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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?"
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Every 3 months, never ceases to amaze me.
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.
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.
Without question. In 80 years, you're going to die. Your kids are going to come into your house, go through your stuff and try to figure out what to keep and what goes to the estate sale. No matter how carefully assembled and documented, no matter how well you lay out (now) your archival system and metadata linkage, when it comes down to picking through the bones of your life, it's going to look like a computer system (and probably an ancient, useless one at that). A shoebox full of pictures, especially with notes written on the back, has clear value in that context and will be saved for the next generation. Those same pictures assembled into an album, even more so.
Video...how do you think you're going to play all those h264 in 80 years, when your computer is a little sliver of plastic embedded in your thumb?
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.
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