best way would be to pool with your friends and store offsite at their homes. A 2-4TB external drive is fairly cheap, and although some people might have more data, it should work to store the truly "cannot be reproduced" data (e.g., not ripped CDs, as you should still have the original).
CrashPlan is free for this kind of backup (as well as local backup), and supports Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris, which should cover most real-world users (although FreeBSD is specifically not supported).
I just copy my photo/video collection to a USB hard drive every month or so and then take it to work and stick it in a drawer. In the event of HD failure, theft, fire, flood, ect, I have a backup in a different location. Worst case is I lose a month of photos.
A better solution is an on-line backup, but this might be too costly if you have a large collection like I do.
www.backblaze.com, unlimited backups for $50 a year. or if you're paranoid, tarsnap. But it's more work and doesn't work as easily with a mac as backblaze.
You should definitely check the DVD disks from Millenniata - they claim their disks can last centuries, if not millennia. http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/08/08/2222208/start-up-claims-immortality-for-data-with-stone-like-disc There's a starter's kit on Amazon for just 285 $ http://www.amazon.com/Millenniata-Starter-Kit-M-WRITER-Printing/dp/B004I52204/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317326110&sr=8-1
Backblaze has unlimited online storage, and is only $5 a month. Just have fun seeding the initial TB.
I am a huge fan of online automatic backups. Things like Backblaze, Crashplan, etc are neat. If, in many years, technology is changing to make your file types obsolete, you will have everything available to convert during that time. If your backup company of choice goes out of business, then choose a new one. As long as you keep something current, you will be set. I bought backblaze for all of my family members for Christmas last year. It sure does feel good to not have to worry about grabbing my PC if my house is on fire....just my wife.
You should use a combination of methods and be prepared to move your backups to a new place every few years.
For off-site backups I use Backblaze which is just $3.96 a month unlimited storage if you buy two years (these are the guys that build a half a petabyte custom servers). I also backup to a removable drive every once in a while that I keep in the office.
Maybe once a year, I pick the very best pictures and print them and build an album. Even cheap photo paper lasts at least 50 years. Archival quality lasts over 100 years if stored properly.
First off, Congratulations! Including files related to my 4 year old, I've got about 100GB of media. I recommend the 3-2-1 Backup method: 3 copies of the data, on 2 different drives/media, 1 of them off-site. I do this by having a "primary" copy of the data on a machine at home, which I copy to a backup drive periodically. The primary also gets rsync'd nightly to a cheap eeePC with a 1 TB USB drive in a closet at my parents place. All this is running Linux, but you can manage with other OS's. Bonus #1: They get local access to the media via an SMB read-only share. Bonus #2: I gave them a writable share for THEIR data, which is rsync'd nightly to our place as a backup. You can do this with friends, etc. Being on the same ISP helps as the sync traffic can stay in the provider cloud. I've also used Amazon S3 (~US$13/month for 100GB of non-redundant storage) and I still use rsync.net for more limited critical documents (encrypted), though their price doesn't scale well for large, static data sets (they don't charge for bandwidth so relatively small but dynamic data is a good fit).
You could try the gmail idea. create an email account for your kid, and record memories on gmail. give them the account when they are ready.
The short answer: film.
Mozy & Carbonite offer unlimited backups for about $60 per year. If your parents are willing to pick up the tab, go for it.
Personally, I do this:
- mirrored data drive stores pictures and video. Happens automatically.
- 2 external HDs gets copies of data drive. Manually cold mirror via SyncToy a few times a month.
- burn 3 copies of DVDs of new files, keep one, send other two to parents and in-laws. I may do this once or twice a year. It is manual and does consume some time, but for the cost of a few DVD RWs, envelopes, and two postage stamps I get off-site backups. Oh, and they'll likely load them on their PC, so that's another backup copy.
It probably costs me more than $60 per year, but I prefer to do things like this myself.
I pay for more google storage.
It's expensive. But it's permanent.
I already have 400GB worth of pics and videos for only one child. but I've got 60+GB stored on google.
They're using their grammar skills there.
triple backups at 2 different data centers. and a gallery to boot.
I had to look at similar options. I might take 50,000 pictures in a year, all raw, and I needed to find a good solution. Losing images means I could be sued (and I actually carry malpractice insurance for photography).
My conclusion: using only local storage or only remote storage is dangerous. Use both.
Using only local storage, no matter how many backups you have and how often you refresh them, is vulnerable to your house burning down or burglary. Even ignoring refreshing the data, storage media are vulnerable to obsolescence. Try reading a 9-track tape nowadays -- even if the tape is good, it'll be tough to get the data.
Using only remote storage is highly vulnerable to sites simply going out of business or deleting your images. And if a site goes down, they don't care if you sue them -- you still lost your images. Flickr has, in the past, simply deleted someone's archives and was unable to restore them.
Initially, my backups consisted of a USB HD stored in a fire safe. Nowadays, I use a combination of both local and remote storage. I purchased a "pro" account on an image hosting service (smugmug, in this case) which has unlimited image storage (and the option for backups of any file types), and I also have a 10TB NAS. The local NAS holds the raw image backups, and after they're processed, I upload them to hidden galleries on my pro account as JPGs. If my house burns, I might need to do a reshoot of the past week, but everything processed is backed up offsite in some usable format.
I highly recommend Synology NAS solutions for local storage, which are open source and actively encourage ports and enhancements to their systems, and they have an excellent admin panel. This is unlike Drobo, who has their system fairly locked down...
is often the best, backups to disk, putting data on the cloud are all volatile storage methods as file formats change over the years. If you want to save an image go make two prints of every image you wish to archive put a copy of each in a vacuum sealed bag with a copy of the original print, Now put both vacuum bags in two places that are geographically more then 50km a part ie one at home another in a lock up. My family has pictures that go back over 100 years and recently I made backups of the prints both as data and as physical and that made me realise the best backup is a hard copy,
With Facebook, you are guaranteed to NEVER, EVER, have it deleted.
Somebody should write the article reminiscing all the "How do I backup my shit" posts. It would be great to see how the question has evolved, what type of data people are concerned about as time goes by, and how the answer never changes. The only variable would be the amount of byte / $ for spinning disks.
(Why DVDs keeps coming back as a suggestion, beats me. At the time of writing, it's at least 6x more expensive ($ / byte) to use 4.7 GB DVD-Rs than the cheapest terabyte HDD. Probably more, since you can never fill the DVDs 100%).
For video upload everything to youtube in 1080p. Set to private so people can't find it. For pictures you can get extra storage from picasa or other sites relatively cheaply. Backup everything additionally on three hard drives. Keep one at home. Keep the second in a safety deposit box. Keep the third at your grandparent's house. Update the copy in the safety deposit box every few months by swapping it with the HD you keep at home. Update the grandparent's copy by mailed DVD or when you visit. Keep copies of new material on home computers/flash media until all backups are updated. For additional safety you can also buy new flash cards for photos and save the old ones in the safety deposit box.
I have a friend who had her photos on two laptops and an external hard drive. When her home was broken into everything was stolen. Offsite backup is mandatory.
Archival quality DVD? http://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-96320-UltraLife-Archival-5-Disc/dp/B000WTO352
It's obvious that the brand of blank DVDs makes a difference, but what few know is using a *slower* burn speed, such as 4X, can greatly help.
Some other suggestions:
* Be sure no extra programs, browsers, etc are running when burning - if not possible, consider getting a dedicated computer just for burning use.
* Make at least two copies using two different brands of DVD - and on each DVD itself, burn two copies - that will limit data to about 2.2 GIG per DVD, so not always practical for video, but certainly worth doing for pictures.
* Storage - keep in dark, well ventilated place - not the garage nor the attic. Keep moisture under 50% whenever possible.
DVDs can be a good intermediate backup option that can with some care in burning and storage, likely last 10-20 year, and perhaps far longer - no one really knows yet.
I remember back when consumer grade videotapes became widely available some people claiming they'd only last 10 years - and yet roughly 30 years later, it turns out videotape degrade somewhat, but nowhere near as much as was once believed. So it's quite possible in 30+ years burned DVDs may still be readable with little to no data loss.
1) Buy 2 Fire Proof Safes. Put in different locations.
2) Mime encode the videos
3) Print encoded text files out twice
4) Put one set of papers in fire proof safe A, the other in fire proof safe B
Simple!
Besides the various storage options people have proposed, don't forget about the codecs! Use industry standard ones (ie. JPG, MPEG-2, DV, H.264, etc), but avoid ones that haven't had wide acceptance (ie. JPEG-2000). I've gotten caught with some old 15 year old videos I couldn't decode because the were digitized off of video tape and used a weird Intel video codec.
I used to burn stuff on CDs, then DVDs, now I'm moving to and moving old archives to BluRay-LTH discs. I like the BluRay-LTH discs because it has a good GB:$ ratio and they're fairly scratch resistant. I try checking the discs every 5 years. I actually burn 2 copies, and keep one set at work, I also have a RAID-1 setup for online storage at home.
Don't use FLASH drives for on-the-shelf storage, they will not last beyond 20-25 years.
Later,
SLam
Later,
SLam
For what you'll be spending on a NAS solution or for yearly fees for online storage, you can get a 100 pack of gold archival DVD-r's (~$270).
I have a antique Chinese chest about 10 feet away from me that has photographs in albums of my mother and her family when she was a child in the 1920s.... and before! They are in black and white but in perfect condition.
Our family spent 5 years cruising on a sailboat in the 1980s and we used cheap cameras to take photos. They were in color and they're still just fine in a couple of photo albums in the room we call the "library" here.
Photographs taken in 1860 still survive.
Take digital pics... save them, post them, do whatever you like... but take regular photos too. And save them in albums. They're a lot easier to mount in the hallway as the kids grow up. :)
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
I do online backups through Mozy.com, and I found that to be ideal. They keep everything for 60 days (including versions for files that change) so if my hard drive fails, I won't lose anything. This means I can just keep my photo library in a folder on my PC and know for sure that it'll be safe.
You could do the same thing with a Dropbox account.
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
I personally use a RAID enclosure from Raidon with two drives in a mirrored configuration. Something like the GR3630-2S-SB2:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816142002
(I've used Accordance RAID systems in the past, before my current Raidon).
Then I buy an additional HD tray and rotate the 3 drives occasionally to an offsite backup. Basically the cost is about $345 total, $75*3 drives+$120 for the unit, and I get 3 copies of the data. Additional offsite backups run $105 ($75 drive+$30 tray).
I've found this the easiest to understand (for end users) and a very cheap and reliable storage method. I've had the nightmare of backing up to 8 different tapes, only to go to restore and find out that 6 tapes are empty, 1 is bad, and 1 has data from 6 months back. Because you're actually running your OS off of the drives, you don't get into that situation. The main key is to make sure that you pull drives when the system is off (so that all files are written to disk), and that you insert drives when the system is ON (so that the raid array knows the drive is replaced and doesn't corrupt your data). NEVER INSERT A DRIVE WHILE THE SYSTEM IS OFF.
I have files from over 15 years ago on my main desktop computer, and the only files I'm missing are from my original 286 before I started this backup method.
This solution can be retrofitted on any desktop computer. All you need to do is install an eSata card (if you don't have an eSata port) and then purchase additional drives (SAME model number OR larger capacity as the current drive in the computer). Simply stick the current HD into the raid array FIRST, then put the new empty drives in SECOND, and it'll automatically mirror. Set the computer to boot from eSata and you're all set.
If you ever want to upgrade capacity, simply buy 3 larger drives and it will automatically mirror those drives to a larger capacity for you.
-=Lothsahn=-
The best method is multiple solutions. Hard drives fail, devices break etc. -- If you truly want to have a copy of these video files in 10, 20, or 30 years then the best solution is to backup using 2-3 different methods. Using a FTP like people recommend is a good solution, DVDs (stored in a secure box (preferably a fireproof one or one stored at a bank/similar,)) and keeping a external hard drive with a copy of the files means that if the server that you are hosting gets hacked into and all of the files deleted, your house burns down with all of your stuff inside then you still have a copy elsewhere and you don't lose those videos forever.
My recommendation is to save your image data in uncompressed or JPEG-2000 format and audio data in uncompressed PCM format on LTO-5 data tape in a controlled temperature environment (that is what we are doing in Hollywood).
Archivists generally agree that magnetic tape, in a well-controlled environment, is good for 20-40 years storage if not more.
But recognize that good digital archiving involves eventual migration from old media to new media.
The reasons most of the answers are terrible is because there is no company attempting to make proper long lived media. The only possible reason I can see for this is because they don't believe they can make money at it. Maybe they are right.
Proper, good as stone tablet, archival media has a few simple problems to overcome.
First is the bits degrading with time. So we need something permanent. Something write once, read forever which will never wear out.
Second is technological obsolescence. How many people can still read 8" floppies? Not many. So the media must not require a drive. Drives wear out and get lost. Almost no data is valuable enough to reverse engineer the drive later. There is a similar problem with interfaces. Sure USB is available everywhere today, but how many new computers are sold with ISA buses? Now though we really want to be able to read the data quickly now, we can probably live with reading the data slowly in the future when it's our only recovery option. So such a media should have two interfaces. One like USB which is ubiquitous and fast enough today, and one which is dead simple to build an interface for no matter the available technology.
The third problem is filesystem format. There are two solutions for this. Either keep a human readable specification of the file system format on the drive in some easy way to retrieve when it has been forgotten to time. Or have a second interface which accesses a built in CPU to decode the filesystem. Say something like an even more trivial FTP interface.
So here is an idea for some company to make so I can finally have some proper archival media which I can expect to be stable across decades. Make a single box in the form factor of an external harddrive. Provide a USB interface and a special dead simple filesystem which can be written to repeatedly. The file system must be write only. To store the data use PROMs. Honest, hardcore, dependable write-once-by-burning-a-fuse PROMs. Put in an easy recovery interface using a serial protocol to a built in micro controller which can read the filesystem.
This is nothing difficult. But for some reason nobody seems to want to make this PROM Archive Pack.
What's so expensive about "100-year" CDs?
I use a 2 TB SATA RAID device for all of my files, and a 2TB USB drive as a backup copy. I use Allway Sync to sync everything weekly. It's a great solution and gives me piece of mind and lots of space!
With Facebook, you are guaranteed to NEVER, EVER, have it deleted.
Even if you press that delete button. IT WILL STILL ALWAYS BE THERE!
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.
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin
I keep my photos and video on an external hard drive which is attached to a Mac mini. I have a larger hard drive that I use with Time Machine for both the local and external disks (Time Machine can be configured to back up both). I keep a copy of my photos on my MacBook Pro, and periodically rsync them to the external drive attached to the Mini. The video is only on the external hard drive because it is too big to keep on a laptop disk, and I attach the drive to my MBP whenever I want to build something in iMovie. The Mini is attached to a TV so I can watch the raw video without having to move the external disk.
My fire/theft backup is Backblaze, which was the only service that would allow you to back up both a local and external disk for the same price when I selected it. It continuously backs up my Mac mini and the external drive with my video and photos.
Which tells us that no one cares about the past anyway, unless it concerns you or your family.
MPAA and RIAA do. Bear in mind their original storage options mean a lot of film and audio tape disintegrated and somethings are lost to time. Now I bet they store everything digitally, on separately managed servers in various geographic locations. Because how can they sue you if you have the only copy and they claim it's illegal?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I recommend a networked storage appliance which can backup to the cloud and has file system and file level integrity checking. Something based on zfs would be ideal. I use a storage nas from Great Lakes SAN (http://glsan.com). This little nas is dynamically expandable, fast, backups with filesystem snapshots and removes manual intervention from having to keep track of hard drives by sending copies of your data to the cloud.
Don't keep all your eggs in the electronic basket:
Make prints of some of your favorite pictures. They'll last longer than any magnetic media.
The only other long-term storage for electronic data, as others have outlined, is keeping it on active storage, with regular backups. Storage space will increase far faster than you can fill it with pictures.
Videos are another story. They consume huge amounts of space (in present-day terms), and there's not really a physical embodiment you can use any more.
It'll be interesting to see how movie studios archive their "films" now that they're not necessarily on actual film stock. I'd bet they're rendering a backup to film for archiving in cold storage, since that's very well understood. But as to how they're archiving the electronic files, I'm very curious.
The best way is to zip all your photos with a password, rename the file to "Britney Spears secret sex tape 1080p DTS.mkv" and put it online on The Pirate Bay.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
there are plenty of ways to store picture files online, or tape or disk. gmail promises to never delete anything, right? email them to yourself. but those files are only useful if there are applications that can use them. chances are that common data formats of today like jpg will be around for a long time, but there's no telling what direction technology will go in the future. have you tried to open a microsoft word 1 document lately? who can count how many dead file formats are out there. whatever format your pics are in today, chances are that 30 years down the road it'll have been replace by something newer and better, and if you didn't convert all those pics from the old format to the new one when you could then having the obsolete binary files won't matter. though maybe your pocket hal 9000 will convert them for you if you ask it nicely. maybe some formats have become "too big to fail" by now - mp3, jpg, pdf - but i still store all my "absolutely can't lose" stuff in ascii text or printed on paper and stuffed in a drawer. fifty years from now what's going to be your great grandchildren's equivalent of finding a stack of old photos in the attic?
1. open format, highest quality
2. multiple copies in geographically separate locations if possible
2. checksums, protect yourself against bitrot, it happens way more often than you think. If you use a cloud backup service make sure they are doing this.
Interesting timing. I had a conversation last night with Brigham Young University's Technology Transfer Office (patent folks) about new startup called Millenniata that claims to produce an optical disc technology to last up to 1000 years.
It's not cheap (yet), with a single disc costing about $3 a piece, and requiring a special drive for writing, but they can be read by any standard Blu-ray or DVD drive.
Might be worth a look.
We have raid (mirrored) hard drives set up on a machine which also gets backed up to carbonite. Plus I just got an LG blu-ray burner so im making backups (almost 25GB) and those will either go in our home safe or in the safety deposit box. Hell it's cheap enough I might just make a copy for each. Photos and videos of your kids and family are something you don't want to lose. When I was a kid we lost all my child photos so im making sure we're covered.
For photos:
Make hi quality hard copies, prints, of them.
You can scan them later if you need to.
About video material, i do not know.
Personally, I keep my primary backup in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'
This works quite well.
However, in the event of the destruction of the Earth, this solution seems somewhat.. inadequate. So I believe you would be well served to set up an auxiliary backup system on an interplanetary satellite, or on the moon, and probably also on another not-too-conspicuous planet within our solar system, and just to be safe, one more in another solar system in this (or another) galaxy. (I recommend Ursa Minor Beta.) You don't want a localized catastrophe to eliminate all your files and backups in one fell swoop.
And every few days just swing by the backup sites to be sure there hasn't been any data degradation.
I play a photographer part time, so I have rather a lot of large photos. I use an external box of disks hard drive enclosure with four drives. One holds the photos, the second is a time machine backup of my notebook (which has the most recent and the most valuable photos on it), the third is a backup of both the time machine volume and the archive version of the photos and the fourth is a mirror of the backup drive that I can pull out and copy onto a computer located somewhere else. Really, every year at Christmas I should exchange an external drive with my parents that has an up to date backup.
That way most photos exist on six different drives distributed over at least three (and frequently four) different places.
Paranoid? Last year my notebook was stolen and when I went to restore from backups I discovered that not one, not two, but three different backups had failed within a month of each other.
are you sure you are a few years out to being able to buy a 100 year recorder, the cost $50. http://store.millenniata.com/default.aspx
As a fan of old electronics, I have read EPROMs dating back from 1979, and data in there where perfect 30+ years after.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Probably not very practical but will most likely last many thousands of years.
Amen, I have photos from 1998 and I have documents from before that. ATA has been a standard for what...20 years now? However, have people not heard of cloud hosting services? I have been backing up all my media to Mozy for years....and when they go away I will back it up to somewhere else...it is BACKUP for cryin out loud.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
I used to store backups on floppy, then CD, DVD, removable HDs (storing some away from home).
Now I rsync files to a server which creates an encrypted copy on a USB disk and then mirrors that backup to S3.
The point is that I have a set of directories that migrate from medium to medium as as appropriate for the time.
Occasionally I change the way they're stored and backed up, but the files will exist as long as someone can be bothered to look after them.
Easy. Use film and photo paper - we've had photographs last a century or more already (your parents probably still have wedding photos and such that are still usable), and you never have to worry about both kinds of bit-rot (media degradation, format deprecation)..
Movies, solved problem as well - put it on film.
Of course, if it's digital, there are places that'll print them to film, and cheaply do high-quality photo prints as well on real photo paper.
You'll have to be choosy, but you'll have the digital for convenience, and the old skool analog for longevity as long as you keep it in a reasonbly cool and dry place. And yes, choosy means picking the one photo out of 100 that captures the memory. Also, when it does degrade, it tends to do so gradually, giving you time to restore them onto more archival media.
Nothing you can own will be as safe as what google can provide. We've uploaded about 10 gb and pay a fixed amount a year. Before that i used doubble external HD backup and also on the PC and yet managed to fuck it up. And, besides reliability of google the grand paraents can get online access on iphone and hope pc and you can set up a screensaver for them. Really, why try to do something yourself that other people can do cheaper and better? Stdk
Probably because nobody ever replies with a reasonably affordable solution that is guarenteed to last for atleast 20 years.
I do use those 100+ year DVD's (they're not as expensive as TFA implies), but whether I can trust the vendors' claims, I'll just have to wait and see.
Probably because there is no such thing and there never has been.
Twenty years is a hugely long time in IT. If you were to go back twenty years today, that'd take you back to 1991. What sensibly priced technology even existed for archiving a lot of data in 1991? CD-R equipment was (if Wikipedia is to be believed) $10-12,000, so that's out.
What format would you store the data in? JPEG is probably pretty safe, but if you want any means of keeping track of those photos - say some sort of database - what database would you use that existed in 1991 and will still run on a modern PC today? Or - if you can't run the application - can the data be imported into a modern application? I think you'd have to organise it in the filesystem sensibly because that's the only thing you could rely on being able to use.
The advice is - and continues to be - be prepared to migrate your data to something new every few years.
This question seems to come up a lot and the answer I give is the same every time - just use hard drives. They're dirt cheap and faster and easier to use than just about any other option out there. The trick here is to buy in multiples of three. Keep one at home where you keep your live data. The other two should be used as rotating offsite storage. Get a safe deposit box and rotate them between it. In other words, every week (or whatever other interval you're comfortable with) back up your live data to one of the two rotating offsite drives, then take that drive to the safe deposit box and bring the one that's there home. Now just continue to repeat this process forever. I usually replace drives every year (that way they still have some resale value) to keep them within warranty periods and up with current technologies. All told, this ought to cost you about $200-300 up front and maybe $150 annually...well worth it in my opinion.
This should be enough protection for just about anyone, but if you really want to be thorough, combine this with an online backup service and you're pretty much guaranteed not to lose data in the event of a hardware failure, malice, virus, theft, or natural disaster.
your biggest enemy isn't the physical medium, it's not being able to read it. You have to go to great lengths to read a floppy disc from 20 years ago today, and quite possibly even greater to make sense of the data you find (jpeg is from 1992, your old images on that floppy are definitely using some other format. If you're lucky, it's something like PCX that's at least documented.
Honestly, the low-tech solution is to stop worrying and make a regular appointment in your calendar every five years or so to move everything to a new storage. You're talking about storing something for 10, 20 years, you can afford to spend half an hour waiting for a disc copy every few years, can't you?
And when you do that, you can check that OS X 10.15, codename LolCat, can still read the formats you used. And if not, converting it then will be a lot easier than it would be another five years down the road.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
3 Backup copies of anything you want to keep.
2 different storage media.
1 offsite storage site.
More info here:
http://blog.wisefaq.com/2010/01/05/backups-with-the-3-2-1-rule/
If these memories are truly precious to you, I would advise you follow this.
None of the originals -- or even 2nd or 3rd generation copies -- of any ancient or classical era literature have survived to the present day. What kept the works from being lost is that there were lots of scribes making lots of copies, and spreading them around. People did this because they thought they were good, so they went to the expense of having a copy made.
For your pictures and videos, even if you're not thinking of keeping them around for thousands of years, do the same thing: Make copies and spread them around to people who want copies. Convert them to different formats, too (Try to keep some high-quality, non-DRM copies for the next format as well). Don't just think in terms of having a monolithic collection (like the Library at Alexandria) either. You want each grandparent, aunt and cousin to be helping you to curate a distributed cloud of record.
The "obvious" tool here would be The Cloud -- but be careful. None of Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, or Facebook really cares about your pictures; they care about the revenue they can make by keeping a relationship with you. They're kindof like ancient scribes. Let them help you with the making of the copies, but don't let any of them (or any subset of them) keep your only copy for very long.
3: Copy files to hard disks, and keep copying them every so often to new media. Likely the best way, but takes time and trouble.
I get baffled by any other solution.
The best way to keep old data? BACKUP YOUR DATA.
When you install a new hard drive, or a disaster happens, copy it back onto your hard drive, so it gets backed up again. I'm not sure how this takes 'time and trouble' when it's something you have to do anyway when disaster hits.
I find the idea anyone has to do anything special is very odd. If you keep pictures on your hard drive...and back up your hard drive...hey, look, you backed up the pictures.
I don't understand when this became rocket science. It used to get complicated when you needed to keep more stuff than could fit on a hard drive...but if you have so many pictures they won't fit on a hard drive, I have to suggest you're taking too many damn pictures.(1) It'd be another thing if we were talking about raw video or something.
A much saner ask slashdot question is 'What is the cheapest offsite backup?' (As the other poster suggested, swapping USB drives with friends is a good idea, if annoying.)
1) New parents, it's probably a good idea to ask yourself: What exactly am I recording all this for? What are the scenarios where I would want this picture later?
Take pictures are regular intervals or memorable events. You don't need to take ten pictures because you're at the park. That's going to be the pictures that people flip past trying to find the interesting ones.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Replying to myself, but JPEG wouldn't have been possible in 1991. The first public release of the standard was 1992 but I have no idea how long it was before a significant number of useable implementations appeared.
I don't need Facebook. I put everything on my GeoCities page...OH Wait?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Long term storage = Archive. Things don't change in an archive. Here's what I recommend. Buy a large hard drive, add your crap to it... and unplug it. The drive will last as long as you don't break the thing. Plug it back in every few months and add more to the archive. Since it won't be running you wont need to worry about drive failures, and hard drives have longer shelf lives than tape or optical media when not used. I personally don't do this... but I have network file systems that keeps my stuff backed up in multiple physical locations with redundancy on the main file server. My system is a $2k setup containing over a dozen drives in 3 machines. My suggestion would cost $80 :P
My wife and I take the Christmas solution:
Over the years, we have given multiple of our family digital picture frames. Then, every year, we go through our pictures, find the decent ones, and copy them on to a dozen SD Cards and distribute.
Not only are all the receivers very appreciative, but they also are our backup. If we lose photos, we can always go get them. Also, because storage is ever increasing, we can, many times, include the back photos on the SD card as well. The recipients appreciate it because they don't have to swap cards, we get the benefit of keeping the pictures on modern media.
Ultimately, you do lose some photos. Your family doesn't care about that picture you took of that tree while on vacation in Florida. But the pictures that matter will always be there for you.
Oh, and at home I'd keep them on a RAID 1 array. Have software back them up to a dedicated USB drive regularly, and sync them with a cloud storage service regularly. After that you're simply going to have to transfer them from media to media as technology progresses.
I do security
Having a 1 1/2 yr old son, I went thru the same questions you have. This is the working solution that I currently have in place.
1) Running a DLINK DNS323 SAN, in raid mode. This is the main repository.
2) Purchases 2 external 2TB USB drives. I keep one here at home. Every 2-3 months I copy pictures/videos to one, bring it to my parents place and bring back the other one. Rinse and repeat every couple of months. This also protects me from losing pictures if the house was robbed, caught fire, etc..
3) Every 6 months or so I also get selected pictures professionally printed. Usually anywhere between 50-100 pictures. They are then stored in nice photobooks.
Last Xmas I also surprised my wife with a professionally done photobook, with pictures celebrating our first dates up to the first 6 months of my son's life. She really treasures that gift.It can get pretty expensive (100-200$), but oh so worth it.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
Get her a domain name and set up her email.
Redirect the email to somewhere you trust.
Email (and you) her the photos you like.
You'll have to upload the videos to her server I guess.
As I've said on the 18 zillion other times this question get asked, the most important thing you can do to ensure that your precious photos and videos are preserved is to delete 95% of them yourself. Edit down your collection to a couple dozen photos and no more than 1.5hrs of video. Give that condensed version to everyone you know. By all means, keep the dross yourself, even back it up (Flickr is a much maligned backup service, as is Facebook, but they work), but you need to produce a tight portfolio if you want anything to be preserved. Make it good and you'll find that your other family members will save it for you--happily.
You should also print the absolute best of your photos (but only the best--if you give someone a stack of 250 5x7's, odds are that they'll all be gone in three years or less. Give them five really good 8x10's, and they'll be safe for decades) and give those prints to your family.
Print 'em out and let your mom hang 'em on the wall.
It worked for the Ogre of Merion!
Barnes' scorn for the art "conservation" techniques of his day eventually turned out to be correct.
I was born in Vietnam and when we had to leave in a hurry, all our childhood memories were left behind and lost for ever.
I think local storage , whether print or DVD or NAS, AND cloud storage for the more important pictures, is the way to go.
Because you don't know when you have to leave in a hurry (war, nuclear, earthquake, house fire etc...).
The answer is always the same too. Keep copying your files to new discs/formats, buy some expensive tapes or pay for some online storage and a fast internet connection. I do the latter, 25GB from Google for $5/year and 25GB free from Microsoft (SkyDrive). Picasa Web and YouTube both keep the original files you upload (Picasa lets you download the originals, not sure about YouTube), and Google Docs accepts any file type now including random video formats and encrypted archives. All allow you to keep files private, while making them easy to share with family and friends and making them available on your phone etc.
This problem has been solved.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
As a father with a two-year-old daughter, I've thought about this very issue. Although I have local and remote digital backups, my wife actually came up with what I realized was the best solution all around. She cherry-picks the best pictures and periodically prints out a book from Shutterfly/SnapFish/etc. You can pass it around a family reunion, pull it out as a conversation piece when you have guests over for dinner, and you don't have to worry about your hard drive crashing or forgetting the password on your backup system.
As a bonus, if you send a copy of the book to the grandparents, you have hard-copy backups in case your house burns down.
My solution was to buy a Network Attached Server (NAS) with 2 racks (for now). 2 * 2 TB in RAID1.
This is the simplest and best solution I found :
- security : you can't loose your data; if a drive fails, you simply have to replace it and the data from the other drive will be mirrored.
- size : if I need more bytes in n years, I simply have to change the drives, one by one, to increase the size of the volume.
The ultimate solution would be to have another NAS geographically separated to do a network backup and be (almost) sure to never loose anything.
...might be to put that back up hard drive in your safety deposit box, otherwise known as offsite storage. Having a backup is not good if it dies in a house fire along with the original.
My personal computer back up plan, for documents as well as photos, is to copy them all to a hard drive, put it in the safety deposit box. Repeat once or twice a year. Swap out drives so you have the old back ups at home, the newest safe.
Third party app...xcopy, free, fast, super reliable
" So such a media should have two interfaces. One like USB which is ubiquitous and fast enough today, and one which is dead simple to build an interface for no matter the available technology."
infrared blinking... like tv remotes.
binary transmitted as pulsing IR to a sensor...
I had a casio watch that had contacts & other data programmed into it (one way transmission only) by the blinking of near whole computer screen
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
This was the subject of my wife's thesis.
E-Ternally yours:
The case for the development of a reliable repository for the preservation of personal digital objects
http://explorer.cyberstreet.com/CET4970H-Peterson-Thesis.pdf
Step 1: Spend $10 for a month of unlimited premium usenet service. Really, any will do.
Step 2: Create an iso of the files you want to backup
Step 3: Encrypt the heck out of the iso file. Then encrypt it again. Put the keys somewhere safe.
Step 4: Rar the encrypted file into 50-100 mb segments
Step 5: Use par2 to generate the parity archives.
Step 6: Post to favorite binary group of your choice
Step 7: After about 2 and half years, repost the archive.
Step 8: Don't lose your encryption keys, and don't forget to re-post your archive.
Step 9: Profit from the knowledge that you have an unlimited offsite backup system for the cost of 2 lattes every 2 years.
And while you have the usenet sub, download some quality linux iso's faster than bittorrent could even dream.....
...and IN SOVIET RUSSIA, beowulf clusters imagine 1, 2, 3 profit!!!! jokes made out of YOU!!!
I have been searching for this for years. I finally found one, can't wait to get mine.
http://millenniata.com
Shutterfly keeps photos in full res forever with no recurring charges. You can get a CD/DVD in the mail with all your photos if they are ever lost.
Hello Soylentred,
Given your situation, I cannot think of a better solution than using software raid. (The alternative is hardware raid, but the advantages of hardware raid are not entirely realized unless you have a high-availabilty server which handles massive IO, where cpu cycles are therefore limited.) Software raid, combined with inexpensive serial ATA drives, will provide a low cost solution with the potential for scalability in the future. Since we are using software raid, a hardware raid controller is not necessary. The SATA controller is merely acting as a port multiplier. All you need is a small pc system with onboard SATA controller--and you're set. Although investing some money to buy a new system for your SOHO storage server is a great idea (new parts= greater reliability, decrease likelihood that your storage server will encounter spontaneous power failures), utilizing an older computer is not a bad idea and should also work great, so long as you take care of your hardware
Most systems built after 2004 include an onboard SATA controller. If your system does not include onboard SATA you can always purchase a reliable PCI 3G SATA controller. In fact my first system to utilize SATA employed a promise PCI sata controller--which worked great for several years! In fact almost all system systems after 2002 support pci3.0 spec, so going the PCI route is not a bad idea. PCI-express is even better if it is available on your motherboard (and is honestly the only way you'll be able to utilize 6G SATA).
>> With software raid, the key consideration is the host OS you choose for your file server. I understand you are a mac user. Unfortunately I do not recommend using osx. Apple only offers raid functionality in OSX Server. Unfortunately OSX Server licenses aren't cheap. From my understanding, Windows 7 includes its own implementation of software raid. This is not a bad option, and is one I especially recommend if you have a spare windows7 disk. However, considering you are a mac user, you've established yourself as a non conventional individual who is willing to "go against the grain' (so to speak). I implore you to consider the GNU way and give Linux a try! Linux includes mdraid in the linux kernel, which is a very mature software raid solution. The advantages to using Linux mdraid are;
> RAID 0,1,10
> Raid 5,6 (Raid 6 is not available in windows software raid; neither raid 5 or 6 are available in OSX server)
> you are limited to the drives which can be accessed via the linux kernel. This means you can use 3TB drives now, and 4TB drives when they become available and as support is added to the linux kernel.
> you are not vendor locked! If you had hardware raid, if you're server died (assuming you had a BBU), you would need to replace the hardware raid controller first before you can begin the process of restoring your data
> "Kernel engineers have much greater ability to diagnose and fix problems, as opposed to a closed source firmware. This has often been a problem in the past, with hardware RAID."
Because mdraid is included in the linux kernel, you can use any of the modern Linux distributions out there and have up to date Linux and mdraid support!
For long term backups, Raid 1 is a decent choice, but not the idea solution. Raid 1 will completely mirror your smallest drive onto the 2nd member disk, but you won't be able to access the 2nd disk at all. I highly recommend Raid5--or Raid6 if you can afford it! Raid 5 requires a minimum of 3 drives, and offers 1 pariy (p), whereas Raid 6 requires a min of 4 drives, and offers dual parity (p q). What this translates to, is you can afford to lose 1 disk from your Raid 5, and up to 2 disk from your Raid 6, and still keep your data intact. Of course, after you lose the drives you can always replace the dead disks and return your array to a healthy state. Furthermore, Raid 5 & 6 perform striping along with the parity calculations, thus these arrays are naturally
get the ones you like the most and tattoo them all over your body, not only a nice backup but fast access as well..
Probably because nobody ever replies with a reasonably affordable solution that is guarenteed to last for atleast 20 years. I do use those 100+ year DVD's (they're not as expensive as TFA implies), but whether I can trust the vendors' claims, I'll just have to wait and see.
No, it's probably because people fail to realize the KISS simple solution is use current cheap tech.
A blank DVD costs cents to buy. It "costs" literally minutes of time to burn. Create multiple copies and mail to your friends/family once a year. Hell, make it an ongoing "joke" Christmas gift; exchange DVD archive collections. This kills me that people are looking for this 100-year "bulletproof" media solution when nothing else in our lives we would ever expect to last that long. Why the hell we demand this of backup media is beyond me. Hell, tech moves so fast that after 10 years you'd be hard pressed to find the drive to read the damn thing anyway. Screw custom solutions and just embrace what we have today and use it. You're gonna replace it all anyway in another 5 years. Might as well keep the backup media and solution up to date with the rest of the tech.
Rsync with another computer (desktop/laptop/server), an additional drive on your computer or with USB storage (thumb drive, hard drive etc). Rsync will update all changes with much less overhead than a complete recursive copy when updates are performed. This tutorial covers rsync use with Linux and MS/Windows. http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/Rsync.html One can also rsync to public storage like http://rsync.net/ or http://www.s3rsync.com/ as well.
Send them to Walmart or Costco or wherever, makes some prints and put them in an Album. If your house burns down, sure, you'll lose them and that will be sad... but if you lost them all because of a harddrive crash, I know my wife wouldn't be as understanding! :)
I have the same problem like yours too. My solution is like this :
convert your video to x264 format at low resolution ( 640x380). Like that the file size will be very small and it will be easy to burn to dvd. Like this you can put 80 hours of movie in one dvd !
Although dvd degrade but they still the best options. Just burn 3 set and store in 3 different place (cold and no sunlight).
That's from my experience. Hope it help.
git's fast, cryptographically validated, and widely used and tested. Put everything you care about into a git repository, then clone it wherever you have extra space for backups. Enable remote pulls to keep the backup versions up to date.
I use subversion for the same purpose now, but I think git is overall a much better choice and I'll probably switch eventually.
Well, actually they did, but Fujichrome and Elite Chrome are both pretty good.
Seriously, for photos slide film is the way to go. Excellent resolution, minimal equipment to project and none just to view, images last 50-100 years with no degradation and should be recoverable for hundreds of years.
Also, NOBODY throws away slide carousels. sure, they're a bit bulky for 140 photos apiece, but they have a talent for survival. I have carousels from the 60's and up, and have never lost one of them.
The BEST solutions are usually the simplest!
Stone tablet and chisel... Bam! Good for a few thousand years depending on erosion conditions.
This signature is lame.
I have to agree. There is nothing better than using the current stuff and migrating it as technology changes. My music collection has grown and transitioned from UltaATA-33 through SATA III drives. I wish I could say the same for the pictures and documents that I stuck on floppy disks more than a decade ago.
Honestly, if the process of doing an overnight copy of your data from a previous-generation hard drive to your shiny new (massively higher capacity) drive is too much, go back to film.
True story, I have a friend that did exactly this. Uploaded dozens of old family photos from the 1950s to facebook since they will "never go away"
I am a little perturbed as to why such a post makes it to slashdot.
NAS storage has been around for a very long time. They support RAIDO and have an eSATA port. So you get 3 new hard drives, place 2 inside on RAID0, and have one in an external eSATA case, mirroring the primary RAID drive. I even keep a copy local on my PC hard drive.
And that's it. If any drive dies, you replace it. You still have your photos. It can even survive two simultaneous drive deaths. To lose all your data, even using a sledgehammer and hydrochloric acid, you need to ensure you get the external drive, the entire NAS and you local PC. Burning your house down or a nuclear strike will solve it, but then same can be said for any method. I wont use cloud storage for personal photos since corporations have become unregulated data thieves. If it really worries you, print them and give them to grandmother.
"Cloud (offsite) + NAS + RAID + Backup drive. Seriously, why does this question in various forms keep getting posted on Slashdot? I'm sick of it."
Same here. Can we end this daft question please?
I've been showing my mother how to scan photos because she have family photos that go back nearly 100 years. she has family journals dating back to the 1850's with irreplaceable information about the goldrush in Ballarat recorded while it was happening.
If pop culture is deemed important enough to preserve, then the hive mind will keep it safe. but we're talking about personal family records here which may not be considered important by anyone outside of your clan, and the poeple it will mean the most to may not have even been born yet.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
All electronic solutions require decoding from degrading media. You could lose access to the decoder or the media.
Until there is a standard for archival decoders plus archival media, your best bet is to print the best images and put them in a photo album.
This requires research on the best photo paper to use and the best inks/printer to use.
Electronic storage simply does not have the longevity of hardcopy storage. And electronic storage requires a decoder, which hardcopy storage does not.
This then indicates that you will have to take time and sift through the pictures to get the best ones. But that could be a rewarding experience.
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/multLevel15-c.html
Buy lots of hard drives and build a NAS using RAID 51. Pretty much never have to worry again. Use PAR2 if you want just in case files somehow get corrupted.
It's a way overboard solution, but it's pretty close to bulletproof. Using something like Carbonite or one of the other remote online storage methods mentioned would be much similar without the ridiculous costs a home RAID 51 would incur.
Punch cards. They're pretty sturdy, but you'll need a lot of them.
> it is really nice that you shared your method with us.
Copy stuff to a suitably large disk when the opportunity presents itself.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I don't believe there's any type of "best way" to address this, but I do recommend having redundancy on multiple levels:
1. Some type of cloud solution (dropbox, crashplan, etc.) to make the files immediately accessible and available to you.
2. I don't trust the word "forever" with the cloud. For all we know, a tech bubble could burst tomorrow and that content all of a sudden could become unavailable. (They may guarantee, but consider that when a company goes under, their promises go to the wind.) Maybe once a year, archive a copy off to a hard drive or DVD. Every 5-10 years, you'll need to migrate this data, but at least you won't get burned if a cloud dissipates.
3. Take the time and keep some prints. As someone who's extremely cutting edge, I've found a new level of appreciation for the simple things in life. Glass soda bottles with the pop top lid, Real Photo Albums, etc. Take the time and truly appreciate the memories and the moment.
Print your photos as ads in a large newspaper. This will be archived by libraries, historical foundations, places like Google and Archive.org. It might not last forever, but it will last a whole lot longer than anything else. Some of the photos and information about my *own* family that was otherwise lost or forgotten was discovered via these means.
Of course, this isn't *practical* for large sets of data, but if it is super-important for long-term storage, you probably have no more data than will fit on one or two pages. It will cost a lot less than other means of *reliable* long-term storage with reasonable means of future-accessibility.
I've actually seen that done.
*Not* DVDs. Sorry, but pressed DVDs don't hold up as well as they should. Burnable ones truly do not hold up worth a crap.
I figure --
1) Use STANDARD formats (JPEG, or PNG, for instance for still photos, and probably you'd want H.264 for videos.) Case in point, I have a Kodak PhotoCD sampler disk I backed up a while ago. The PCD (PhotoCD) format was supposed to be "the wave of the future" about 20 years ago. Now? A few programs can read the PCD files, but only in some low-res like 640x480 or so form, I only found *one* package in the Gentoo tree (and needing a special USE flag at that) that could extract the full 3072x2048 images. So now I have copies in PNG format. (Most "PhotoCDs" made later on were just a CD with JPEGs thrown onto it.) I've been lucky with videos due to mplayer and ffmpeg, but I had some old AVI video files in Radius Cinepak format that were unplayable for a while -- ffmpeg supports it now. If these were important, I would not keep them in this format!
2) Don't use DVDs. Sorry, but I've found the reliability of burned disks to be just awful. I would keep it on multiple hard drives. It might be nice to throw the stuff onto say a USB stick, I do think flash storage is pretty reliable compared to either magnetic or DVD.
3) Check your copies periodically, so you don't think you have 2 or 3 copies but actually have one. If a copy is acting up, make another copy and discard that bad one. This is a good time to make sure your file formats are not almost unreadable too (I think JPEG, PNG, H.264 will be readable almost forever. But if not, convert!
I'm in the process of digitizing a large number of photos as we speak (well, not literally this second but within the last week or two.) I have a pair of Epson Perfection 636 scanners I've been scanning photos at, I figured I might as well go 600DPI although this may be overkill, I'd rather cut them later than find out I wasted my time scanning at too low a resolution. I've scanned somewhat over 1000 photos. I'm saving as PNG files. This is another part of this though -- it's probably easier for a digital collection to go completely out of control than a physical one, you really should figure out some way to organize them. Since the photos I was given were already utterly disorganized, I've just seperated them into directories based on what album they came out of, subdirectory "Epson" or "Epson 2" (so I could keep my file names straight) and if it's undated it's "scan 1.png" next is "scan 2.png" and so on. if they are dated put the date into the filename "scan 1 - January 1 1997.png", and if there's writing on the back have a "Scan 1 - front.png" for the front and "Scan 1 - back.png" for the back. It turned out several albums (luckily that I had not scanned yet) were not even any relative of mine, my grandparents rented a storage area and the previous renter had left the albums in there! Thanks so much for throwing those on the pile to scan!.. yeah.
Been a user for many years. But remember, they use Amazon cloud service for many things, so if Amazon goes boom, everything goes.
So probably, you can use smugmug + some non Amazon cloud provider(google?)
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
the original write once - read many image storage. will outlast any hdd on the market if stored correctly.
The thread seems to be focusing on how to store data for a long time. I don't believe that is the biggest problem:
We all need to replace our hardware every 10 (yes, very optimistic here) years, it's easy enough to copy your data from your current RAID1 storage to your new RAID5.1 storage. Careful handling of your files will solve a lot of "accidental loss" problems.
A more serious problem is the fact that you are storing your files in a specific format. GIF? JPEG? PNG? How about all of those movie and audio codecs. We need to be very careful in maintaining the support for our simple 2D photographs as we migrate to 3D holographic crystal storage.
Fact is that there are companies that are keeping a working copy of wordperfect 2.1 in order to be able to read files of only 10 years back. There are even companies happily running Delphi-based accounting software.
It is vital to choose a file format that will keep for a very long time, open source is a very good candidate for that. Additionally a simple fileformat may be wise, so that even after 100 years your great grandchild may be able to write an application that can reconstruct the images you store today.
With a one year old, I've asked myself the same question.
What I have settled on is:
When I import files (I use Lightroom), I create .dng (Digital Negatives) files, an open format. The .RAW file is embedded in there as well. If you are using JPGs, you don't need to worry about this.
File system sorting is via year/month/day. Should the catalog ever be unrecoverable, this supports easy navigation based upon basic date criteria.
Lightroom backs up its catalog every week or so to somewhere on my hard disk.
Local backups are done via Windows Home Server.
Remote backups are done via Crashplan (used to use Mozy, but they are too expensive when you use RAW files).
After I import into Lightroom, I don't wipe the memory card until I've kicked off a manual backup (of if there is a copy on the NEXTODI)
Although I've gotten worse at it as I take more and more photos and want to get them on the computer quickly, I also have a NEXTODI (external hard drive with a card reader and battery pack) that I usually throw the card into as well just to create a quick copy. The NEXTODI is also great when you are travelling and don't have access to your computer.
I print 5-10 A4 or A3 sized photos every month and they go on the living room wall. The old photos come down and go into an album. It serves as a nice way to have both a physical copy of the photos as well as new photos on the wall all the time.
I think this issue has been here before. Laser etched stone tablets buried in clay 5 miles down, is what we came up with.
For people complaining about repeat question: I've been (re)reading this question and the responses on Slashdot for years and have been desperate for something affordable and easy to come along. Don't complain about the repeat, the answers have been getting better over time. Prices for hard drives have been coming down; prices for online backup have been coming down; and there are now dozens of online backup providers. Eventually the perfect solution will come along - we're getting closer.
The cheapest online storage I can find is about 3 US cents per GB per month. I have 200GB of home videos/pics/files that until recently were only backed up onto another hard drive that I kept in a closet and pulled out every few weeks. I could live with 3 cents/month but the interfaces are no good. I don't trust the backup sites, even the ones which _claim_ they can't access your files, so I prefer to use a large TrueCrypt file. Unfortunately, the cheaper sites don't offer an interface that works well with mounting a remote file as TrueCrypt.
So, now I keep a hard drive attached to the computer at my mother's house (on a different continent). It just has a large TrueCrypt file on it which is shared over the internet in a Windows share which I can use as a backup. Obviously, you have to get the port forwarding, accounts, passwords, settings just right so the whole thing isn't a giant security hole... but it is possible.
For stuff you want your parents to have access to, just don't put that in a TrueCrypt file.
Yes, you and your parents need a reasonable internet connection and it's best if they leave their computer on all the time. Even a slow internet connection isn't too bad, it just means it could take a week to backup your latest batch of videos. If your parents have a monthly download cap on their connection though, that could be a problem...
Encrypt it with a secret password, and release it into the wild through WikiLeaks, using a catchy file name. This way, all you need to backup is the password.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
I'm in a similar situation and my plan is thus:
1. Buy two mid-range external hard drives, and store one at home, and one at work/somewhere a few miles from home
2. Store the "live" copy of the media on a single source (laptop/server/NAS/whatever)
3. Every weekend, backup the media from the source to the drive stored at home
4. On the first weekend of each month swap the location of the two external drives
This way you have three copies of the data, one live, one at most a week old, and one at most a month old. If the worst happens, you lose only one month of media. When one of the drives inevitably fails, replace it and do a backup/restore depending on which drive failed.
For extra protection, mirror the "live" source using RAID or similar, and buy a fire-proof safe to store the home-backup in
The reasons most of the answers are terrible is because there is no company attempting to make proper long lived media.
Maybe also because archiving on a long lived media is not the solution either.
The only solution is redundancy, whatever the media, with multiple medias (not only digital, printed too) in multiple places.
So the best solution should be to distribute media to all your family as soon it is shot. Some of it might live much longer than you expect (for example you grand-aunt may better care of printed photo than you of your digital photos of your own child).
https://files.dreamhost.com/
a 1 time fee for indefinite term storage
Just a customer (though I haven't used this service specifically), not a rep of the company.
Go to a kiosk. Print out the ones you want. Past them in a scrapbook. This is an ages proven way of keeping memories that works, is simple, and will be easy to access in the future.
E Proelio Veritas.
Punchcards.
Lots and lots of punchcards.
Just don't drop the box.
Never mind Spamassassin. When's Spammerassassin coming out?
If you're not making money off it, a 3000 series epson is a better buy (and much smaller foot print). 4900 will last longer and be cheaper to operate in the long term, but you're looking at $3000-4000 in start up costs (at retail). You'd have to make a lot of prints, way more than 100's, to justify it. 3000 series can be had for $1500-2000 in start up costs.
Guys, stop suggesting to print out the most imortant bits, that won't help at all with videos
Zip up all your files into a single file, name it "Hot young xxx porn..."etc. and seed it to BitTorrent. It will immediately be downloaded and re-seeded by thousands of users, and will live in the torrent-sphere forever.
Do they? I have several albums of full-res stuff, like 3MB 3072×2304 res and it looks like the original. Do they just downgrade when hotlinking?
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
There are lots of good suggestions in other replies, but I'd like to stress the importance of having recent offsite backups. These files are literally invaluable, as in extremely important to you, but a thief which runs off with *all* your equipment will likely delete them with no second thoughts. A friend recently lost every image and video of his firstborn after a break-in.
It's not necessary to be too fancy; I'd suggest the following: Keep your master archive on an internal drive. Buy two external drives, they are cheap. Mirror all your data to both, and place one offsite (for instance at your parents' place or in a safe at work). As you accumulate more material, store it in a specific folder on your internal drive and also the drive you have in your house, and use some online storage like Dropbox for this directory to keep recent images "backed up" offsite. Keep the external drive you have unplugged, but updated regularly. Once in a while you swap drives with your parents and update that one with your "new" directory, which you then empty. Check drive integrity on the external drives regularly, and swap them out for new ones every two-three years. I would look into creating simple rsync scripts to keep everything in sync, but with this approach it's not really neccessary.
This way you have three physical copies of your data at different locations at all times. It's a relatively low-tech solution, but short of WWIII your data should be safe. It's also relatively cheap compared to the importance of your data.
In addition you could store the whole archive with an online provider, but it doesn't really add all that much security, and you *should* have two physical copies in different locations in all cases.
Good luck!
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
Oh maybe you're right. I hadn't seen the new "Download" feature. The pictures I'd previously uploaded are definitely still re-sized down, however.
A good quality DVD is good, that's what I use and place a copy in a safe deposit box when the disk is filled. JVC (Taiyo Yuden) makes DVDs, and they claim their dye layer will retain an image for 70 years, and you'll be able to get data off them in 30 years when your kid is grown up. 40 years ago 8mm was the standard for 'video'. Hardly anyone has has a 8mm projector, but most of us have a nearby business which will convert them into a current format. We might not have anything to read a DVD in 40 years, but there will certainly be someone out there which can convert it. You go with some online service, you have to pay for anything reliable and trustworthy, and if you go with a free server, they probably wont be around, or have deleted your 30 year old files. Either way with online, if you die, how is anyone going to know how to retrieve them, unless you write detailed instructions and make the location where you store these notes known to other people.
Saw a Chrome add, and while I wouldn't use this as the only backup, you can set up a gmail account for your kid, then email your photos/notes/videos to it to store them.
If you don't mind Google having all that information it's probably a good way to do it. Other option would be either a paid Flickr (Yahoo) account or some other network based storage. Point being, use services from multiple vendors so if one goes down suddenly you have them all in another place.
Personally, I'd do a gmail account, Flickr account, and mirror to my own web server's Gallery setup. Bonus points if you script it so that you put them in a specific spot on your personal HDD and it does a nightly push of anything new.
While I agree with rsync overall there are three issues:
It's not dead easy (though to be fair nor is a 5 drive/3active mirror rotation).
It either: does not provide offsite backup OR runs into ever increasingly common bandwidth caps (which is my problem).
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Timothy, congratulations on your new addition. My daughter is a little over a year old now. In response to exactly the same concerns that you and your family had I have been developing http://digitalheirloom.org where I store photos, videos, pdfs, and audio files that I want to preserve for my daughter. The idea being that these documents are an heirloom to pass on to future generations.
This is a budding project, but I would be happy to have more beta testers. Beyond the ability to store/view files, I have also developed screensavers for windows and mac users to see photos from the website. That means that as I upload new photos, my mother's screensaver (which is a repurposed old laptop) automatically displays the new photos without her having to log into a website or check email.
This project was in response to several of your (and my concerns). I wanted a project developed with open standards so that it would not be a slave to a corporation or technology, and would be compatible with future devices/browsers. I wanted full access to all of my documents and how they are organized (e.g. through FTP). I wanted to consolidate photos that my wife had on her laptop, photos I had on my computers, and so on into a single authoritative place. I wanted RAID and offsite backup of all the documents (which the site provides). I wanted a space that could respond to the specific needs of families that want to archive and share documents. I wanted to know that the person managing the site cared as much about the content as I do. There are more features than I care to get into here, but I hope you get the idea.
My intention for the project is to file for non-profit status, and have users make one-time payments that would go into a trust to perpetuate the project. Please take a look at the site, my sense is that it would be a good fit for you and what you are looking for. Contact information is available on the site. I would be happy to discuss the project further.
Good luck and enjoy every minute you have with your family
the rest will follow
For pics, print a couple of copies of each fav pic and send it be mail.
For videos, keep migrating them....my wife got a copy of a DVD from a super8 filmed 42 years ago...DVDs will die after the disc format will be obsolete. BluRays will disappear in 10 years because of super high speed connections and huge cloud storage systems.
Well...don't care....anyway, the world is going to end in 2012.
Personally, I use SSH+SVN (though it's a bit of an overkill), and do offsite backups to a small (mini-itx, atom based) server at my mom's place. My mom lives 1.8Mm (1100 miles for people from USA) away, so it's even natural-disaster proof. Unless it's 2012.
This can even help you share and keep albums in sync with other people easily :) My GF had access to this, and a cron script that made sure she always had the latest photos.
I use SCORD to avoid the overhead of the ".svn" directories.
I never loose anything I might accidentally delete either :)
I'm exactly the opposite...I like to see stories like this on /. every couple of months.
Sure, there haven't been any "breakthroughs" and most of the time I see the same thing I saw 6 months ago, but stories like this can help aggregate 4 or 5 related stories that may have been posted to /., which the person asking may not be aware of. For instance, there could have been a new brand of archival discs out that are cheap, or a study disputing their effectiveness which may be relevant. There could be a new cloud-based storage provider that the poster isnt aware of. Point is, if its hum-drum boring stuff for you, just move on to the next article!
Here is what I did: 1) Bought a 500Gb external hard drive 2) Attached to Grandma's and Grandpa's PC
3) Register a domain name at dyndns.com and install the update agent on PC
4) Open port 22
5) Install cygwin with rsync or some sort of rsync package that works in windows
6) create a cron job on your side that rsyncs your pictures to grandma's and grandpa's. Check logs once in a while for signs of disk errors.
Depending on bandwidth you might want to rsync the disk locally first and then take it to grandma's and grandpa's.
The enormous side benefit to this of course is that G&G will instantly have all your photos which they love. Just ensure you do the rsync so that it writes to their house only and does not sync back. Just for additional data safety.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Proving that Ask Slashdot is not reliably discoverable storage.
I thought you were responding to a comment about Google's Picasa.
Google does degrade your pictures, or at least caps their quality. Flickr does not.
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
Except that they downgrade your photos.
I realize I'm still a n00b (I read /. for the educational value) and it's possible I'm wrong here, but I don't believe they do. I use Picasa to backup my digital pics, so I just downloaded a photo I archived there, and compared it to the original. The md5sums match. That's close enough to original for me:
goo.gl/GKgs9
There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
For the record, a) I purchase a $5/yr plan from Google for extra storage space (not sure if that makes a difference); and b) if you upload using Picasa rather than going to the website (inefficient at best), goto Tools>Options>Web Albums and choose "Original size" in the Default size dropdown menu.
There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Digital storage media for long term -- which I'd take as a human lifespan at least -- simply does not exist right now. It just hasn't been a priority in consumer based technologies, and is not likely to become one any time soon. Even if it did exist it would be expensive, reliance on it alone would not work, any single titanium box of gold plated discs would end up in a landfill somewhere the first time a marriage ends badly.
Only family based tradition can bridge time with assurance. There must be some one to gather the material, decide on the medium and see that the copies are tested and the collection is updated regularly. Also at least one other 'backup librarian' person -- preferably far away -- holding a copy. In every generation there should be one 'primary' and one 'backup' librarian. Consider the role of primary librarian as one not be taken lightly, which deserves the respect of (and occasional monetary support from) the entire family.
What I am saying is, it is not enough for everyone in a large family to acknowledge to one another, "You have a bunch of stuff, so do I, I'll send you mine some day, or..." Some day never comes. People forget. Disks crash. Only someone so designated as 'librarian' emowered with personal responsibility who follows a ritualistic backup/mirror strategy can make it work.
Choose some modern but cheap medium, for example 500GB or 1TB external USB drives. Get three of them, A B & C. Put the whole collection on each and send 'C' to the backup librarian. During the year write new material to 'A', mirror the changes to 'B' occasionally. At the end of the year mail 'B' to the backup librarian, upon receipt they mail back 'C' which you also bring up to date. You keep swapping 'B' and 'C' through the mail, only one in transit at any time. Of course, the failure of any disk demands immediate replacement.
A paper document and personal letter from you explaining the collection and instructions for keeping it up to date should be kept with each drive... so even if the scheme does not work out, some descendant might read it and be moved to salvage the data and carry the tradition forward.
As the years go by no doubt better mediums and methods will be available... but once you have gathered and built your Collection, mirrored and have a backup copy far away you can say to yourself, "That will be a task for a future librarian." and take pride in the statement! For you have done much more than just gathered and written some stuff... you have created a 'mantle of responsibility' which is just a wetware based mechanism to see that the job is done.
Because WE ARE LIVING IN A FUTURE DARK AGE
http://breakfornews.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=10474#10474
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Facebook NEVER deletes or forgets ANYTHING, even when they claim they do.
It is probably is the safest storage there has ever been.
Plus, you can order a copy of your data when you need it.
Iosafe Solo 2TB fire-proof waterproof external hard-drive http://www.iosafe.com has served me well
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
Early childhood is a development stage like any other - don't hold on to it and symbols of it like trophies. Learn to forget. Savor the happy moments for what they are - but don't fetishise them. Your memory will remember what is appropriate. Maintaining the image of a helpless infant in your mind will not make a better parent in the long term - the opposite, more like it. Take care and give them security. But make well fucking sure that they know that they know they are their own persons, with their own right of opinion, by the age of twelve. Over and out. Oh, and just for the record - XFS+LVM on a RAID5 of RAID1ed drives with staggered spin-up with some nice ARM board in micro-ATX form factor ought to do the trick, for what you are thinking. Zenwalk or a tweaked Fedora install image would make life easier.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
what database would you use that existed in 1991 and will still run on a modern PC today?
I dream of a far future where the state of software development could get to the point where a question like this becomes unthinkable, because along with a universally addressable packet-routing Internet we'd also have developed a universal structured data format as persistent as 7-bit ASCII is today. Sadly, given today's IT attention span, this might take a while.
oh look it's 2011 time for a new data standard. let's move all our data to eight-track cassettes made of chocolate!
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
no
I've been backing up my personal files for about 25 years, on everything from floppy to Iomega tape to CDs and DVDs to Flash to hard drives. I've also had several online accounts that store some of my files.
My all-around favorite data backup is hard drives. They are reasonably inexpensive, reliable, convenient and fast. I have several hard drives that are more than 10 years old and still fully readable. Even my 25 year-old, 20 MB Packard Bell hard drive still boots. Currently, I have about 4.5 TB of files that I maintain on several external hard drives. I like to get drives with eSATA and USB 2 (3 will be good, when prices drop).
My CDs and DVDs generally hold up OK, though other people sometimes say they have problems reading them. They are too small and inconvenient for large-scale backup.
Flash holds up quite well over time. You could probably toss a flash drive into a lake, then fish it out a year later and still read it just fine. The trouble is, they are 10 times more expensive than hard drives, aren't terribly fast and aren't all that large. I fill up 2 TB hard drives fairly quickly.
Storing files online is fairly reliable, as long as the company doing the storage doesn't go out of business or stop offering its services. I had many files on my AOL account, but they transferred my images to a third party (that has now transferred my images to yet another third party), and my Web pages simply vanished. My email may last forever. Regardless, transferring GB files, much less TB backups, over the Internet is not fast, and I don't trust the security on any of these systems.
Tape has not worked well for me. In fact, most companies that rely on tape would be surprised to learn that their files aren't really recoverable, should they ever need them. I had a few copies of a Ditto tape backup, but something went haywire with the hardware and it unspooled the tape off the spindle. I have 1 last tape copy, but the software for Iomega's hardware crashes any modern OS. I've never had so much trouble with a backup plan as I've had with tape.
My floppy drives were still readable, the last time I checked.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)