For me I had a stack dvd blanks left over, I decided to save a little bit of money and used them to back up folders of childhood photos, documents etc and place them inside their own jewel cases.
I do have a 2TB external HDD, But that I throw on LARGE steam game back ups and movies.
Sure, the “cloud” exists and I use that too but what if your intewebz goes down, good luck getting your backups until it’s back up.
What do you use? Optical media, tape drives etc?
I prefer optical media if possible. Should survive a few decades, assuming good quality discs.
But I’d much rather use LTO tape if it wasn’t so expensive to get the drive.
DVD’s will last about 15 years tops. I bought the highest quality 100 year rated AZZO dye DVDs. I used special tools from cdforums to make sure I burned at the speed that resulted in the lowest pi/pio errors rate ( the errors you don’t normally see because they’re corrected in drive). The ideal speed isn’t the slowest or fastest based on the drive and the media. I stored the DVDs in black dvd cases in my temperature controlled basement.
They all started having errors after 10 years.
Email the company – out of business? Lol
Verbatim is still around. They still say, “Up to 100 years”. 10 years is up to 100 years.
Play the lottery. You could win up to $1M dollars.
With the lottery, you could also just win $1M dollars (assuming that’s the jackpot). But I get your point.
It seems like an unlikely claim from them given your experience, but are they still going to be around 100 years after making that claim? And if they are, is anyone who cares going to be around to call them out on it? Lol
Just the other day I came across some CDs that I used to back up some important data about 15 years ago (and which I thought I’d lost). They were absolutely pristine 👌
I found my secondary school Video Production movies I made with my best friend 20 years ago haphazardly thrown into a spindle and I was able to rip it perfectly. I was ELATED. They are even better than I remembered before watching them again.
That’s really cool :D The creative photography that I’ve rediscovered has given me a reinvigorated sense of my artistic self-woth. The Hi-8 tape footage i’ve processed so far is more candid and bit of a mind-warp though…
Hell yeah! DO A ART, you only become better every time you do it! I am HORRIBLE at art but I was extremely great at video editing back in the day. Shoulda kept up at it!
Second vote for LTO. Stable and cheap medium. If only drives were cheaper.
I have a 2.5” drive with music that I made that’s ten years old and probably full of bit rot. I should replace that.
I have a couple of older drives used to back up photos and MP3s. They’re mirrored in case one falls.
I transferred my optical media to those drives just for accessibility but the discs are still in my garage somewhere. Lol
Burnable discs have a limited life span. Make sure you have duplicates, and test them regularly.
Iirc it’s about 20-25 years for DVDs. But like 75 years for Blu ray
M-discs are supposed to last longer
A few years ago I went through a 15-year-old collection of DVDs and a surprising number of the burned discs were no longer usable.
Size-wise I’d probably just get a handful of 256 gig USB sticks and make multiple copies keep them in a temperature and humidity controlled environment.
Get M-discs. It’s a special type of Blu-ray that lasts for hundrets if not thousands of years. You can use a regular Blu-ray burner to write to it.
I have absolutely no trust in those discs
They throw around the thousand year and 500 year and 5,000 year dates on the different brands
I’ve seen people report failures and some of the different brands of archival discs that claim the super long lifetimes.
Also keeping in mind that regular burnable DVDs are reported to have hundreds of years of lifetime I definitely have a great deal of those that failed that were burned in the early 2000s.
And there’s the fact that I would need 10 of them for my must-haves and probably 60 for my nice to haves
I really rather have it all on tape, there are tons of peer-reviewed studies on long time tape archiving. In every 7 years you can just read copy or set to freshen it up. but that s*** still too expensive.
If you’re this paranoid for your backups, I’d just go with AWS Glacia and dump all your encrypted data twice a year. You can get a TB of backup for about 1 € / month.
Do you have any idea what the cost is to restore 50 TB from that?
What happens when they decide to raise the price? It kind of leaves a person trapped there. And it’s also not like Amazon hasn’t lost data before. About 7 years ago couple of my S3 buckets disappeared and came back 6 months older than when they disappeared.
I’m right around that 50 to 60 TB mark. It’s annoying because it’s too expensive for hobbiest live storage too big for most removable media storage.
I currently keep a small hot store of the most important things. And I’m slowly splitting up the less important ISOs and putting them on cheap rotational media for cold store.
I’m really sad that crash plan shut down their consumer client. They had a really cool feature where you could run a client locally, run another client at a friend or family member’s house and back up to their target with full and to end encryption and encryption at rest. But there doesn’t appear to be anything that clean anymore.
Long-term goal, there was a guy I saw about 10 years ago that buried a raspberry pie with a POE hat in a large PVC tube 3 ft underground. He made it a I-SCSI target. I figure if the eight terabyte NVMe’s ever come down in price, I’ll stack up some PCI Express switching and make something truly magnificent.
Do you have any idea what the cost is to restore 50 TB from that?
I assumed you’re only paying per GB storage. At least that’s what their S3 pricing page says. I believe transfer cost only applies if you transfer from one S3 solution to another. I’m not using it myself, so I don’t know the details. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
What happens when they decide to raise the price?
If you depend on AWS you’re doing something wrong. You should at least adher to the 3-2-1 backup plan. If you do so, you can switch away from AWS any time they change their policy.
USB sticks are only rated for 10 years. So you should only expect 5. Physically they will last much longer but the electrons leak out of the floating gate unless re-written.
I usually wrap my USBs in a few layers of tape to reduce the leakage
10-15 years for DVD. I have extensive experience with DVDs. I don’t have experience with Blu-ray but I would expect it to be half the rated lifespan too.
I’ve got oodles of 20-25 year old DVDs and never found a dud. But it’s good to set expectations.
Burned DVD’s or mass manufactured? Purchased can last forever although aluminum substrate corrosion has happened in humid environments.
Burned! I have soooo many data discs hahahaha
M-Disc Blu-rays last a thousand years literally. It will outlive all of your other mediums a hundred-fold.
I have like 5 USB drives which I save stuff on, I happen to have a lot of games on the one hard drive I store the majority of my games on, and that drive has made it emphatically clear in recent months that it is on its way out. Uploading to the cloud never quite piqued my interest.
Why not? As long as you have more than one copies, and you validate their integrity over time, it shouldn’t be a problem.
I just made a DIY NAS, i mean I bought a cheap Intel N100 based minipc, installed xpenology and called it a day, I have backups set up, home assistant, jellyfin, immich etc
