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Ask Slashdot: Best Medium For Storing Data To Survive a Fire (or Other Disaster)
First time accepted submitter aka_bigred writes Every year as I file my taxes, I replicate my most important financial data (a couple GB of data) to store an offline copy in my fire-rated home safe. This gets me thinking about what the most reliable data media would be to keep in my fire-rated home safe.
CDs/DVDs/tapes could easily melt or warp rendering them useless, so I'm very hesitant to use them. I've seen more exotic solutions that let you print your digital data to paper an optically re-import it later should you ever need it, but it seems overly cumbersome and error prone should it be damaged or fire scorched. That leaves my best options being either a classic magnetic platter drive, or some sort of solid state storage, like SD cards, USB flash drives, or a small SSD. The problem is, I can't decide which would survive better if ever exposed to extreme temperatures, or water damage should my house burn down.
Most people would just suggest to store it in "the cloud", but I'm naturally averse to doing so because that means someone else is responsible for my data and I could lose it to hackers, the entity going out of business, etc. Once it leaves my home, I no longer fully control it, which is unacceptable. My thought being "they can't hack/steal what they can't physically access." What medium do other Slashdot users use to store their most important data (under say 5GB worth) in an at-home safe to protect it from fire?
CDs/DVDs/tapes could easily melt or warp rendering them useless, so I'm very hesitant to use them. I've seen more exotic solutions that let you print your digital data to paper an optically re-import it later should you ever need it, but it seems overly cumbersome and error prone should it be damaged or fire scorched. That leaves my best options being either a classic magnetic platter drive, or some sort of solid state storage, like SD cards, USB flash drives, or a small SSD. The problem is, I can't decide which would survive better if ever exposed to extreme temperatures, or water damage should my house burn down.
Most people would just suggest to store it in "the cloud", but I'm naturally averse to doing so because that means someone else is responsible for my data and I could lose it to hackers, the entity going out of business, etc. Once it leaves my home, I no longer fully control it, which is unacceptable. My thought being "they can't hack/steal what they can't physically access." What medium do other Slashdot users use to store their most important data (under say 5GB worth) in an at-home safe to protect it from fire?
Oral tradition. Seriously wtf
There are fire rated NAS devices like the ioSafe 214 which has Synology guts.
Here is the thing about hackers: they don't care about your data unless it contains banking information or anything that's got to do with your ID.
One thing you can do to prevent that is using encrypted container. Mount them when you need them, unmount them when done/
Second, if you're worried a company could go out of business, get more than one provider and sync data across them.
is the only safe solution.
A couple of BD-Rs stored in a safe deep deposit box or over at a relative's house.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Drill a small hole into a fire-resistant safe where your power and SCSI/IDE/SATA/USB/ETH cables go, then put your drives in there. Won't be easily stolen and will likely survive a house fire. Googling the terms "fire-resistant safe" revealed dozens of good options.
Seriously, why go for some kind of difficult or expensive solution when low tech is cheaper and safer. It doesn't have to be the cloud, it could be encrypted and stored in your desk at work.
>Most people would just suggest to store it in "the cloud", but I'm naturally averse to doing so because that means someone else is responsible for my data and I could loose (sic) it to hackers, the entity going out of business, etc.
Simply strongly encrypt your data before backing it up to the cloud, you will be at no risk of hackers or anyone else gaining access that way. If you can't find a cloud storage service that you trust/trust won't go out of business, you can make your own cloud using Amazon's AWS system. The levels of security at the facilities and redundancy mean your data will survive anything short of nuclear Armageddon. Personally I'd just go with the local encryption option.
If you plan on having the medium survive your house burning down, it'll either have to be something really exotic(CNCed cuneiform tablets?) or something boring inside a sufficiently fireproof safe (which can get costly; but are a well recognized product category).
If it gets to the point where the fire and/or water are in contact with your storage medium, luck might save you; but the odds are lousy enough that it doesn't really qualify as a plan.
You really should consider off-site storage. This doesn't have to mean 'in the cloud', anything that gets updated very infrequently can be dumped to some backup medium and shoved in a safe deposit box.
And for the really paranoid, two banks, located in different parts of the country (or a different continent).
Yep.... encrypt and put it in cloud, and/or encrypt and store a hdd at your moms/friends house.
Better check the documentation on your safe. Many are not designed to resist heat. They provide an oxygen sparse environment such that paper won't burn. Thats why you have to let them cool off afterwards, if you open them too soon the oxygen from outside hits very hot paper and it lights on fire. This is fine for paper but not so good for plastics and magnetics. Best suggestion is one or more off site storage locations, such as a bank security box or a professional storage facility. How many is determined by how much you want to spend and how "twitchy" you feel.
I know this isn't what you asked, and I'm interested in hearing the answer to your question as well. But offsite is really the only safe alternative. Put copies on whatever media, then store them somewhere away from your house. If you have a place you feel is relatively secure at the office, put it there. Send it home with a trusted friend. Store it in your mom's basement (if you live elsewhere). Encrypt with a phrase you won't forget. Only a thermonuclear strike is likely to destroy all your copies, and if it does, I suspect you won't much care.
Yes, storing a second copy off-site is important for anyone who REALLY MUST have their data, no matter what. Bank vaults are reasonably safe.
Relatives' houses are also a good choice, depending on the relative.
Offsite is the only real solution. Be it cloud, safe deposit box, or your mums house. It doesn't matter. Anything fire rated is rated for x temp for y hours, which are easy to exceed.
The summary states that it's only a few GB of data, so why not put it all on an SD card and keep it on your person? You shouldn't have to worry about temperature extremes that way, as even in the case of a home fire in the middle of the night, you'll want to take it along with you to call 911 as you rush you and your family out the door.
Naturally, you'll still want to encrypt it in case your phone is lost/stolen, but it's probably by far the safest, easiest, and most secure solution.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
I've commissioned a stone mason to carve a backup of everything I have into solid blocks of granite. Since the type of information varies (text, photos, videos, etc) I've had the Mason translate everything to its raw binary state and carved in bit by bit (Ha! See what I did there!)
These are stored in my living room, which is causing some difficulty in negotiating living space--but I feel that it's worth the sacrifice.
Sure, he complains when I edit an existing document. He's hired an assistant just to keep my grocerylist.txt file up to date in the archive. I wanted to switch it to an XML structure, but I let him win that battle.
As a recovery strategy in the even of a fire my plan is to outsource the data entry to an Indian firm and take advantage of global time zones and cheap labour. I expect to be back up and running within 7.2 years in the even of a catastrophic event, if my calculations are correct. The best thing is I've eliminated all risk of media becoming obsolete: my last archive was on a Syquest Ez 135--never let it be said that I haven't learned my lesson!
Skot Nelson music is my saviour / i was maimed by rock and roll
I really like your idea. But if it's just a few GB, take it one step farther. Put a uSD card into a pendant. Bonus points if the pendant is both attractive, and a USB uSD reader
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There are a line of fire proof safes out there that have ports that allow you to run cables into the back so you can store hard drives or SSDs or whatever in the safe... in the event of a fire, the insides of the safe should be fine.
So... that is what I would do. I'd get some external drives, buy a data safe, and then put that next to the server where upon at given intervals the data is backed up to the externals in the fire proof data safe.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
small chance all three will go out of business and be hacked to the point where all the data is wiped. if that is even possible to wipe all of their data
if you are really paranoid burn a yearly DVD or some other media and pay for a box at a bank
Rule of three: Original copy, on site backup, off site backup. Otherwise you're not truly protected. I'd say SD cards, in a Pelican SD card case, in the safe for the local backup. Then look into an encrypted off site backup. The key is to make sure it is encrypted *before* it leaves your computer, and that the provider does not hold the key. Many providers offer this, even if it's not turned on by default.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Mountain_Incorporated#Data_losses
Oh f***... Never Mind.
And for the really paranoid, two banks, located in different parts of the country (or a different continent).
For the less paranoid.... Make sure the data is encrypted. get yourself a piece of sewer pipe.. stick the media in with some baggies of Silica gel.. cap off the ends of the tube with airtight/watertight seal, so nothing is getting in Use a post hole digger to create a hole in the backyard 3 to 4 feet deep, and bury the piece of tubing so the top is at least 36 inches down.
If you're serious... use offsite storage. If you think your house might burn to the ground, and you think your fire safe won't protect optical media, then backup to an offsite location. If you think your house might catch fire and the fire department will come and put out the fire before reaching the limits guaranteed by your safe, then backup to an offsite location because the fire department is going to flood your home with water in the process. If you think your safe is waterproof; and, you live within the 500 year flood zone, backup to offsite storage because a "waterproof safe" won't survive long term immersion... If you're not within the 500 year flood zone, backup to offsite storage anyway because a severe storm may rip the roof off your house and flood it anyway.
There's a theme there. You can't plan for every possibility. Either put the data onto a portable drive and store it in a local bank's safety deposit box; or, encrypt your data and backup to the cloud. Just make sure there's a copy offsite somewhere
If your data is not backed up in 3 separate places, it's not backed up.
So to answer your question, you should have it on your drive where you access it. Stored on an external HD (or CD/DVD/ETC) in a fire proof safe and in the cloud (preferrably in an encrypted container). So if your house burns up and your fireproof backup fails, you'll have the cloud. If the cloud provider goes bust, you'll have your backups that you can restore to a different cloud provider.
If you don't want to store it "in the cloud" have a trusted friend store a backup drive at their house or put one in a safe deposit box somewhere. But the bottom line is, one backup of your primary data is not enough and never will be.
This gets me thinking about what the most reliable data media would be to keep in my fire-rated home safe. CDs/DVDs/tapes could easily melt or warp rendering them useless
Ordinary fireproof safes are designed to keep papers from bursting into flames. Data rated fireproof safes keep the interior temperature under 125F/50C, like say this one so computer media survives just fine. In fact, this a "Why can't I be arsed to google this for five minutes?" question.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'll put in a freedom of information act request to get a copy back.
There's quite a few companies who've built their business around safe records storage.
Iron Mountain
Recall
These guys will store almost anything you want to pay them to. Documents, Hard drives, Tapes, paintings.... etc They can send an armored vehicle/courier to your source location to pick up the content.
Though if you have only a few HD, a safety deposit box at your local bank should suffice.
Lastly, encrypt it and upload it to Amazon S3's Glacier service. Heck you could upload it to a bunch of different Regions in case all of East Coast region is nuked.
For the last 26 years or so, I've been making electronic copies of my records. The media changes, the location does not. My current scheme is to burn financial records onto CD-ROM on two pieces of archival media. One goes into my local at-home fireproof safe. One goes into my safe-deposit box at my neighborhood bank.
Work backup is a little trickier. For a long time I was using tape backup, upgrading to larger capacity as the new drives came out. Then I started burning multiple DVD-ROM disk sets. I was able to start using a single pair of DVD+R(DL) when the cost came down. Again, one set goes into the at-home fireproof safe, the other to the safe deposit box.
I also use USB hard drives for in-office backup. I use Linux, so I formatted a 3-TB drive as ext4. I then use rsync to update the drive during projects at regular intervals.
The cloud? I have some people who insist I use Github and Dropbox. Github is fine for working projects, but I wouldn't depend on them keeping stuff forever -- regular backups of the working projects is the rule for me. Dropbox was going just fine until it broke completely when I upgraded my systems to CentOS 7.0 (and now 7.1). Almost useless. I'm hoping Dropbox will get a fix for this soon.
Life tip: Record your financial records on media separate from your other backups. You can then pitch the media after the statute of limitations expires (7 years for US).
they are typically specified to withstand an impact of 3400 g and temperatures of over 1,000 C (1,830 F)
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
OK, this is not a serious solution, but the way a company I worked for years ago managed this was hilarious. One of the managers put a server in the boot of his car and had it connect wirelessly to the file servers when it was parked in the office car park.
Because he had to reverse his car in to bring the wifi into range, the joke "I'm just backing up the data" got played every time he did it. Suffice it to say, the joke got old pretty quick.
That fireproof, waterproof ubersafe does not help when the hurricane or tornado throws it a few miles away, and it ends up at the bottom of the river.
Go off-site. Anything else is just on low amateur-level.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/...
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Tar up your files. Encrypt with GPG and a 20 character random passphrase.
Upload to a cloud service, and put on a USB drive at work and the house of a friend and relative.
Why bother trying to find storage media made of unobtainium that can withstand fire or flood or theft, when you can simply and easily make a copy and store it multiple times in multiple places immune to most loss events?
FTFY.
Multiple backups. Multiple media types. Multiple locations.
Ours cost about $80 a year and is open on Saturdays. We rotate our backup drives into it monthly. Yeah, weekly would be better...
If it's that important, rent a small safe-deposit box at the local bank. Copy as much as you like onto a portable hard drive, and put it in there.
buy a handful of hard drives, encrypt them, do rotating backups on them of everything irreplaceable (that includes photos and documents) at reasonable intervals (monthly or quarterly or whenever you do something momentous such as taxes, for individuals), and make sure at least one of those drives is never physically at your home - your parents', your job, your bank, your SO's, your gym...
Backups are 1- offline, 2- offsite, 3- tested, 4- multiple. Miss just one of those 4, and you don't have a backup.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
I know you said you didn't trust cloud solutions, but Backblaze is fantastic for online backups and they allow you to set your own private key that they don't have access to.
For a lot of my data, I've just take a flash drive or SSD card into the office and left it in my locked desk. It's convenient for me to get to and off-site so I don't have to worry about a fire.
My thought being "they can't hack/steal what they can't physically access."
Oblig xkcd reference
Stone tablets, translate your data to Aramaic, and carve it into them. Those things will last for thousands of years, and nobody understands Aramaic, so it's safe.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
I bury a 2TB USB drive below the frost line. It's about 3 feet from the foundation. I use it as a Time Machine target. It's sealed in a tomato can with RTV. I used an existing through-hole (used for some ham radio gear) to connect by mac mini to the drive.
automatically encrypt your data locally and upload it to multiple locations. These locations can be public locations as only your private key can decrypt the incremental (or full) backups.
Some backends:
...think about it, if there's a fire and I'm NOT home, I've got the car, and they're safe. If there's a fire and I AM at home, the first think I'll do is get the car out of the garage. My biggest risk is whether the fire is between me and the garage, and I've got several alternative routes to get there (including two that involve going outside).
My main storage media are 1 Terabyte drives with 100% copies of each backup from every computer (4) in the house, every night. I change the drive about once a week. I have a three-point cycling system: #1) This week's backup, connected to one of the computers where a copy of each computers' backups are written; #2) Last week's backups, in the car; #3) Two-week-old backups, at the front door of the home; if I can't get to the garage, the front (or back) door is my next natural alternative.
When I was more actively engaged in business, I stored #2 in the local bank's "safe deposit box" in the vault, and #3 in the car trunk. Never had to test these options under "real fire" before, but I think it's a reasonable set of alternatives. Of course, all my essential records are digital, not on paper.
I find that an implant that allows me to securely store data too sensitive for regular computer networks is the way to go.
https://allthetropes.orain.org...
To back up a few GB, why are you making it complicated?
First, if your home fire safe is not media rated, then don't count on any media surviving a fire, the firesafe may prevent paper from burning, but don't count on it keeping any electronic media from melting or degrading. And a fire safe is no guarantee, my sister lost her house and *everything* in it -- the only thing recognizable was part of a 100 year old cast iron stove, and the remains of the brick fireplace, everything else ended up in an unrecognizable pile of debris in what was left of the basement, there wasn't even enough left of their thousand dollar gun safe to be found in the debris.
A few GB is *nothing* -- just encrypt it and email it to yourself, set up multiple accounts with different email providers if you don't trust that Google will be around for the long haul.
If you had tens or hundreds of GB of data, then I'd say use a cloud provider and migrate your data to a new provider if that one goes out of business. I keep my data in Amazon Glacier -- for $10/month (it's mostly old family home videos converted to digital along with a lot of TIFF photos). If I needed to recover the data all at once, I could send them a hard drive (plus a fee) and they'd restore to that hard drive and mail it back to me.
Just create a web site lauding ISIS (or the little green men in Ukraine, or the North Koreans, etc. There's a long list.).
You're guaranteed to have all your data backed up on the best quality archival storage the US government can find!
Just don't get too over the top. Predator drones, you know. ;)
If it's encrypted properly it's basically impossible for anyone to break into it.
Redundant Array of Inexpensive Cloud Storage.
Store redundant copies on as many providers as necessary to provide the integrity desired.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Instead of printing encrypted (and properly encoded) data on a sheet of paper, you could use a sheet of stainless steel and a laser cutter. Use a common scanner for reading.
You need a safe.
To be more specific, you need a water-resistant fire safe rated for digital media. Check the certifications and endorsements.
Talk to your local fire department. The temperature and duration ratings differ by safe, and you'll want to make sure that your house fire scenario matches the safe you are getting.
Also pay attention to water. Your safe may end up in the basement, and the basement may be full of water. You may decide to place the safe in the basement now, so that it doesn't experience a few hundred Gs getting there on its own.
Expect to pay $300 minimum for one. You'll be astonished by how big and heavy it is, and yet so small on the inside.
Oh, and from then on, you will have operational issues. You need to air it out from time to time, but you can't leave it open. Oh, and you can open it with a butter knife, or a stern glance, so don't put anything valuable in it.
See that "Preview" button?
Physical backups are are a waste of time. Just keep everything digital and sync over the net. You can use encryption to ensure that everything is safe. Get yourself a 3 disk array, RAID it and put everything on it. Have the RAID array encrypt everything and sync it to 2 seperate cloud storage providers. If in the event that your local copy burns down you can pull copies from online storage. Otherwise it's at your finger tips whenever you need it. If you think that you must store it offsite make sure when you create the disks you setup parity files so if some of the files are corrupt you can recover. Par2 files work a treat for this.
Yeap, stick it under your skin. Five gigabytes isn't that much after all. It could easily fit on a uSD card, so you'll hardly even notice that it's there. If you happen to have an untimely demise in a house fire, it is no longer your concern. You can also be reasonably assured that the storage medium will melt when you combust, which further enhances the security.
Seriously though, decide upon your priorities. Your data is too important to store offsite. Yet it is too important to store onsite too. Which is it? If you decide to store it offsite, there are plenty of options that don't including storing it online. This includes placing it in a safety deposit box or giving it to a family member or longstanding friend. Just store the data on an SD card inside of an envelope, so that it can be filed away without being lost. Encryption will solve most of the trust issues. If something goes wrong on their end, such as them being a victim of a fire or burglary, remember that it is just a backup. You can create another backup to replace it.
I have to disagree with everyone who is suggesting shipping physical copies offsite. They have the right idea -- a fireproof safe is about as failure prone of a strategy as there is, but I disagree with the premise that physical copies offsite is a better idea than using 'the cloud'. Offsite security isn't 100% unless it's a bank (and even then, it's like 99.999%), it's hard to keep up to date without a non-trivial time investment (will you go run a new copy to the bank every day?), it's error prone (did you remember to copy ALL the files), and it's prone to corruption (are today's DVD-R didn't have a burn defect?). Instead, I'd suggest something like this: 1) Use a cloud backup service, like Crashplan. Crashplan lets you encrypt your stuff before it's sent to their servers. They don't know the password -- that's on you. Several platforms work this way; Crashplan is just an example. 2) Put your files in an encrypted container -- something a TrueCrypt container. Save all your files in there. Have your backup service (ex- Crashplan) backup the encrypted container (don't directly backup the files within it). The initial upload of the container may take hours (maybe even days) for 5gb, but only incremental differences will be uploaded after that. Tell Crashplan to scan the file nightly for changes -- don't have it scan in 'real-time'. Now you have a backup platform that is encrypted twice, backed up offsite, and is kept up-to-date, and is relatively immune to corruption. You could layer on more security & encrypt the files within the TrueCrypt container (ex- NTFS EFS encryption). If this isn't enough for your security needs, then you better be storing some file about the JFK assassination on your computer.
as far as safety from disaster goes, cloud storage is definitely the best solution.
People think a fire turns everything to molton slag. There was much that survived even when the 2 cars in the garage were reduced to burnt hulks.
Don't have any experience with such a thing with modern multi-100 Gig drives, but traditionally drives were built like tanks.
I think you're too focused on the risk of your backups being compromised. Do you store all your data only on encrypted hard drives with passphrases that you have to enter at boot time, on machines that auto-lock after a short timeout? If not, then you're probably at way more risk of data exposure through theft of "live" media and machines than backups, even stored offsite.
Not to mention the fact that a fire safe is a juicy target for Mr Burglar when you're away from home.
IMO the solution to the issue of cumbersome storage is to heavily encrypt, multiply duplicate and distribute your data.
I GPG-encrypt zip files, copy them to USB keys, and post the USB memory keys to my mother. Small USB keys are practically free now. She posts her backups to me too, along with outdated backup USB keys for re-use. This isn't all that frequent, so it serves for worst-case DR, but it has the handy effect of keeping old backups for quite a long time in case of accidental deletion not detected immediately etc.
I've also left an old laptop hard drive with photos with her, for example. Unencrypted because I don't much care if they get out, but it'd be easy enough to use an encrypted file system and store the keys elsewhere.
Key storage is the important part. Those keys must be in multiple places but stored fairly securely. If you lose the keys, your encrypted backups are worthless. A safe deposit box is an option, but it's kind of expensive and not necessarily as safe as you might like to think. I keep my GnuPG private in paper and electronic form in a couple of places, passphrase protected. Only I know the passphrase. So if I have a head injury when my house burns down I'm in trouble, but really, what else is there to do?
I also use SpiderOak for cloud sync of much of my data. Anything particularly interesting like key financial and identity records, passwords, etc, gets gpg-encrypted first. The rest is in the clear on my laptop, and I'm at much more risk of my laptop being stolen than of SpiderOak being compromised. SpiderOak offers versioning and deleted file tracking, which is very important, since many people's backup routines fail to properly account for files that are accidentally deleted/damaged at some unknown point older than the last backup rotation.
(I really should get a fire safe and run a spare SSD in there for up-to-date protection from more moderate incidents; that way I could real-time sync it from my laptop via the media PC.)
Isn't Copt or Syriac as spoken by Middle Eastern Christians tracing their geneologies to the First Century pretty much the same thing?
Here's the thing you didn't address, which is harr2969's fundamental axiom of backups: if it isn't automated it doesn't happen. YOU MUST AUTOMATE.
For that reason, you need to place a bigger weight on cloud options. You listed a few specific issues with cloud. I believe there are easy and specific ways to address them. The tool I'll leverage for my answer is Crashplan, although others have suggested other tools.
Cloud Concern 1 - someone else is responsible for my data: Crashplan can be peer based. In that mode, you still have control of the data at your friend/family member's house.
Cloud Concern 2 - I could lose it to hackers: Crashplan can apply a backup-specific password on top of whatever standard file-level encryption you prefer for your personal data..
Cloud Concern 3 - The entity going out of business: The resources to run the program are on you, not on them with a peer based model.
Cloud Concern 4 - Once it leaves my home, I no longer fully control it, which is unacceptable: Peer-based, again, you're in control.
Cloud concern 5 - Cloud based costs $$: you didn't even mention this one, but the peer model is free.
Cloud concern 6 - harr2969 is a shill for Crashplan: Nope. It's a good program and I use it.
Encrypt, and put it on 3 64G+ SD cards. Tiny things you can tape to the bottom of your desk at work (or a better hiding place), one in your fire safe, and one in the car. It doesn't matter whether they are lost, if you trust the encryption. And you'll always have a copy if your main is lost.
Media is cheap. Make extra copies if it's that important. Then scatter them (in places you can easily recover them from, of course).
Learn to love Alaska
Yours is the most insightful comment here.
I _used_to_be_ (humbly and quietly in the background) a successful composer and musician, with five albums and a movie soundtrack in production at the time of my disaster. I lost about 60 thousand hours of work (not including the work of others, so roughly half a million man-hours in total).
1. My studio / house was burgled. This included analogue tape, every CD, every hard disk, etc.
2. I went to my offsite backup and picked up my backup disks.
3. I was then mugged on the way home (not related to the robbery).
My situation mirrored that of a victim of fire or flood.
To extend your advice: You need THREE OR MORE PHYSICAL BACKUPS in separate places. Leave them lying around in as many places as you can. A drawer, your parents' house, workplace, friends' places. Learn not to delete. Fill and store. Even stuff you think is bad. Put stuff on all sorts of media. When you fill a USB stick, put it somewhere else, spend 10 dollars and start a new one. The moment you think: "I should back this up", just grab it on a DVD and put it somewhere else again. Anything and everything.
My experience is that when you lose that much, even an old SIM with a few crusty mp3s of an old gig can make you cry with joy. The only data I had left was on those bits and pieces of junk left lying around various places. However it wasn't enough to rebuild.
If you don't follow this advice, you may, like me, lose your life, sanity and credibility. I am now 45 without a history. Not even a photo of my mum.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You've said this is for backup purposes.
So what you need to do, is get truecrypt, cyphpershed, or veracrypt. Make a file big enough to hold your stuff, and put it in there.
Then back THAT file up to the cloud.
Without the password, they have a bunch of random data. You never give them the password, only using them as a remote storage device for a bunch of random 1s and 0s. If and when you want your data back, you bring back the big file, and then mount it- good to go.
Now, there are reasons to keep your stuff local, but you don't seem to have any of them.
For your list of concerns: a DVD backup is not going to have issues with water, but hot enough will destroy anything. I would personally consider a backup external hard drive, one local, one remote, encrypted as above if needed. If you are concerned about water, simply place the hard drive in something waterproof.
2500 C60 cassette tapes to be exact.
lose != loose
I actually experienced the scenario you're talking about: fire in my apartment complex. Fortunately, nobody was hurt but several people lost all their possessions. Lucky for me, the fire only got within 90 feet of my place [while the fire was raging I was sweating bullets]. This was the one day I didn't have my laptop [which was my previous backup in case of fire] with me and I was out at the time.
I now use a 64GB USB stick that I carry on my keyring, so it's always with me. I also have one that's in the trunk of my car [under the spare tire].
Additionally, mailing the the USB stick to a family member or friend [one that you trust]. Also, get a safe deposit box. This can hold a full blown 4GB USB portable drive that can keep a lot more data. Because you stated that you only need 5GB or so, this makes the USB stick the ideal solution.
If you're paranoid, encrypt the backup.
Keep multiple disks of whatever variety and rotate them. That is, backup to disk A on Monday, disk B on Tuesday, etc. That way, if the actual backup process croaks the backup media (e.g. power failure during the backup), you still have other copies. This rotation also applies to trips to the safe deposit box and return mailings from your trusted friend with the older backup drives.
Of course, you can do the encryption yourself locally and send it to the cloud [as others have suggested]. Use multiple vendors in case one goes out of business. Actually, this may not work too well because of ISP datacaps and slow uplink speeds if you have a lot of data, not because of the cloud storage company per se.
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there
Seriously, paper is the most permanent thing that we know of. I did some consulting work with a long-term data storage company several years ago, and we found that no current data format is really stable for more than 5-10 years. Well, the one way that actually works is to make a metal CD master of your data, press a test CD, test it for data integrity, and then store the master. Metal stored correctly lasts indefinitely, and you can make a copy any time that you need it. Kind of expensive, though.
Having said that, the best advice is to print our you most important documents with on good quality acid-free paper with a good laser printer, and all of your picture with a good quality photo process printer. Then save those documents in your sealed fireproof safe. Truth is that most people don't really have that much truly archive quality data. Pick your couple of hundred pages of financial documents and personal/family stories, and your couple of hundred best pictures. That much is easy to store, and we have good readable paper documents from many of hundreds of years ago.
Make a spike out of Sch80 PVC
Please trickle in lead low voltage wires for aux power
Batter in bottom
Solar on top to charge it
Airport WiFi for access with Time Capsule or the like
Big enough hard drive to hold everything you'll want.
Do it in RAID-wise with two drives incase one fails.
Use low energy drives so minimal heat.
Seal it all up so moisture stays out.
Bury it under ground with antenna out and cell.
Paranoid? Setup a second remote one.
My family all use tapes stored in safe deposit boxes. The same fire is highly unlikely to destroy both your house and your bank. (and even if it did, the boxes are typically stored in a fireproof room.)
GENERATION 667: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation
Encrypt it hard, put it on a solid USB stick like the all-metal Kingston ones and put it on your keychain.
Or if you are worried about losing your keys or not being able to get to them when you evacuate, give it to a family member.
We are the 198 proof..
Unfortunately the Fire Department Standard Operating Procedure was that every fire was suspicious until proven otherwise, and the site was declared a crime scene. Consequently the Business was denied access to the site for several weeks until the situation was resolved and the remaining building could be made safe.
By that stage enough of their customers had moved to another accountancy firm and they were unable to survive with the remaining customers despite being able to completely rebuild their IT infrastructure.
I'd suggest in your example you may want to consider some form of removable media (5 GB will easily fit on a dual-layer DVD) and keep the backups in a secure safe at another family members house in case of disaster. With backups that size you could make several copies and keep them at multiple locations. Alternatively, encrypt the backups and keep a copy at work.
...multiple copies in multiple places: It's the only way to be sure.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
If I believe US movies and TV shows, the car is often stored in the house.
This. And it was stupid of the asker to even pull the "I don't trust cloud providers" with Google and Microsoft not going anywhere for awhile. Microsoft in particular respects privacy and permissions is the better bet. Worried about hackers, as you said, encrypt locally and upload.
Multiple copies will probably be the best solution. Just like redundancy with storage involves multiple devices, your backup should simply be the same.
Tape storage is probably the better choice for long term "offline" data. So having 3 backups in different locations would probably give you the best ability to restore later on.
Had a workshop fire last year and what did the job for me was having two drives (working copy, and a rolling backup done with SVN) on physically opposite sides of the workshop. If it's not a lot of stuff, just use USB sticks that are physically scattered around your place, one will survive.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
The answer is still the cloud.
You're not vulnerable to hackers because you encrypted it before uploading it.
You're not vulnerable to the company going out of business because you still have your local machine. The only vulnerability is that the company goes unexpectedly out of business with no advance warning on the same day as your house is burned down. The great thing about two such radically different forms of storage (home + cloud) is that their failure models are uncorrelated and so vanishingly less likely to both fail at the same time.
They make special NAS products that are designed to be fireproof and waterproof.
https://iosafe.com/products-2b...
Just dig a hole in the back yard and place the USB key or whatever in a water tight container and fill it in. Encrypting it would be a good idea too, just in case the neighbors dog digs it up. For something simple, you could try an otterbox drybox. These are used for kayaking and diving and are waterproof. The only problem might be cracking during the winter. You might want to dig below the frost line or put insulation around it.
Another option would be to get an external shed and store stuff in there in a fire safe.
Better idea: Encrypt the data, stick it on SD cards, and then mail them to random people. Be sure to email yourself with their addresses just in case you ever need to get the data back. Imagine the thrill they'll get from receiving a brand new 64 GB SD card in the mail for free!
Then again, maybe that's not such a good idea. But it is still more reliable than cloud storage. :-D
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http://gizmodo.com/388465/char...
Seriously, as others mentioned, one home, one offsite in a bank security box. a portable external HDD will fit in the smallest ones for big backups, or a USB thumb drive/sd card..
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
5 gigs is nothing anymore.
As previously mentioned, you can just use a thumbstick, keep one on a keychain, another at work. Write a simple batch file to copy files quickly and easily... Problem is, that requires work. Any backup plan that requires the user to actually do something is bound to fail at some point.
This is why I like Crashplan. Yes, you can use their cloud (reasonably priced), but you can also just send encrypted files to any remote system(s) of your choice as well. The best part is that not only is it easy, It's free and works on most major OS. I setup a small "server" (old desktop with a big drive) in an office. In exchange for backing up their files to my home, I backup my files to their office. It even emails you updates and warnings if anything goes wrong. It's pretty much the best backup I've found for homes and small business.
.
I only backup necessary stuff though, anything I can afford to lose is backed up to a local drive.
Encryption won't keep them from wiping it and using it for something else, or giving it away to the first person who asks. Again, can't tell if I'm talking about cloud storage.
Learn to love Alaska
The most effective way for your data to survive a fire (or flood, tornado, lava, etc) is for it to not be in the fire. If you don't want to automate off-site backups then periodically drop a hard disk into a convenient bank safety deposit box.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
into naked pics of celebrities and post it on 4chan. It will be around forever.
Just don't store it in Benghazi.
Table-ized A.I.
PS: http://www.jwz.org/doc/backups...
I keep my backups offsite - at the house of a relative. I don't worry about security because I keep it encrypted, and I know enough about how to apply cryptography to be sure no-one is decrypting this without the passphrase - of which only one copy exists, memorised.
Every year... a couple of GBs... of most important financial data? Who are you? Citibank?
Don't try to survive a fire. Your data won't. And if it does, you probably won't be allowed near it for a long time, and others might well come along and try to pillage things from the ashes if you live anywhere populated.
Avoid one fire/disaster from affecting your data completely instead.
I swap a disk with my brother every time we meet. If you didn't trust them not to read it (then why are you relying on them to store it?), you could just encrypt it.
Problem solved.
Hell, just rent a storage box somewhere and put an encrypted set of backups into it once every so often.
Though the chance of you surviving a fire is pretty low, the chances of two storage locations having simultaneous disasters such that you can't retrieve the second in time when the first has gone down, is even more miniscule. The more storage locations you add, the tinier the chances of absolute loss are.
It's a RAID. Think of it as a family-and-friends RAID if you must. And ensuring the chances of X simultaneous failures is so low that it's completely improbably is a damn sight better than trying to make a single fireproof disk.
For only a few GBs? I have one of those tough memory sticks as a keyring for my car keys. On there I have a few encrypted containers that hold the stuff I would like immediate access to should disaster strike. Plus most valuable photos, etc.. This does not mitigate the daily backups to various locations, obviously. But I figure that if there is a disaster then I will mostly likely want to drive away from it and will have with me that really important stuff.
Sewer pipe? Can I sftp to a sewer pipe?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
who will host the backup of your disk in his house.
... he also does regular offsite backups.
And so should you.
Problem solved.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Create a watertight storage safe with - say - a Raspberry Pi and a bunch of USB disks. Connect it with power and ethernet wiring. Bury it six feet deep in your crawl space. Hope that the Raspberry SD card doesn't get corrupted.
You can - at some expense - get fire rated safes that will protect magnetic media against a substantial fire. A small one is a few hundred pounds, although larger ones run into many thousands. You might consider a safe of this type.
apparently this is how republicans believe the internet was made
[site]
Encrypt with GPG and a 20 character random passphrase.
FIFTY.
Use a passphrase, not a password
Rewrite the drive's firmware so it cannot be used for anything but encrypted backup and only when given a certain key. You'll just need to borrow some of Equation's hard drive firmware rewriting malware, and use it correctly.
Multiple copies in geo diverse locations is going to be the most reliable way to keep your data safe. So, a safe deposit box, in a location that is as far from your home as you can justify is your best option. Also, since it will not be under your direct control, you will want to make sure you encrypt it. As for archival media, I use Corsair Survivor USB sticks.
Good point -- I was about to ask the GP where he planned to store the 20 character random passphrase that was also safe from fire or other disasters...
bank safe deposit box. $60/yr. Perfect size for 3 NAS drives....so 9-12 TB and improving...back everything up quarterly, monthly, weekly...whatever you need. house burns down, you have your safe deposit box. bank burns down, create new copies from home for new bank. house and bank burn down? probably the apocalypse and you're not that worried about storage anymore
When all of your wishes have been granted, many of your dreams will be destroyed - Marilyn Manson
So you setup gpg, setup a key as normal.
Setup git-annex. It supports several backends, including rsync which works with rsync.net and an amazon options, and a few others. I only use ssh backends myself.
Anyway, you can setup some backends as encrypted backends and anything that goes there gets encrypted. It can only be read by someone with a clone of the original git repo and the gpg key to decrypt it. So you keep an encrypted copy of that seperately. Its much smaller, so you can keep many copies of it, its just index information.
Then after a disaster, you get a copy of the index/key, decrypt it, and have full access to your offsite cloud storage. You can even have multiple types of backend at different services. Hell if you have a friend who runs linux and doesn't mind you using some of his disk, you can use it as a remote.
Oh, and carry an encrypted clone of the index repo with you on a usb stick.
If the password/phrase is good you shouldn't need to worry too much. Learning to come up with decent enough passwords is pretty easy too. Everybody has their favorite methods, I like things with mnemonics, they work shockingly well, I could tell you with decent accuracy some root passwords we used for all of a few months at a job I left 10 years ago.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
...but encrypt everything I can't afford to lose with my own 2, 048 bit key. IM frequently less than HO encrypted cloud storage isn't secure unless you have control of the encryption key.
I keep the key on optical media in my house and a printed copy in a safe deposit box at the bank.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
Put it on a portable drive, encrypt it and put it in a drawer/locker at work or family's house. No cloud required.
I encrypt my very important backups (pictures mostly, some documents and software development) and put them on Amazon S3. I also do the portable drive idea, but that is more like cold storage in case I get a nasty ransomware that finds all of my backups.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
People posting here should know such things by themselfs. Really, that's a stupid question, with two obvious answers
a) Cloud and encryption. Hey, 5 GB is nothing
b) give a usb stick to your mom. problem solved.
> If you just encrypt the data before sending it to the cloud, nobody in their sane mind would waste resources decrypting it (specially for such low hanging fruits).
Same's true of an encrypted sd card or USB stick under the liner in the trunk of your car. And the data transfer rate to put it there is a lot higher than a typical internet connection.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
the low hanging fruit is getting the data from your workplace unencryped instead of breaking the encryption in the cloud.
Ultimately it depends on how much the data is worth to you when it comes to assessing how much you should spend on the solution. If you want to use a cloud provider then I would also look into the commercial inline encryption appliances (e.g. SafeNet) as then you control the visibility of the data in the cloud. If you want to spend a bit less then you could look into cheaper encryption options but again storing the data offsite is a must. Have you spoken to others in your industry that are facing the same challange? If so you might find a colo opportinuty that will keep costs down and be beneficial to both organisations. Obviously you still want to ensure the Integrity and Confidentiality of the data you store at the remote location but you have offsite storage and you could possibly negotiate a better deal for a mutually beneficial agreement then from a third party. Just food for thought.
If you're worrying about which data storage medium would be most likely to survive a fire, you've already lost. It's about as stupid as getting a circumcision to avoid getting HIV.
Since you're asking Slashdot for advice, you can't be that big of a deal, which means you need to protect against idiot script kiddies and basically nothing else. Any meaningful adversary wouldn't hack you, but rather confront you through blackmail, seduction, or just plain old hitting you with a crowbar. If you are a big deal, or have ties to organized crime or other significant risks (just covering all the bases here), then what the hell are you asking here for? Hire a competent security professional; ask Slashdot for tips on finding one of those, if you must.
Now that this is established: what you do is you wad up your files with whatever you want (tar, zip, whatever you're comfortable with) and use AES (or CAST5, or whatever). Then, if you really want, you can etch the key into a big piece of steel or stone and put that in your safe. Using the alphabet {|, -, /, \} for ease of carving and to avoid ambiguity, you can represent it in 128 strokes. Assuming 2"x2" space for each one (including border), that's about 3.5 sqft, or ~5 sheets of steel in US Letter/A4 size. A more sane thing to do, might be to store copies of the key on paper in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory in the basement of one or more of your friends' or family's homes.
By the way, I find it hilarious that the same crowd which once would have told you to encrypt and store remotely is now tripping over itself to find ridiculous reasons not to, just because it's easy enough for anyone to do now.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains. The stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
Commit your taxes to memory twisted mentat!
Well I am pushing a couple hundred meg now of financial related data, but should probably start deleting things as I have close to 20 years worth of stuff. Granted this is for myself and my wife and includes, credit card statements, pay stubs, checking account statements, savings account statements, loan payment histories, multiple 401k statements, multiple 403b statements, IRA statements, other investment statements, tax documents, etc going back almost 20 years. Also I scanned in other important documents for each family member like birth certificates, social security cards, passports, driver license, marriage certificate, etc. so I have electronic copies of those as well. Then for good measure I also scanned in other documents of importance like car titles, bills of sale for firearms (they contain the serial number, who I purchased them from, and when I purchased them), insurance policies, wills, etc. As I said this is a few hundred megs but depending on what else one wants to backup like family photos or movies I could see it getting to a few gig pretty easily without being considered an obscene amount of data.
Time to offend someone
Once it leaves my home, I no longer fully control it, which is unacceptable.
Until it leaves your home, it's not really a backup, it's just another version. Finding a media to survive a fire is solving the wrong problem. The correct problem is to find a way for your data to survive a catastrophe that may or may not be of a type that you can guess before it happens, and the correct solution is off-site backups. Off-site does not imply cloud based, although cloud does qualify. A safe deposit box at a bank also works. Your grandmothers attic works. There are plenty of places that are outside your home but within your control.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
As long as you have a sub-basement below the frost line; you could carve a narrow transport tube, with a larger holding area at the other end, and deposit additional capsules.
Retrieval is a harder problem, and you better make sure you choose non-combustible non-thermally conductive materials and a nice long plug for your transport tube.
Unless you have the world's most amazing fire safe or root cellar, you have three options that I see. First, easy: pick a drive that survives to zero degrees fahrenheit, and when you're not using it, put it in the freezer in your kitchen or garage. Most fires will kill it, but you'll get a bit more protection. Second, harder: pick a small drive, like a USB Key. Write it once a month or so. Store it in a safety deposit box at the bank, where only you have access. Storing something *in* your house that needs to be fireproof is nigh impossible. Storing it somewhere externally that's easily accessed and still secure is a problem you can solve with cash. Third, actually pretty trivial. Store it to *two* cloud providers, so if one goes out of business, you still have your data. Google Drive and Dropbox, for example. One trick; encrypt it locally before ever uploading it. Winzip (or Linux's zip) should both be able to produce and use strong AES-256 keys. Currently, the expected amount of time to get 50% odds of breaking AES-256 is exponentially more computers than currently exist running for the entire life of the universe, using suns as fuel. (With brute force, no one can do it, ever.) So the "someone will hack me" is up to you. The "two cloud providers" is probably what you want.
That's how I do it at least...
up 12 days, 22:30, 2 users, load averages: 993.20, 994.21, 994.56
*makes note to limit user processes...
You need multiple copies. Stick a BD is the safe, another at a local bank and upload to an offsite backup company like crashplan or even plain S3. All of these have failure modes, but the likelihood of them all failing at the same time is miniscule.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
I'll stick with cloud and local backups thanks.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
a small usb-stick - because they got the least amount of plastic that could warp. put them in a vacuum flask, so they are nicely insulated.
Off-Galaxy
Assuming a large enough SD or USB, why not just keep the backup on your person? As safe as your are and readily available. If your wallet isn't good enough, get something for your key chain, a wrist band with a pocket or perhaps a pendant?
Especially Amazon, now that they are have S3 replication between regions available. Upload it there, have it replicate to Oregon, the Bay Area, and Virginia at once.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
You're approaching this all wrong, thinking you need a storage medium that's heat-resistant, when we don't even know if such a thing exists. (At least for consumer media, like disks and tape and hard drives.) And the answer is much simpler: Get a safety deposit box at your bank, make a copy of everything in your safe and put it in the safety deposit box. Your bank is EXTREMELY resistant to fires at your home.
I'm not sure of the exact odds but I would put a house fire at around the odds of being struck by lighting. It's going to vary based on how old your house is and the age of it's electrical system but house fires are extremely rare.
Do you have a shed or detached garage? I have detached garage that I ran connectivity to using a 100mpbs full duplex ~$40 tplink power line adapter. In the garage I have a ddwrt router for extending wifi and an old PC for garage tunes, IPTV (hdhomerun), user manuals for car wrenching; and perfect for an outside the house rsync of critical docs (single truecrypt container).
I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class, especially since I rule.
Suspend an SSD by the cable in a bucket and then spray the whole thing full of quickfoam to make a watertight seal. Then bury the bucket in the backyard with the cable exposed. Cover it with a junction box and get one of those industrial Ethernet USB extenders. Then run a conduit and CAT6 into your house. Surely your house fire won't penetrate even a few feet of dirt. Now I bet you feel silly for asking when the answer was so obvious.
Sorry, but your neurotic requirements leaves no other option.
Alternatively, take some happy pills, learn about encryption, and store it at multiple online facitlities.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
they won't if you pile them up in the shape of a pyramid. maybe also get a permit to allow yourself to be mummified and buried in the middle of it.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Personally I suggest 2 usb external hard drives. One in the home media-rated fire/water safe and one in the bank safe deposit box. Swapping out the drives periodically.
Do a backup to the current home drive. Take it to the bank and swap drives. Do a second backup to the drive you brought home from the bank and put it in the home safe. Both drives in both locations are now current.
I end up doing this about 3 or 4 times a year. Had one drive go bad in the last 5 years, just bought a replacement and continued on.
And of course I have an external RAID box for my daily backups and non-fire related disasters.
The short and easy answer is a regular harddrive. The magnetic patterns will usually survive, even if the electronics do not. There are recovery services that can get the data back, who you don't have to pay unless there is a fire.
But of course the best answer is "off site", like they said. Just putting a flash drive in your car might be enough, although not as secure from theft.
A lot depends on what you concern is. Like which is more important, recovering the data or securing it from theft? What locations can you have reliable access to? How often do you need to refresh it?
Also, how long does it have to last? If that is a long time, many types of media will be obsolete and not readable on new computers. In that case you might have to also store a computer with it, or at least the necessary drive.
How likely is it that any of those three will provide cloud storage that is actually affordable? S3 costs a small fortune. My home backups span... I think fourteen terabytes of fireproof hard drives. Assuming I'm doing the math right, it would cost me a whopping $5,040 annually to store those backups using S3 standard storage. And if I ever needed to restore from the backup, it would cost me an additional $15,120. So backing up for a year and then recovering from one hard drive failure would cost me as much as a new car. Even if I used glacier storage, it would still cost $1,680 per year, plus $1,330 if I ever needed to fully restore that backup.
At those prices, Amazon's cloud storage only makes sense for your most critical data, or for data that absolutely has to be available quickly from around the world (replication for performance reasons). It is completely impractical as a backup medium. Ignoring the fireproof aspect, it would be cheaper to buy new backup drives every three months than to use S3 glacier storage for backups. It would be cheaper to throw away your backup drives every month than to use S3 standard storage. That's not cloud storage; it's sky-high storage.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Cloud is free. Self-encrypted cloud storage is leak proof.
This guy (aka_bigred) is asking for under 5 GB. You can use free cloud storage - multiple dropbox accounts, gmail filesystem etc.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Put your data on SD chips, more than one chip in case there are errors, in a decent metal/glass vacuum thermos bottle in your fire-proof safe. Bury another thermos bottle in your back yard. One of them will survive.
Unlimited storage, provided you don't mind manually clicking and dragging everything you want to back up, and waiting for it to transfer immediately. That's a backup in much the same way that the flash drive I carry around in my pocket is a backup. It's a quick way to temporarily store a handful of files just in case my laptop dies while I'm traveling, but I can't viably back up a server's hard drive to it.
BTW, has anyone ever tried to upload a few terabytes to see if it really is unlimited, or just "unlimited"? :-) I'd try it myself, but it would take years over my 640 kbps uplink.
Oh, yeah. That's the other problem with cloud storage: ISPs with pathetically slow upload speeds. *sigh*
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Banks offer safe deposit boxes where you can safely store media as a flash drive, cd, or even a small disk drive. Use an offsize rotating backup schedule of 3 devices to ensure you always have one in the safe.
Get a dropbox account. Store it online, make a secure password. Or buy a TB usb3 drive, encrypt your data, copy your data and take it with you and keep it at a 2nd location. Dont burn a bunch of dvd's to lock up in a firebox, that was good in 2003.