Ask HN: What is the best media for long term archival storage?
I know M-Disc is supposed to be good but finding media is hard.
Is there something better for long term storage of family photos and other important data?
Is there something better for long term storage of family photos and other important data?
52 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadCD-R because it is still around after more than two decades and the media is still in production, there are many drives and they are repairable.
My second choice would be DVD-R for similar reasons, but less history.
Third choice would be FAT formatted spinning disks used as write once. But they are much more susceptible to environmental flux.
Anything that is expensive or hard to come by or new, I would avoid…they’re almost certainly going to be a Zip drive equivalent in 20 years because there is no consumer demand for physical storage and less and less commercial demand because of the cloud.
But that’s me so YMMV. Good luck.
I don’t think the hardware was/is as widespread and I don’t expect blue ray was/is as commonly specified in government contracts, integrated into medical devices, etc.
My primary consideration with all digital media is what will the ecosystem be like in twenty years. How easy will it be to start with only a disk?
In 1997, I could say the same about Zip because Zip drives were everywhere until they weren’t because consumer behavior changed and CD-RW replaced the market.
There are still working Zip drives, but not a terrible many. Running one is only a matter of conjuring up a parallel port or scsi connection. Nevertheless most people who bet on Zip archives have regretted it sooner or later…and probably sooner.
Drives that read CD-R are almost anything that reads DVD or Blu-ray, plus all but the earliest CD drives. There’s not going to be a need to compete with gamers or retro computing enthusiasts.
That’s what I want in an archive strategy based on my experience over almost forty years. For me, archiving is enough of a project without involving jailbreaking a game console.
But that’s me and my bet. Other people have other priorities and I respect that.
Go cloud, ZFS or tape.
The cloud has a very low bus factor. Miss a payment and the data is gone. It provides high availability but low permanence and requires active management. It is inherently a poor archival medium.
“Tape” is a cluster of incompatible specifications and implementations. I know you don’t mean Quic 40, but that’s tape and about the last system that sold to regular computer users in big box retailers.
Sadly, magneto-optical discs never caught on.
Personally, I think storing data on an external Harddrive is the most stable option. You can keep upgrading the setup as required and the bit rot is minimal.
I backup my data on multiple drives, along with redundant copies stored in multiple locations.
I have heard good things about Tapes as well but have no personal experience with them.
Which is pretty much what is meant by "long-term archival storage".
This is more true the less standard your media is: 1600bps tape using Unix tar format is much easier to read today than some 1990's commercial backup program on some proprietary, hardware compression implementation using some oddball tape-in-cartridge media.
You still have issues with, eg. melted rubber on tape rollers, leaking capacitors, etc, etc, but that's a more tractable problem than finding the right weirdo media reader 50 (or 100, or whatever) years after it was obsolete.
In all seriousness, this isn't a popular opinion around here, but cloud storage. I back my photos up to both iCloud and OneDrive. This way there is triple redundancy if you include the local copy. I trust Apple and Microsoft a lot more than myself to protect my data from spilled beverages, floods, fires, other acts of god, or just my own stupidity in general.
It saves images and videos from any folder to the onedrive cloud.
I've configured it, and then I sync the onedrive to a Synology Nas at home.
- iCloud Drive
- OneDrive
- Google Photos - I still haven’t gone over the 15GB free space since Google instituted the limit. But I’ll pay for extra storage when needed.
- Amazon Drive - free with Prime
My videos get synced to everything but Amazon Drive.
RClone takes care of uploading to it. Works out to barely over $1/TB/month and AWS takes care of the media lifetime and all that.
I didn't bother with burned disks because then the backups are too local to me, nevermind spanking TBs across multiple disks.
https://www.mdisc.com/
I’ve been thinking of this question too, and think a combination of cloud storage (GDrive + iCloud), HDs, and these MDiscs is what I’ll do. Just haven’t bought the MDrive writer yet.
Those you can burn at home relies on a chemical reaction which will degrade after several years, faster if exposed to sunlight.
From the website: Verbatim M DISC™ optical media is the new standard for digital archival storage. Unlike traditional optical media, which utilize dyes that can break down over time, data stored on an M DISC is engraved on a patented inorganic write layer – it will not fade or deteriorate. This unique engraving process renders these archival grade discs practically impervious to environmental exposure, including light, temperature and humidity.
ISO/IEC 16963 standard longevity tests have proven the durability of M DISC technology, and it withstood rigorous testing by the US Department of Defense. Based on ISO/IEC 16963 testing, M DISC media has a projected lifetime of several hundred years. https://www.verbatim.com/subcat/optical-media/m-disc/#:~:tex....
So far, cutting edge commercial is https://www.piql.com/, the Norwegian company that did the GitHub Arctic code vault. Their tapes have instructions on how to decode the data inscribed on the tape itself.
Truly cutting edge (non-commercial) is Microsoft’s Project Silica optical storage as well as DNA storage.
I’ve been thinking about building something in this space since I started my career, but the business seems incredibly hard to figure out a revenue model for. Trying to have someone pay up front for eternity(?), always seemed like a steep price. Would love to hear others thoughts if they’ve talked to people about this.
I have a safe with my critical keys in it but that is only fire proof for 3 hours. If things got really hot those are gone. In theory it shouldn't be an issue as I have them backed up other places but it would give me peace of mind to have them on a fire proof media.
A random site[0] I found offering some of the solutions. Given the industry, I assume this is just the most highly astro-turfed platform, but there you go.
[0] https://cryptosteel.com/
They can rebuild them from backups somewhere else but that is about it. They're printed on paper in a safe because of this.
For the economics of storage see https://economicmodel.dshr.org/ and DSHR's other writing about archiving.
Of course there's still a chance that physical prints can be lost, stolen or destroyed in a house fire. But I think overall that's statistically much less likely to happen than digital media becoming obsolete or unreadable, or data stored online being deleted because the original uploader stopped paying the storage bill or didn't arrange for transfer of their accounts after their death.
The chances of losing digital and physical copies at the same time are pretty low.
I have gotten into habit of printing photos and ordering photobooks for not just us but also for relatives. The idea is sort of distributed backup of physical photos. Also they love it.
It really depends on your requirements.
It was a massive effort. So, I no longer do that.
I now just keep everything on my NAS. The volumes are mirrored. I have a removable HDD onto which I snapshot the entire NAS volume every night. I swap that drive out every month and send it off-site (and replace it with the one previously off-site). So I have live, local snapshot (up to 24 hours out-of-date), and off-site snapshot (up to 1 month out of date).
Everything I care about is rsync-ed daily to the NAS: home directories, photos, music, Time Machine laptop backups, machine configs, IMAP sync, CalDAV sync, CardDAV, Git repo clones, etc.
Every few years, I double the size of the NAS volume.
There's no monthly cost, and there's no concern about degradation of the media. The storage format is always current, as are the OS and tools required to read it. The only effort is the monthly off-site drive swap.
It won't outlive me, unless my heirs decide to continue to maintain it, but ... at that point I no longer care.