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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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Every 3 months, never ceases to amaze me.
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
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. )
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.
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!
Well there's a question about what you're trying to accomplish, yes, and RAID 0 is faster. However, what you should overlook is that RAID 0 drastically increases your chances of losing the entire contents of your drive due to catastrophic disk failure.
When you get 2 hard drives together in a RAID 0, either one could die and cause total data loss, meaning you've doubled your chances of losing all the data on that RAID. There are consumer-grade RAIDs now offering 4 drives, which means that if you use a RAID 0 there, you've quadrupled your chances. This is a problem, because it's really not all that rare for a hard drive to fail.
So the point of "safe" RAID configurations is not just to increase safety over what a single drive provides (which is what RAID 1 does) but rather to mitigate the danger created by putting the drives in a RAID. A RAID 5 is much safer than a RAID 0, for example, because the chances of 2 drives failing at the same time is rather slim. However, there is bound to be a point where, if you have enough disks in a RAID 5 (I don't know how many, and it would depend on a couple factors), then it would be less safe than storing data on a single disk.
So... yeah, if you need a lot of speed and space for cheap, you're really confident in your backup solution, and you don't mind the downtime of needing to restore from backup if your RAID dies, then RAID 0 isn't a bad solution. But on the other hand, I don't recommend that people rely too heavily on their backups.