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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.
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).
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.
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!
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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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.
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Sewer pipe? Can I sftp to a sewer pipe?
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Agreed. I use an alternative to all this: all my data is backed up on a small eeePC in my attic and send sent to a friend of mine through SSH. I have 1TB of data storage at his place, and I offer in return 1TB of data storage in my place for him to do the same.
Sensitive stuff is encrypted so I don't care if he can see all my files. The bulk of it is pictures/personal movies in terms of size. encfs works wonders for low sensitive data, the rest can go through TrueCrypt/keepass2 encryption or even PGP.
And it costs me zero (minus the 1TB I have reserved for him).
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Encrypt with GPG and a 20 character random passphrase.
FIFTY.
Use a passphrase, not a password