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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?
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.
Um, no. Blu-ray is more scratch resistant than DVD. And the best storage for long-term backups is always off site.
So, basically, your solution is to make up a story about having a backup system that exceeds any rational person's in complexity, redundancy and cost in the hopes that everyone else will believe it and worship your e-peen.
Even with "scratch resistant external media", I use 10% of the disc space for redundancy and recovery by using Multipar. It's a PAR2 compatible program that handles subdirectories. I've also bought but haven't used in recovery mode ISOBuster, a program that can handle the internal disc structures to try to recovery from corrupted media.
I have manually changed files and parts of files and had Multipar recover the originals; I have not yet physically scarred a CD/DVD/BR to see if it's recoverable via ISOBuster. It's supposed to work, though.
Fair (not archivable quality discs) BDs cost $0.50 for 20GB effective or $25 for 1TB, this is comparable to hard drive prices. They'll handle drops better and if one goes bad, you "only" lose that media (20G) vs terabytes. It's much slower, smaller, and write-once, though.
(OMG -- 20G is "small"?? I remember having things fit on a single 256KB 8" floppy. Much better than paper tape, though.)
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
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?
I do have one hope -- the USB bus seems to still have devices that interoperate at USB 1.1 speeds, even now, almost 15 years later. This is a good thing. If those devices are still usable on modern systems, then a floppy drive, or a CD drive are usable and would continue to be usable. USB 3 definitely is different, but there will be adapters so that people's mice and other items will continue to operate.
The parent is correct though. Critical data can't just be tossed on some media and forgotten. Ideally, every year or two, it should be copied onto something new. At least every five years, it should see a new medium.
What comes to my mind are software products like TrueCrypt. Who would have thought that TC, something one had as a utility for over a decade, would be sunsetted with multiple, incompatible forks out there? Now is a good time to move data stored in that format to another secure format [1].
Tape pose two problems -- not just finding a physical drive, but what software is being used? This is a bit easier with LTFS (put the tape in, it has a filesystem that is mountable), but in general, is data stored using tar, or some vendor specific utility. AFIAK, NetBackup uses cpio, IBM TSM uses its own specific format, and so on. However, if handed a tape, it becomes a matter of guessing to find out what is stashed on it, and some formats like DLT, one also has to factor in blocksizes. However, if one documents and keeps the backups programs around, this shouldn't be a major issue, although it seems to be often overlooked.
[1]: If the data is static, and one isn't worried about an intruder knowing the data's size, gpg or PGP Zip come to mind. Drive images are harder -- since TC is gone, one sort of has to bet between VeraCrypt and CipherShed to see which one will continue versus which will be discontinued.