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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?"
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."
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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 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
Daddy Warbucks...Is that you?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
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.
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
Cloud (offsite) + NAS + RAID + Backup drive. Seriously, why does this question in various forms keep getting posted on Slashdot? I'm sick of it.
No, blame it on the price of DVD blanks. When they were a couple bucks a pop the quality was better than they are at under a quarter. But you can still buy good media if you look. Anything important I burn to two quality name brand media and make sure they are a different brand and tech (dye color). That way if one is a bad batch or the dye doesn't hold up the other copy should be OK.
And for now all of my photos are still on the RAID and the backup drive. One set of the DVDs is in a fireproof box, probably should put the other one off site but haven't done that step yet.
Democrat delenda est
While it is true that digital data needs to be maintained, it's not a lot. If there ever comes a time when you won't be able to cheaply and easily store your digital files, you will have much more serious things to worry about than preserving old photos.
Over time, data gets smaller relative to storage devices. Something that seemed like a lot 15 years ago can easily sit in the slack space on your phone.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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. )
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.
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.
File and forget works with film. Digital archives are better if you do the work; analog archives are better if you don't. And over the decades, almost inevitably, someone forgets to do the work.
We had five, yes five duplicate tape backups sets for a final copy of our obsolete accounting system. All tapes were verified good when they went onto the shelf (in a climate controlled room). A year later, it took us more than 10 tries to get one of them to restore successfully.. I think it was tape set 3 on the 4th try or something before it restored.
Tapes suck.
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.
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.
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
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!
> 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.
The main problem of digital archive is not preservation: it is discovery.
What the grand-parent says is that printed media is a shoe box is more discoverable than digital files. A digital archive lost because no one knows that it exists or where it exists is of no value.
Also, discoverability is a more important feature for a family media archive than quality. A bad quality photo is better than no photo at all.