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Ask HN: How do you use to store your personal files long-term?

1 points by fgblanch ↗ HN
Hi HN community, I'm interested in knowing what are your preferred strategy or strategies for long-term storage of your personal files (from photos, other media, old payrolls, tax fillings, old side projects, college docs, backups...) I realized I have many of my personal long-term files sparsely distributed across many cloud services (which is not optimal economically) and in some external drives (which is not optimal for long-term data security). I wanted to ask you what are your strategies, which are your decision factors. For example, cloud vs local, security, accessibility, convenience...

Thanks,

5 comments

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phendrenad2
First I copy everything into one folder, and then I copy that to two hard drives. Every few years I buy two new drives, copy the old backup, add all of the new files from the last few years. Old drives are thrown away, because I don't trust hard drives for more than a few years. Also I use cloud services like onedrive and icloud, so the only way I'll ever need my backup drives is if one of those services dies.
dv_dt
I send all data to my desktop system Documents folder, then restic encrypted backups go from the main system drives to hot storage drives in the same desktop, then offsite cloud backups of the restic repos.
mdmglr
Backblaze B2 with rclone and encryption.

It’s a loosing battle as a single person to be dealing with hard drives and self hosting a NAS. Companies who focus on this problem have the funding to do it better.

fgblanch
any concern with the company going out of business or login account getting blocked (for example Gmail banning your account) ?
mdmglr
Certainly a concern. So for Backblaze I use an email address on my own domain which is then forwarded (thanks to Cloudflare; previously Gandi) to another email service which is currently iCloud. I did this after hearing about horror stories of loosing email access with Google a few years ago as you mentioned. I’m running on the assumption that Backblaze, Cloudflare and Apple will not all try to screw me.

I’ll say for me the most important data is family photos which I’ve got them duplicated in Amazon Photos. B2 is the hedge against Amazon, and Amazon is the hedge against B2.

For other documents, I’m willing to trust b2 for now. They have not given me a reason not to trust them. One benefit of reading HN daily is I’d hope to see red flags posted on HN if b2 is having problems. Maybe I’ll consider having an alternative. I also don’t want my data floating across multiple vendors even if encrypted.