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Ask Slashdot: Best Medium For Personal Archive?
An anonymous reader writes What would be the best media to store a backup of important files in a lockbox? Like a lot of people we have a lot of important information on our computers, and have a lot of files that we don't want backed up in the cloud, but want to preserve. Everything from our personally ripped media, family pictures, important documents, etc.. We are considering BluRay, HDD, and SSD but wanted to ask the Slashdot community what they would do. So, in 2015, what technology (or technologies!) would you employ to best ensure your data's long-term survival? Where would you put that lockbox?
... have always worked for me.
Media is cheap, more scratch resistant than Blu-Ray, and put it in your gun safe.
Sock Puppets: damn_registrars=pudge_confirmer=jimmy_slimmy=raiigunner=cml4524=a_klavan=red4men=ronpaulisanidiot
Either dvd/bluray media specifically for archiving or magnetic tape.
still the most reliable, and it's offline storage, and can be stored in an offsite safe
A hard drive when not in use will last for many years, and a USB interface will make access easy in the distant future.
http://superuser.com/questions/284427/how-much-time-until-an-unused-hard-drive-loses-its-data
BluRay is hard to beat. The discs are durable and not worn by use. The drives are cheap and will almost certainly be available in 30+ years time (like you can still buy drives to read CDs), and the filesystem will be readable.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Personally, I have three external hard drives encrypted with TrueCrypt that I rotate and keep in a fire safe at an offsite building. I rotate them monthly. Cost is a little high, but it fast, easy and convenient for me. Your circumstances are likely different enough that you will need a different approach. But generally, my archive set is large (3+TB) and sensitive (taxes, bank statements, account numbers, passwords, etc) so this solution works best for me.
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
Every year, I just back up my files to an external hard drive and put it in my safety deposit box in the bank. If my house burns down, I still have all my photos (long since scanned in all my old film stuff), documents, and even music. I've got the last several years in there so it would take three or so drives not working to really lose everything (after I lost everything at home). Usually I spend a little extra money to make sure I have small external hard drives that don't have wall worts to power them as they'll fit in the safety deposit box easier and I won't have to keep track of the wall worts either. In the past, I suggested my parents do the same with a flash drive and my father scoffed when I mentioned keeping on in the safety deposit box. Of course, his computer got hit with the encryption malware and they lost everything including the flash drive we back up everything several years earlier because they can't remember where it might be.
It's an open format, so its usability will penetrate deep into the future.
I've already converted my entire porn collection to Base64 encoding, and printed it out on archival paper (acid-resistant for obvious reasons); I've grown so used to it, that sometimes the alphanumeric text is enough to make me extend my coffee breaks.
I just tell people the boxes filled with reams of paper are my late grandfather's WWII anti-NAZI code-breaking attempts.
Paper.
I have a decent sized file server at home, and basically have three backups:
- a complete mirror (yes, I build a second file server of equal capacity, though of much lower spec)
- a set of two external hard drives. I keep one local and one offsite and periodically swap them (every few months or so). I back up my irreplacable stuff on here
- an encrypted mirror on a VPS (using duplicity) of my home dir (small amount of data which changes frequently, I keep a month worth of daily snapshots)
I feel this provides adequate protection for my stuff:
- the file server is raid6, so I am protected against drive failure
- if that fails I've got a recently synced mirror of all my stuff
- if that fails (due to something bad that gets synced) I've got a local drive with a recent copy of my irreplaceable stuff
- if that fails (due to say, my house burning down) I've got an offsite drive with an older copy of my irreplacable stuff, plus a recent copy of my home dir on a remote server
I've used DVDs for a looong time. Spot checks of the data hasn't found any problems so far. Maybe just luck.
I happen to like 2TB internal laptop hard drives (2.5").
Pros:
-High capacity
-Small form factor, will fit in most safes / lock-boxes
-Slightly more shock resistant than 3.5" drives.
-Fit my hard drive dock/drive duplicator
Cons:
-Slightly pricey because of the large capacity
Keep the anti-static bag it comes in and toss a few zip-lock bags around it for a little bit of water resistance. If the data is worth anything to you, keep a local offline archive and one at a friend's house. If anything sensitive is on it, pick your favourite encryption (truecrypt is still my goto).
Got to have 2 different media in 2 different locations away from the computer to be fool proof against all the vagaries of time. HDD is hard to beat and cheap. Blu-Ray is good and the newer denser disks coming out might work out OK, but we won't know for years. Hence, LTO tape has lots of adherents.
Your best bet is to pick more than one. You have a better handle on your needs and recovery point objectives than anyone here. Pick two (or even three) strategies that fit your needs and utilize both. Finding out you picked wrong usually happens at the very worst moment. Duplicating your efforts adds an awful lot of cushion.
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
1. One that's "live"
2. One that's a backup, updated daily
3. One that's in a fire proof/water resistant safe.
Exchange #2 and #3 periodically.
For long-term storage, HD's still work very well. The only problem is that when not used, their magnetic and mechanic properties deteriorate. To solve this, simply copy the entire contents of your disk(s) to a second disk once every 3 months or so. Using this method, I have data that is more then 15 years old and reads without a single read-error.
My CD's and DVD's from 15 years ago have an almost 90% failure rate due to the chemical decomposition (due to oxidation and UV) of the layers that contain the data.
So yeah, HD ftw!
It almost doesn't matter as long as it's more than one medium, stored in more than one place. I keep copies of everything on HDDs (and sometimes tape) here at home, but also copy the most vital stuff onto 3.5" magneto-optical disks (Fuji DynaMO -- they never caught on but they've been super reliable) and keep that in a safe deposit box at the bank. $25/year is pretty good for getting my life's work back if my house burns down. If you do choose a removable medium, make sure you keep a spare drive too. It'd be a shame to have pristine media you can't read.
I have an MDisk writer and three Blu-ray version of MDisk media. I have had them for months but embarrassingly have not broken the shrink wrap. Anyone else have any first hand with this stuff?
Personal data is not something you backup once and forget it. You need to update it every once in awhile. So I would suggest to use multiple different mediums in the process of rotation. If it's Bluray then make a new disk every time and have a process in place to check integrity of the data.
Don't trust the cloud? Doesn't mean you can't still use it.
Encrypt all your important files in a single container then upload it.
Don't trust any particular provider to be around in a few years? Distribute. Still don't trust their longevity? Throw it up on binary newsgroups. Those seem to last a while.
Code, documents and pictures --> Printer.
Videos --> DVD
Music --> CD
Other --> USB Drive
Put the physical items in a waterproof bag.
Put waterproof bag in strong box.
Dig hole in backyard with kids.
Put box in hole.
Cover box with dirt.
Cover dirt with young tree or other large bush bought at local gardening store.
Come back twenty-five years and dig out treasure.
This may be my last time, as I am now using AWS Glacier for all our personal photos/vids and that accounts for about 100G of the total 150G in content. I also copy everything to a mechanical USB drive and store it at my office. I think AWS + USB will cover me
Our safe is in the basement, on a high shelf. Keep in mind fireproof safes need a disecant as you *will* get moisture in them. Or use zip lock baggies.
Press it on vinyl, encrypt with rot 13. Next question.
How much data are you talking about? Megabytes? Gigabytes? Terabytes? You really have to give people a clue. The smaller portable USB external disk drives are a good choice, and are currently available in sizes up to 2 TB. Personal favorite is currently the Seagate 2 TB Backup Plus Slim, USB 3.0. Just remember to test the disk drive before assuming that your precious files are safe. (I'd put a link here for software, but that seems to get filtered out.) No, I don't work for Seagate.
.. it better be GPL compliant or GOD HELP YOU.
I've been wondering about these for several years, seen a lot of PR but nothing that seemed like an unbiased recommendation yet:
http://www.mdisc.com/millennia...
I wouldn't put anything in a lockbox. Such media will be tested very rarely, and when they do fail, it's likely you won't know until it's too late.
I'd rather use a hard drive, hooked up (NAS or mini-pc, maybe) to a network and capable of rsync. You could place it somewhere in your home, or, if available, another secure location with Internet access. Run daily or nightly automated backups.
I use M-Disk. It is a DVD disk that is made of basically indestructible material. It is certified by the DoD as a medium of over 1000 years lifespan. Here is the link. http://www.mdisc.com/
Remember that magnetic and other computer media needs a higher level of lock box protection if you are thinking of heat/fire. Believe it or not the computer media can get damaged and rendered unusable at lower temperatures than the paper will. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
The first problem, you don't said how long you want to preserve the data without transfering it on another support!
Because, the longer you don't use the support the more you have these problems :
with HDD, the mechanical part, even when not used risk to jam. Happen for me to a HDD stored in a safe in a Bank
with SDD and other flash drive, especially when not in use, the data (electric / magnetic gate) evaporates
With opticalDisk, except some old cd made in real gold, the data will fade aways is in contact with light.
with magnetics tape, the problem will be the same as the flash drive, the magnetics elements will evaporates.
And with all these technologies, you will need the hardware to read and connect them.
You today are able to find a computer with a 8 inches floppy drive or even a 8 inches floppy drive or a computer that have the ide connector to connect the 8 or 5 inches floppy drive ?
My solution, is to backup and copy often. I transfert my backup support every year or two to a new kind of backup support. First tape and CD, then DVD, then BR, Then HDD, this year TB SSD are cheap enough to be in my near vision for the next backup. And I keep my older backup.
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
You copy your hard drive every 3 months, but didn't recopy your optical disks for 15 years. And to you, this is 'proof' that HDD are superior?! OK, got it. I suggest reburn every 5 years on optical. You get a fresh disk and a chance to consolidate CD to DVD, DVD to BD etc.
None of you fools mentioned M-Disk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC
http://www.mdisc.com/m-ready/
Pansies.
There is no format or medium or media that will last as long as you want it to.
Optical disk. Magnetic tape. Hard drives. Flash memory. They all rely on things that degrade over time.
Optical disks delaminate and their reflective layers corode. Tape grows brittle and the lubricants dry out. Hard drives have bearings that seize. Flash memory even slowly losses integrity over time. All media formats grow obsolete and their readers get difficult to find and interface with modern systems.
The only realistic solution is to have a living archive that you maintain regularly.
At least once a year completely audit and checksum your entire archive. Test media. Assess current technologies and move the entire store to something new to take advantage of increased density and speed. You'll find that your binder full of burned CDs will soon fit on a 150 dollar 4 TB hard drive, etc.
Store data with generous amounts of parity bits (With a scheme like Par2) so you can recover from eventual "bit rot" errors.
Eventually you may find that there's no point in doing it yourself and that for the price of stashing your data you can archive it with two online, cloud based services. (For redundancy)
Hard drives are just a bad idea... so are thumbdrives.
Use archival quality DVDs ... that's about as good as it gets. Sure, tapes are an option, but who's going to spend cash for one of those for home use? Also, the drive has to work down when needed a few years down the road. DVD drives are cheap.
Use something like Taiyo Yuden Archive quality DVDs.:
http://www.amazon.com/Taiyo-Yuden-JVC-printable-surface/dp/B000F38GS0
The USB 3.0 sticks are pretty fast and 128GB sticks are getting cheaper all the time, with cheap 256GB units on the horizon. They are light, small, have good retention, and make it easy to divide your data types into separate physical units so if you only want to retrieve the family photos you don't need to pick up the tax returns and such as well.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Sorry to be the one to point this out, but your question is missing an important variable: How long is long-term, to you? Are you looking to preserve files for the foreseeable future (say 10-25 years), or into the next couple of generations (say 25-50 years)? And how much data are we talking about? You mention "personally ripped media" - do you really need to store a copy of Die Hard in your digital lockbox?
For my money and at this time, hard drives (and solid-state drives as the price drops) are great for the "foreseeable future" scenario. Hard drives are cheap enough that you can employ a multi-tier strategy like I have for redundancy... one drive online for daily/weekly/monthly backups, one offline stored locally for an annual sync, and one updated every few years but stored off-site. Drive interface technologies do change, but not to the point they outpace your ability to find a converter/adapter at some point in the future. I have old-style IDE hard drives from ~1990 and 1993 that I can connect to an old IDE->USB adapter, and still spin up today.
Now if you're talking about "archival" quality storage, that becomes a bit tricky. You could go the route of something like JVC archival Blu-Ray media, but even that format can be a risky proposition if you are talking about 25-50 years out. After all, the direction our culture is moving towards is one where concepts of personal ownership of hardware and content are slowly dying...
Good luck.
I use Amazon Glacier with FastGlacier Pro for the non-confidential stuff (photos, docs, etc). http://fastglacier.com/
It costs me about $1/month for 100GB of storage, does differentials on a schedule, and I generally don't have to think about it (which is the best type of storage).
I uploaded all my data to Sony Pictures' network about a year ago... now every script kiddie on the Internet has a copy. Don't worry, it's disguised as a new, unreleased Adam Sandler film, so nobody will ever try and open it.
At least you can read the holes outside of a computer
The problem with media is that data tends to degrade and technology tends to move forward. Who says you are going to have an optical disk drive in your computer in as little as 5 years? Still its an option. Maybe instead of asking what's the best, maybe you should focus on multiple options. First and foremost, make copies of everything. Take one copy to the bank and have a safety deposit box. It's old school, but unless the bank is robbed, or maybe a fire your documents are safe. Take another copy and get one of those fire lock boxes they sell at the hardware store. I don't know how good they really are in a fire, but its gotta be better than that one desk drawer they are stuffed into now. Finally upload everything to the cloud. Pick a good cloud...or multiple clouds. Encrypt your data.
Get a transporter and put it in a friend or family member's house.
http://www.filetransporter.com...
Supposedly it'll sync all your files automagically.
And you can host your transporter, too.
http://transporterhosting.com/...
don't know much about it except that it works.
For me, I have a NAS at home with mirrored drives, if one goes down, the NAS emails me to let me know. I also keep multiple copies besides the NAS, one copy on my personal laptop, one on my wife's and one on the desktop computer. About the only thing this doesn't protect against is the house burning down, but if that happens, my .mp3 collection is the least of my worries at that point.
Frank said: "Store your data on Ridulian crystal paper, tightly packed in a nullentropy capsule."
I have mortgages at BofA and Wells, and both offer free safe deposit boxes with mortgages (at least they did when I got them), so I have a thumbstick in my box at each bank with important files. I also have a Colo in Texas VPNed into my home that I use to store things offsite in an encrypted volume.
I go in once a month or so to drop off an updated thumb stick and retrieve old ones (I leave a few in there with the most recent copies of everything, just in case one of them goes wonky).
I know you said you don't want them in the cloud, but why not? Well encrypted files are quite unlikely to be in danger of decryption, and storing them on multiple cloud servers, where data loss is an existential threat to the companies maintaining them, seems an overwhelmingly successful strategy for ensuring the survival of the data.
There are multiple.
1.) simple sftp reachable cloud (very cheap, no need for special cloud software)
2.) root server (you can get these with ~4tb space minus the OS) for arround 20â (you don't need a power horse) even a vserver is ok, if it has the space and you can sftp into it
traffic is mostly multiple times storage cap
3.) having offsite sftp storage is great the connection+login/pass is encrypted + save the ssh-fingerprint and check for manipulation, only filezilla needed to retreive all data
otherwise you can automate many things like offsiting your archive hashes / etc.. via script, curl can pop3s and smtps your data.
With tcls "expect" you can automate sftp backups and automatic storage.
4.) Multiple independend hosts are also a nice idea
5.) -> Test your backup system Encryption
I suggest everything you store offsite and also onsite should be encrypted.
Everything you store offsite should have at least two layers of strong encryption using different crypt-algorithms
1.) AES or twofish/serpent
2.) additional to that
That big archive should be split into 50-100mb chunks of data and encrypted with their own hash hash value as key value
you need to store the hashes
3.) encrypt the hash lists
4.) store them in cheap or free email accounts
I'm not the first and probably not the last to suggest you take a look at M-DISC. http://www.mdisc.com/. Also, with any optical disc storage you want to make sure to store them vertically. Gravity can do surprising things when given enough time.
If the documents are that sensitive, you can run the files through multiple encryption schemas with different and very hard to crack pass-phrases, before sending them to the big drive in the sky. Yes, someone coming up with perfect quantum computer and running down all encryptions to the ground, in a matter of seconds is always a possibility, but I think I can take that much risk over, losing my important documents in a house fire or earthquake or flood. Take your pick. I personally can not see myself walking to a safe deposit box every week or even month to store the latest copies of my documents, burned to a DVD or BlueRay myself.
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
The main thing is to keep multiple copies in multiple locations as easily as possible. I have all our important files on one drive at home. This drive is auto cloned each day to a different drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. About once a month I copy the newer files to an external hard drive. I take this drive to a different location where I copy the files to a different drive. That drive is also cloned each day using Carbon Copy Cloner to a different drive. In addition, all the contents of that offsite drive are copied to the cloud using CrashPlan. A separate copy is also copied to the cloud using another data backup site. Everything is pretty much automatic except for putting the files onto the external drive and moving them to the other location via sneakernet. I'm sure I could come up with an automated way to do that as well, but frankly I haven't felt the need to do so in all the years I have been doing this.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There is no -best- medium:
Paper is always readable, but can be easily destroyed by water or fire, and stores the least amount of info per size unit than anything else.
The cloud will be present barring SHTF, but there are the security issues [1], so it needs encrypted via the endpoint.
Tape is an archival grade medium, but the drive is expensive ($3000+), it requires a fast computer to prevent shoe-shining, and either requires a program for backups/restores, or one can use LTFS to have the tape appear as a hard drive. (This route, one can use LTFS or even just tar to stash a copy of the backup program and its keys for install, then install/use the program for the rest of the tapes.) Tapes can be physically set read-only so malware can't tamper with contents. One can also buy WORM tapes that further guarentee protection against data modification.
External hard drives are cheap and easy to use... but are not an archival grade medium, can fail, and can be zapped by malware.
Optical drives can function well as WORM media, and are inexpensive... but their present capacities are minuscule (25 GB is the best bang for the buck price point, although the next gen Archival Disc format may actually make optical media viable again for backups.) If Sony and Panasonic can make AD drives and autochangers [2] at a price point well under LTO 4-6, they may just have a major untapped market. Sony does have high capacity optical disk drives... but they run in the $6000-$7000 range, so hopefully this price will drop by large amount once mass produced.
SSD is decent and fast... but it is nowhere near permanent (those electronics will bail the gates eventually), and once the data is lost, it is gone for good.
My take: I use various redundant media. Critical files get burned onto Blu-Ray media using Nero's SecureDisk or DVDisaster (for error checking/correction), stashed in an encrypted container. I also periodically buy a large external HDD, copy everything from my machines onto it, let it deduplicate, then copy all the stuff from the normal backup drives onto the volume as well. With deduplication, this doesn't use up that much space.
[1]: Never know who has access to the files, and the provider can go bankrupt at any time, allowing the next owner of the physical servers free access to the stored data without any legal ramifications whatsoever. In fact, one cloud provider even has it in their TOS saying that the next person owning their firm gets all data free and clear.
[2]: You used to be able to spend a few C-notes on a 400 disk CD changer. An optical silo holding 400 disks isn't much different, so with the 300 gigs promised this year per disk, that gives 120 terabytes of WORM media in 3-4 rack units
I don't trust any kind of cd/dvd/BR for archiving my stuff. I back up to hard drive, detached from the system when I'm not backing up, and I cycle the hardware every 1 - 2 years, because hard drives don't last forever either.
Hard drives are so cheap these days that backing up to traditional backup media just doesn't make any sense anymore.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Get a large-capacity, multi-disk drive housing and set it up as a mirrored RAID. Over time, as each drive fails, all you have to do is swap out the failed disk and the RAID will re-mirror the data to the new disk. This is the most robust perpetual storage option. It is possible that the magnetic fields on the disks can fade over time if left in an unpowered state. The biggest downside is that the RAID is onsite, and if there is a catastrophic event such as a fire or a flood, the drive could be destroyed. A RAID is what I am currently using for my longterm, permanent storage needs. I've lost a couple of files to bit rot, nonetheless.
Optical media storage is decent for long-term storage, but there is evidence to suggest that these disks break down over twenty to thirty years and become unreadable. So, bit rot is still an issue with optical media. However, they offer the advantage of being able to store the data in a stable medium without any power required and are easily portable to safe locations. Also, newer disk technology developed in recent years is more stable than older disks.
At the moment, I don't consider SSDs as a reliable long-term storage. All it takes is one cosmic ray to flip a critical memory cell and your drive becomes unreadable. Also, when disconnected from power the charges fade over time and in as little as a few years the drives could just erase themselves. The advantage they offer is being small, lightweight and easily portable.
The important thing to remember is that technology is changing all the time, and there are newer and better alternatives on the horizon that answer the shortcomings of each of the above solutions. The biggest problem with any long term storage is bit rot, where random bits get flipped or erased over time. Storage technology companies are striving to improve all the time, so the choices available to you will also continue to improve.
Whew! This water sure is cold!
For anything that can be printed, print out a few copies on archival paper using an appropriate printer. Have photos professionally printed on Fuji Crystal Archive or better paper.
Unlike anything digital, we KNOW that paper will last several hundred years with only basic care.
Also, make more than one copy and store in more than one place.
2 External HDs and Blue Ray/dvd disks.
You keep one HD, you get other HD to your mom/bro/close friend to store for you.
Encrypt all data as files, not hd encrypt.
Put tool used to encrypt data on disk with data blobs.
Remember your own password/keys, don't put those on the drives.
Things that don't change like pictures also go on Blue ray or DVD in case grandma wants to see them.
I also have close family friends we exchange family picture backups.
Update at least twice a year if possible.
1 house fire and you lose everything so keep that in mind. Fireproof safe would be nice but I do not think the heat would leave much working either way.
Cloud services only work as long as you pay for them and someone knows where to find them if your hit by the plane that crashed into your house.
There are a number of services that will store your data for you and it's well encrypted. Unless you are a confirmed cheapskate like me, and don't mind the headache of actually performing backups, encrypted online is the way to go.
If online doesn't float your boat or if you really think somebody will be interested enough to break into your stuff, then do what I do. I first back everything up to my NAS, then I backup the NAS to three hard drives. One drive is stored at the in-laws house and gets swapped every time we visit, One is stored in my file cabinet and gets swapped every weekend with the last one that stays in the server and gets a snapshot backup every few days. The NAS is built on OpenMediaVault and has a Raid 5 array with a hot spare. The NAS has a SATA drive bay that I can just push in a bare drive (2.5 or 3.5).
I use "rsync" to push all my data from the various windows and Linux boxes I'm backing up automatically to the NAS, so I end up with a minimum of three copies of all backed up data (the original on the original host, and two in the RAID array) I'll have four copies once the NAS is backed up, and FIVE copies once we visit the In-laws. Overkill, I know. However, it's worth it given that I happened to loose a few years of pictures once and my wife about came unglued. I'm NOT doing that again.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
If you are looking for long term storage, that is what M-Disc is made for.
http://www.mdisc.com/
Writable DVDs and Blu-rays use an organic coating that degrades over time. M-Disc says you only have up to 7 years of reliability before you start loosing data. A pressed CD/DVD will last up to 100 years, but I've had pressed music CDs that the media layer burned from very little use. Also pressed CD/DVD/Blu-rays are not practical for backup.
Hard drives are designed to be spinning. M-Disc claims hard drives are good up to 5 years, but if you don't spin them up every once in a while, they can fail in less than a year.
Flash Memory they say is up to 8 years. Again, if it isn't powered up every once in a while you can only be sure everything will be there for 2 years. If it is an SSD, your information can disappear any second. The SSD will still work fine, but they sometimes just loose everything on them.
Backup tapes have been the tried an true form of long term backup, but even those, people suggest having at least 1 backup of the backup as magnetic material degrades over time.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
One thing I should mention about SSDs is that I have a couple of thumb drives that have been sitting around untouched for years that are still usable and the files are still readable. The only one that doesn't work is one that was sacrificed to a very powerful magnet in a demonstration of how vulnerable flash drives are to magnetic fields. So, perhaps an SSD drive will be more stable than I suspected.
Whew! This water sure is cold!
You might wish to consider using a hard drive cloning tool (drive imager) that makes backups of the entire hard drive (including the OS) to save time and effort. These programs are capable of automatic scheduled backups to make things easier on you. An external USB hard drive is typically the medium of choice for these types of backups since hard drives and USB 3 enclosures are so cheap and portable. Some software versions let you do incremental backups (since the last full backup is made, only files that have changed get backed up) and there is often cloud storage too (which I personally do not trust). Anyhow software like Macrium Reflect (which has a free version and is excellent) or a paid for version like Acronis True Image or others is worth examining. YouTube is full of tutorial videos on how to use these programs but they are very easy to figure out on your own. Now, you will need to make boot medium too (CD/DVD/USB key) too don't forget and it's a good idea to include an ISO image of the boot medium on the storage hard drive too in case you need to create bootable medium once more in a pinch (you lost your original boot medium for example). Why I suggest using these programs is that when restoring after a failure of a hard drive or what have you, it only takes a fraction of the time required to get back up and running to a fully working state (all your programs and customizations are working just how you like them at the time of backup). These programs are capable of restoring file and folder level restoration or entire hard drive contents. Since hard drives are so cheap, saving complete drive images makes sense and you can have several terabytes of data compressed down down into something a lot smaller on the hard drive allowing multiple images to be made (you can even span them over several drives if needed). You can also encrypt them for safety. The only thing iffy about going this route is that OS vendors deprecate their OS's over time (like Microsoft has done with XP) and perhaps the hardware of the future is not able to load the drive images for some reason. But, if you were staying diligent and doing backups at least once a month or more (and keeping your software version current), you'd most likely be fine since you'd be deleting old images and replacing them with current images.
It really doesn't matter what media you select. The important part is your schedule of updating. Ex.. You pick optical discs and you burn a new disc every 3 months and store it securely. The important fact is not the storage media, it's the 3 month schedule of updating it. You can switch media out on your 3 month update schedule, use flash media, external hard drive, tape, whatever. As long as your most recent backup is no more than 3 months old you'll still be able to read it.
Where most people fail at this is the schedule.. And that's why an online backup solution would work better for the majority of people. Schedule your online backups with one of the secure vendors and let it run automatically.
I use an external HD that I keep at home as my back-up, but I also have my important pictures & documents on both Google Drive (half) and MS One Drive (the other half).
I am hesitant to admit to Slashdot that I do this, because of the hatred towards "the cloud", but quite frankly it's peace of mind that my files are in both places in case there really is an emergency and I lose both my internal and external HDDs. And no, I don't want a lockbox at some bank or a safe in my house, as I don't have any valuables really aside from the pictures on the HDDs.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Real men par their files and post them to newsgroups
This is the number one question asked on Ask-Slashdot. In my recollection, I believe this is at least the 7th time I've seen it. The answers are always unsatisfying. Such is life.
Here's a related question I've been wondering about. Assuming that cloud storage is used as part of a solution to archive personal data, what are some easy tools that can do strong encryption on file sets such as a directory tree? 7-zip looks like it may be a good choice, but is there something better for that?
It would also be nice if such a tool automated the upload/download process to/from the cloud, was open source, and was easily to compile on a variety of systems (yes, including Windows) in order to reduce the possibility of any back doors.
By far the best method to ensure long term survival of your data is to send it out in interstellar space embossed on a golden record like the guys from NASA did with the Voyager probes. Now, you didn't ask about retrieving it did you?
External HDs are cheap these days.
Set up a robocopy script to backup to an external. drive Periodically backup to a second external HD.
Periodically cycle the external HDs into your safe-deposit box at the bank.
Accept that every few years your external HDs get cycled out due to age.
Don't try to make some permanent archival solution which will rely on technology in the future working ... keep them active and in the air. Two local copies, and possibly as many as two remote copies.
I think your specific medium over the long term is less meaningful when you can buy a 3TB external HD for under $100 .. especially if archiving those files actually is valuable for you.
Nowadays, it seems like redundant, offline backups for stuff you deem important enough is fairly easy to do.
The advantage of a robocopy is it will only copy what's changed, so your static data doesn't add too much.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
A RAID is what I am currently using for my longterm, permanent storage needs. I've lost a couple of files to bit rot, nonetheless.
Want to know why? It's because RAID isn't a backup.
Most fire safes are designed to keep the contents at less than 450F for a certain number of minutes. That's based on the temperature at which paper bursts into flames. Media such as tape and DVD will be ruined at 200F or less. So a 30-minute fire safe might last ten minutes with DVDs in it - your data will be gone before the fire department arrives.
A safety deposit box at the bank is cheap. You can also throw a USB drive into your office drawer if your office isn't at home.
As someone who spent the first five years of his career putting hard disks in freezers and all the other old tricks to get data off crashed (and not backed up) client disks I eventually came up with the following perls of wisdom.
1. Archive and Backup are the same thing and its name is called Constant Data Protection (CPD). There is just too much data to do a traditional backup and there is no point in archiving data like it will never change anymore. Maybe with a 6TB HDD you could go back to just doing a start to end backup of all your data to a single media but if that is the case then you don't need to follow any of the advice in this thread.
2. Whatever setup you choose make it simple. Simple tends to work. Not simple tends to not work so well. Also I have noted that much data loss happens because the backup procedures stopped getting followed because nothing bad happened for a while so people could not be bothered following them. Automated is best although I have had clients with automated backup that stopped working and they never noticed because they never did point 2 which is...
3. Manually and periodically validate the backups are working. I remember one client that followed backup procedures religiously but failed to notice all the dust in the tape drive was shredding his tapes. Only when the disk failed did he notice that he had no backup. Take the disks, memory sticks, tapes and do a restore and compare every now and then.
4. Remember that most data lost is because of deletion or corruption, not hardware failure or house burning down. Use a versioned file system (zfs, btrfs, etc) to be able to recover old files. Don't complicate the backup procedures by trying to use it for versioning. You would need an massive amount of extra backup storage space in order to do something that btrfs or zfs is designed for.
5. Don't go nuts on multiple levels of backup. I cannot stress this enough. No need for Raid6, second servers, etc. This just makes things complicated and refer to point 1 about complicated. I mean what is the point of having a second server if you still got to backup offsite to protect against fire or theft anyway. Just means you have even more copies of data you need to manage and pay storage costs for. All you need is online storage with Raid 5 (or 6 if you have 6 or more disks), and an offsite backup solution. Anything more than this is going to cause more hassle than it is worth.
6. Offsite can be done in either two ways. Either backup to external media and store offsite or use a cloud storage service like crash plan or even put a second server with enough capacity at a trusted friends house and rsync. Always encrypt what goes out the pipe though for reasons I don’t need to explain.
Personally I have a ReadyNAS with that is expandable (x-raid) and versioned (btrfs). It works as both a central file repository and a backup for local pc and server files (time capsule, etc). At the moment I simply have a set of old disks that I rotate offsite but I will soon be moving to crash plan (or something like) using a self generated set of encryption keys that I will store offsite on a separate swiss cloud service. This will totally automate the backup and the self generated keys guard against crashplan (or someone else) looking at what I store.
You might want to check out alternative software for TrueCrypt, because the TrueCrypt developers advised againt using TrueCrypt and closed shop.
Or you could just use my secret formula which came to me in a sweat lodge fever dream, to convert all your data to a decimal number string, locate its position in Pi, and you're done. For eternity.
The best part, I thought, would be the ability to retrieve work I hadn't even completed yet. But there's a wiggly bit of formula necessary which is evading my thoughts, so that hasn't worked yet... Also, I think I might get in trouble if I succeeded.
Get a job as a contracter/sysadmin, and store encrypted copies of all your stuff on the servers in your client's offices around the country.
I would also suggest their desktop computers. The executives desktop computers always have extra space, but they get upgrades too often. I suggest low-level management's and receptionist's desktops. They never get anything new.
IMO the best (but not the cheapest) option would be to use personal NAS server with some level of mirrored RAID. Configure backup from all machines/data you wish to backup to the NAS server. Then sync it with cloud provider. Of course when picking cloud provider do check to have strong data encryption, 2F authentication, account/data access audit and DO backup your encryption case (in case you loose it there would be no way to acces your data) - just print it in plain text form and store somewhere safe.
If you do it right everything would be automated and you won't need to do any manual actions with it. Just monitor its status. And do test recoveries from time to time.
And YES - I've noticed you are against the cloud which is in my opinion silly. Decent cloud provider's DC will by much more secure (as in physical security, data mirroring) than any homegrown solution. What you are afraid of? If you are afraid of automated attacks like malware they will target your personal machine anyway, not your backup, backup is not the weakest link here. Also any profiled attacks on your person will target your client machine. So what is your practical point against using cloud storage?
Also worth mentioning that NAS server is not mandatory in such setups. Just it speeds up things a little and gives more control. Also it provides the "oops" factor protection (like incidentaly deleting something - which is satistically the most often case to need backup recovery anyway).
Still if you oppose to use cloud just exchange cloud option for offline media stored offsite (like safe at your friends house or bank). Which media to use is entirely up to you. As you haven't stated what your need are (like how much data, how often it changes, what would be your preffered policy as weekly, monthly etc.) I can't recommend anything. An uneducated guess would be to use external HDD drives in enclosures and rotate them. Or for the cheapest option BlueRay discs.
The obvious answer is silver-in-emulsion photographic film. Microfiche will outlast typical U.S. made copy paper by a long shot. (Cheap copy paper starts to eat itself in about 20 years.) If properly stored--which is easy--it will last centuries. Even certain color film has a typical lifespan of about 70 years.
I have probably incited a riot and will be modded a "troll" but this is a serious answer folks--be objective. Film seems expensive at the outset but it pays dividends every year that it keeps storing your documents/pictures without needing maintenance, repair or energy.
If it's not worth the effort (are we talking heirlooms here?) then why even bother to spend the money on storage? Remember those times you typed up those important documents on your TRS-80? Do you know where those files are? Do you care?
Now if we limit this to a discussion of digital data where we intend to not mitigate, but *eliminate* all types of risk (except force majeure) then forget about single hard disks, DVD/CD recordables, RAID or flash memory. All these devices have no guarantee of ability to perform as archival storage--they could fail at any time from the day you buy them to a decade from now. There is absolutely know way to know when and therefore the risk is incalculable. If you can't calculate the risk of using an individual device there is no way you can even hope act appropriately to prevent data loss. All of these mediums but one require handling. You've never misplaced or dropped anything your life, right?
None of these technologies were marketed as or intended to be permanent storage. Hard disks are made to hold software, DVD/CDs are meant to hold copies of video and music, RAID's purpose is to decrease the length of service outages on a business computer (although it's pretty useless now) and flash memory is used as temporary storage for digital camera pictures. You are nuts if you rely on /any/ of these for storing important documents.
Low-tech minimum: printed on archival-quality paper with high-quality dyes. High-tech minimum RAID-Z array with at least 8 lower-capacity drives and identical units in two disparate geographic locations, replaced every two years.
encrypt it into a zip file, put it on drop box, and external media.
To loose the data now, Drop box and every PC in your home has to die at the same time.
I use Cobian backup to automate it on windows.
You can get 1 Terabyte thumb drives now for about $US20 per - I have two. Get 5 of them, mirror/archive to each, put three of them into fire-and-water proof safes concreted into the ground (basement, garage, under a rockery in the garden). The other two put into a safety-deposit box. Add copies of all your important documents (insurance etc) to all five locations.
LOCKSS - lots of copies keep stuff safe.
As someone who spent the first five years of his career putting hard disks in freezers and all the other old tricks to get data off crashed (and not backed up) client disks I eventually came up with the following perls of wisdom.
1. Whatever you choose make it simple. Most data loss happens because the backup procedures stopped getting followed because nothing bad happened for a while so people could not be bothered following them. Automated is best although I have had clients with automated backup that stopped working and they never noticed because they never did point 3 which is
2. Manually and periodically validate the backups are working. I remember one client that followed backup procedures religiously but failed to notice all the dust in the tape drive was shredding his tapes. Only when the disk failed did he notice that he had no backup. Take the disks, memory sticks, tapes and do a restore and compare every now and then.
3. Remember that most data lost is because of deletion or corruption, not hardware failure or house burning down. Use a versioned file system (zfs, btrfs, etc) to be able to recover old files. Don't complicate the backup procedures by trying to use it for versioning. You would need an massive amount of extra backup storage space in order to do something that btrfs or zfs is designed for.
4. Don't go nuts on multiple levels of backup. No need for Raid6, second servers, etc. This just makes things complicated and refer to point 2 about complicated. I mean what is the point of having a second server if you still got to backup offsite to protect against fire or theft anyway. Just means you have even more copies of data you need to manage and pay storage costs for. All you need is online storage with Raid 5 (or 6 if you have 6 or more disks), and offsite.
5. Offsite can be done in either two ways. Either backup to external media and store offsite or use a cloud storage service like crash plan or even put a second server with enough capacity at a trusted friends house and rsync. Always encrypt what goes out the pipe though for reasons I don’t need to explain.
Personally I have a ReadyNAS with that is expandable (x-raid) and versioned (btrfs). It works as both a central file repository and a backup for local pc and server files (time capsule, etc). At the moment I simply have a set of old disks that I rotate offsite but I will soon be moving to crash plan (or something like) using a self generated set of encryption keys that I will store offsite on a separate swiss cloud service. This will totally automate the backup to be made and relieve me of the need to perform backups.
I'm putting silver bullion into my lockbox.
If you search you'll find there are "Archival Grade" CD-Rs and DVD-Rs. Read the specs, but some are rated at 100-300 year retention life.
Stop spreading fud. The developers closed shop because they no longer want to maintain the project and will refuse fixing any crippling bugs, if found in the future. As long as there are no security holes, it is reasonably safe to use.
The issue with any backup media is if it is placed somewhere in storage, you have no indication when degradation will make it unreadable.
My strategy is to have at least 2 live systems in different locations connected by a standard network, with active workstations & servers ( laptops, desktops etc) backing up to one of each, and then having the 2 systems backup to each other. These systems are live HDD based (with SMART technology with alerts) so am aware of any impending issues. Each also has external HDD's with a copy of the whole system.
The HDD's are upgraded every couple of years, and old HDD's are stored in yet another location - ( NOT the dump/tip ).
You can buy a 1TB thumb drive (Kingston HyperX Predator), but it will cost you around $1K.
You can buy thumb drives for $20 per, but they'll be 64GB, maybe 128GB if you're lucky and don't mind dodgy manufacturers.
You can buy a "1TB thumb drive" for $40 or so on eBay, but you'll find that it "redundantly" stores the last few gigabytes you wrote across the entire drive. In other words, it lies about its capacity, and just trashes existing data once you exceed its real capacity (likely 8GB or less).
Of course, if you're just trying to save "important documents", you probably don't need anywhere near a terabyte, or even a gigabyte.
Blu Ray M discs
If you backup to an external HD and then stick it in a safe, chances are you won't back up very often: your backup routine contains manuals steps you have to remember/set reminders for.
Also, this HD is used only occasionally, and in my experience that's not a recipe for high reliability: I tried using HDs this way (accessing them only once every few months), and of my limited sample, pretty much every one broke down in a few years. Exacerbating factors: flaky USB enclosures (the tiniest nudge of the connector and it'd interrupt the connection, potentially corrupting the drive) and stiction.
I'd want to carefully monitor the backup drive, reading back what it wrote to make sure the backup matches the source. I'd also want to read the entire drive at regular intervals to pick up signs of trouble at an early stage.
I've got an excellent program (Watchdrives) from a fellow Slashdotter that does this for my main drive: reading the drive using dd in a low-priority process, so that the entire drive gets read once every ~2 months.
RAID is not a backup or an archive solution.
If you store a raid it can't detect data and/or media degradation because the system isn't running. I haven't seen many safe deposit boxes that allow you to run a computer inside of them. The drives will most likely degrade inside of 10 years.
To archive something you want archival media. Something like the 100+ or 200+ year gold archival DVDs and Blu-ray discs. The readers for those disks will be available for a couple decades at least. (Look at M-Disc as an example)
Add the data as post comments on slashdot.
It will work froeevr!
Sounds like my setup, though no RAID6 on mine so likely something a wee bit smaller than GP's
4TB disk on fileserver. Fileserver sounds grand; it's a NUC with a USB drive attached. Lowish power and almost no noise in the living room (XBMC).
3TB on desktop which backups the mostly static stuff from 1st box periodically - 2nd 3TB copy taken offsite monthly-ish.
Laptops/Desktop home dirs, etc get backed up (xfsdump incremental & rsync) to the "fileserver"
A couple of 1TB drives which get the more important stuff synced daily and rotated offsite weekly.
Hopefully we're fairly covered.
Print all of your text documents on acid free paper in triplicate and store them in climate controlled facilities around the planet. Maybe even keep an extra copy on the Moon just in case. All of your digital files can be uuencoded before being printed out.
If you're really paranoid, you can encode everything into the DNA of some organisms and then distribute them throughout local and deep space with rocket ships and comets!
How much of your information needs to live significantly beyond your personal lifetime? My guess is you need not consider storage that will live beyond your children, who might have some need to review your papers for personal or practical reasons. Your grandchildren might like a handful of pictures, nothing more than than.
If your information is actually valuable (its creative or philosophical or similar) other people will look to its preservation.
I tend to split stuff up. For my profession life as a programmer I use github and one other git based storage. Anything worth keeping I'd migrate to whatever replaces git. For personal life I keep backups of photos and videos on local and networked (cloud based) storage. For tax stuff I just have a fireproof locker.
I imagine in 20 or 30 years the only stuff of value will be my movies and photos and written personal documents. After I'm dead none of that stuff will meant much to anyone, unless my son wants some pics of our dogs when he was young. And he'd be the last one to care about any of that stuff.
Try not to let possessions become too important. You are going to have it all taken away from you eventually.
Peace, or Not?
Moore's Law is only partly your friend here - storage keeps getting cheaper rapidly, but that also means that not only do devices become obsolete, but the interface specs and data formats also become obsolete. You probably don't have an 8" floppy drive anywhere, or a working 5.25", or the right kind of cable to plug the 5.25" drive into, or a Bernoulli drive, or a 9-track tape drive (800, 1600, or 6250dpi), or the Sun cartridge drive, or anything to plug those MFM drives into, or SCSI-1, or probably SCSI-2. You might have something that can handle IDE / PATA, or an old laptop with PCMCIA, but even those are getting scarcer. If you can connect to that old disk disk drive, you can probably load a virtual machine running NetBSD that'll have drivers for the file system format, but maybe not; you certainly don't want to risk having Windows "update" the format. You might think that FAT 8.3 format will stick around for a long time (and maybe it will for reading, but it's rapidly getting replaced with FAT16, FAT32, ExFAT, NTFS, etc.
Leave aside the question of whether you can read a 20-year-old version of WordStar or WordPerfect format file (unlike my late-70s nroff files, which would be readable if they weren't on a 9-track tape I've probably lost.) You can probably read that 4-year-old TurboTax file, but if you need to get tax data back from when you bought your house, you'd better have everything on paper.
Just for physical format alone, you need to copy stuff every couple of years.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Important to you, yes. Other than that, no one cares.
Your dissertation? Print it out. Send it to the cloud and let that take care of it. Pics of the family? Again, print. And not on your crappy inkjet.
Paper in a folder or photo album is universally, instantly accessible. Anything else (digital) requires a continual update to whatever storage medium is current.
10 years ago, saving to a CD might have been a good idea. 10 years from now, will anyone you know have a device with a working CD drive?
Tape is king for this type of thing. They are actually fairly affordable; if you don't have the need for robotic loaders and tape libraries you can probably pick up an older LTO-5 reader and some LTO-5 tapes for a few hundred bucks.
This is the medium every serious organization uses for offsite, out of sight, out of mind, its there if we screw something up really bad, sort of archiving.
A friend of mine and I both use crashpan to backup to each others home servers. We each have 2 tb in RAID1. this should protect against drive failures and disasters such as fire. As long as both our houses don't get destroyed at the same time, the data should be safe.
If you don't trust the cloud (which is entirely reasonable), encrypt your data and back it up to multiple clouds. Then put the private key on paper in the lockbox.
A few years ago I resigned myself to the fact that every thing about me, probably even my DNA sequence, is out there on various systems and will get stolen or compromised one day. I do what I can to keep things secure, but there's only so far I'm willing to go. If you have been reading a few security blogs over the last few years, you'd know that more and more experts (whoever they are) are recommending that corporations focus more toward mitigation of security breaches while taking resources away from prevention. It's kinda like getting mugged or in a car accident. Eventually, it's just going to happen to you. This is how we live in 2015.
Backing up to DVD or thumb drives or whatever is so 1990's. You may as well have a stack of Zip disks. Physical media is as stealable as anything else in your house. And BTW, if you do get burglarized, guess what the first thing is that they take? That's right, any box in the bottom of your closet or in your garage with a lock on it.
The cloud is technology agnostic so format doesn't matter, you shouldn't have to worry about that. It'll evolve over time but that's not your concern.
Buy yourself a little NAS, load it with 4-5 fat drives. Put everything important on it. Back your laptops and PCs up to it. Encrypt what you feel like encrypting. Push it all to Glacier, which costs a penny per GB. Done. No trips to the bank. No wasting time burning media that will degrade. No physical items to lose.
It probably is a good idea to have more than one copy of everything, just know that as soon as you make physical media of something, it's outdated. Someone else on this thread mentioned keeping a NAS at someone else's house, perhaps your grandma in another state. I'm personally not that paranoid about my stuff so I don't do that, but it's probably a good practice.
Fewer and fewer laptops are coming with dvd/bluray drives built in. Over the last decade we have seen fewer and fewer models of external drives/burners in stores. The writing is on the wall. In perhaps a decade or two you won't have choice, your stuff will be in the cloud (or whatever they change the name to), may as well get on that business now.
Asking myself the same question, I went with MDisc technology, in the BluRay capacity, in addition to my hard drive backups. MDisc uses an inorganic pigment as opposed to the organic dyes that are common on CD/DVD/BluRay recordables (and degrade over time).
I'll do an MDisc burn every year and move it offsite, to keep with the 4TB ZFS drive I rotate offsite weekly. The MDisc won't get my mp3 or mp4 files, but the stuff I can't recreate.
My best idea currently is to write PAR files of loop-back mounted LUKS volumes and include the PAR software source and ISO of the distro on the disc, in case I need the data in 20 years (emulators should be readily available for 2015 hardware).
I needed a BluRay writer anyway, so I went with this LG and it's been a great drive so far, and at the right price point for me.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
http://it.slashdot.org/story/14/05/28/2126249/truecrypt-website-says-to-switch-to-bitlocker
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/14/06/01/1922248/the-sudden-policy-change-in-truecrypt-explained
http://it.slashdot.org/story/14/06/19/145219/truecrypt-author-claims-that-forking-is-impossible
John Edward is probably the best medium. He will be able to retrieve your data even after you're dead!
Read for yourself
http://it.slashdot.org/story/14/05/28/2126249/truecrypt-website-says-to-switch-to-bitlocker
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/14/06/01/1922248/the-sudden-policy-change-in-truecrypt-explained
http://it.slashdot.org/story/14/06/19/145219/truecrypt-author-claims-that-forking-is-impossible
the interface specs and data formats also become obsolete.
You can buy devices for almost any media and format, and, thanks to eBay, these devices are more available than ever before. As time goes buy, obsolete media is becoming less of a problem. You can even find paper tape readers. If you don't want to buy a device, you can use any of numerous companies that will copy your media for a fee.
You probably don't have an 8" floppy drive anywhere, or a working 5.25", or the right kind of cable to plug the 5.25" drive into, or a Bernoulli drive, or a 9-track tape drive (800, 1600, or 6250dpi), or the Sun cartridge drive, or anything to plug those MFM drives into, or SCSI-1, or probably SCSI-2.
No, I don't. But I can have any of those things on my front porch in a week.
How much is "a lot" of data? If we're talking less than a current 8 TB HDD, then use a HDD. If we're talking tens of terabytes, then tape. Encrypted, of course.
Haven't we had this discussion on /. a thousand or more times in the last ten years? Search is your friend. It does work to find old /. articles for answers to these questions, folks. It's the box at the top of the page next to the icon of a magnifying glass.
to a tomato can buried in my back yard below the frost line containing a hard drive, time machine target.
House burns, check
Someone steals my computer, check
Unless you're dealing with Media Files - plain archival quality paper is the best for any long-term archive. Even images printed on Archival Quality Photo Paper with Archive Quality Inks will certainly out last a bluray disk - keep in mind the burner that created the disk may have it's key revoked, possibly making all archives written by it useless.
Since Electronics have not withstood the test of time like paper, I'll stick to paper.
How much data do you have? M-Discs if not that much as they are supposedly going to last 1,000 unlike any other media.
HDD for other, BUT MUTIPLE HDDs. IT depends how much you want to spend. but 3 copies of the data is the minimal I do for myself.
It you feel that you can't live with failure than 3 copies using 3 complete sets of Raid-5. If money is no object and you are that scared.
find some long lived organization and pay them to ensure that your data is upgraded every 10 years for eternity
sort of like a perpetual care agreement with a cemetary, or a trust with a law firm as executor
It took my friends months to find working 8" floppy drives they could take to Guatemala to decode the files the police and army had created during the dirty wars there. I don't want to have to buy a 9-track tape drive to read the one 9-track tape I have (if I find it again, and if it's still even readable.) (I gave away the Sun cartridge drive along with the Sun-2.)
Much more reliable to copy the data every couple of years to some current medium, knowing that Moore's Law means that it's not going to cost much and the only problems will be data formats, not media formats.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
What he said.
I have a Mac, so I created a bunch of writable sparsebundle disk images ranging in size from 10 MB (single-PDF tax returns) to 1 GB (car documentation). I save them all directly to iCloud Drive. When I mount the disk image and make changes, only the changed bands are uploaded, avoiding a bottleneck or incomplete sync situation.
Time Machine keeps versioned backups of the iCloud Drive files on my offline backup disk (as of OS X 10.10.2). Periodically, I copy the disk images into OneDrive and Dropbox for redundancy.
Each disk image has a different password, all of which are secure (long strings of random characters) and managed well (saved on my Mac, as well as printed out and safely hidden in case of total disaster). My cloud accounts all have secure passwords, two-factor authentication, and all my computers have encrypted drives so I'm not out of luck if my computer gets lost or stolen.
For disk images that I know will never be modified again (e.g., Taxes 2003), I convert the disk images to a read-only format to save space in my clouds. I haven't paid a dime for cloud space, ever.
It sounds overkill when I type out the procedure, but because I've used only features built into the operating system, I can scan and archive a document in under a minute. On the other hand, this is complete vendor lock-in, so if I switch my primary computers from OS X down the road, I would have to throw out this entire solution and start a useless Ask Slashdot thread like this.
Hope this helps out any Apple nerds.
Is TrueCrypt still OK to use after it was shut down or whatever happened last year?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
That protects ONLY against drive failure or human error. It does nothing for fire, flood, power surges, etc... That is not a backup.
Even images printed on Archival Quality Photo Paper with Archive Quality Inks will certainly out last a bluray disk - keep in mind the burner that created the disk may have it's key revoked, possibly making all archives written by it useless.
A BD-R with its "key revoked" is perfectly capable of reading and writing data to BD-Rs. It only affects your ability to read DRMed bluray movies (HDCP).
I agree about paper though. I've toyed with the idea of using archival paper, compressing and encoding binary data to ascii, and then printing it, in the hope that 100 years from now, it will still be possible to scan/photo the page and convert the encoding back to its original binary format.