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Ask HN: What's a reliable long-term personal storage medium?

9 points by antjanus ↗ HN
Having just moved from a big house to a small apartment, I realized how much crap I carry around with me. From hundreds of printed (slowly decaying) photos to boxes full of (scannable) paperwork.

I realized that I don't particularly trust digital storage because of a recent harddrive failure that was unrecoverable (I lost several months worth of photos).

So, HN, what's the best way to store photos, documents, scans, and anything else in terms of longevity (5-10 years+)? What's a good strategy in terms of backups and even file formats?

9 comments

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hashtree
Never trust a single piece of hardware. Never trust two either.

For me:

  - SANs/NASes make use of ZFS-Z2 or RAID 6. But, RAID is NOT a backup!
  - Have two or four separate backups in rotation (depending on how critical
  the data is). Half of which are located at a local bank's safety deposit box. Boxes
  typically run less than $75 per year. Work with the branch manager to get a
  top-level box for improved flood mitigation.
  - Each week, make a trip to the bank and switch them out.
  - These are awesome transports for this approach:
  http://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Forensics-Drive-Transporter-Classic/dp/B002IY6B9U
  - Careful of SSDs in RAID, they tend to all fail within a short period of time
  due to their reliable point of failure with writes.
If it is critical data, I get a little more crazy. ;) If the cloud is more your style, you might check out SpiderOak (but, again, unless treated as a backup it should not be used as such). I make use of this as well.
andyakb
This seems way over the top. How muuch extra reliability does this get you when compared to RAID+1 locally and amazon glacier or s3? For the super paranoid, add a non-amazon based online backup as well. This seems to have made sense before these services were available, but just doesn't seem worthwhile anymore
hashtree
Hmm... I should reframe this. I just noted it says personal. I didn't see the qualifier, ignore my previous post as it is for my actual business data (e.g. huge persisted data stores, logs, etc).

Personal looks like:

  - Two or more personal computers (e.g. iMac and MBA) with SpiderOak syncing between.
  - Once weekly I backup to disk (basic rsync), take said disk to safety deposit
  box (as mentioned above), trade it out with another with the previous weeks data.
  This makes sense for me (over AWS) for the amount of data I have,
  the fact I do this anyways for my business, and that I do not trust most services
  with my data.
  - More recently, I've been doing a year-end permanent archive to disk going back
  2 to 3 years.
a3n
For hardware: the ones you continue to upgrade to as technology progresses.
alixr
I know you said you don't trust digital storage, but discs remain the best way to backup files for me. I purchased a blu-ray burner a couple years back and I've hardly made it through my first stack of discs. The blu-ray discs should easily outlast any other storage medium if they're kept in proper conditions. It comes down to your ability to keep track of them, not whether they'll go bad on you.
petervandijck
For longevity: make multiple copies.

Harddrives: fill them up with photos and leave them stored at your parents' place.

Cloud: back up to at least 1 cloud provider (Dropbox, Amazon, ...).

Local: local computer, of course.

That's 3 backups there, which is not a bad start. Next: burn some DVDs etc. and again, leave copies at your parents' house.

For photos, my final backup (additional to the above) are printed photo books of which I make multiple copies and hand out as presents to mother-in-law etc.

More copies in more formats = longer life. Think about how your kids are going to recover these.

informatimago
For a human lifetime, paper. For centuries to millenia, stone. For ten or thousands of millenia, perhaps even up to hundred of million years, live DNA. As for file formats, the letter is dead, the spirit is live.
Nicholas_C
>DNA

Someone tell me why this wouldn't work.

DanBC
How important is this stuff? How much time and money do you want to spend on it?

Most archiving software can create extra recovery data, which can help if some of it bit rots. You can supplement that with Par2 data. You then need to have multiple copies, in multiple locations.

If you really don't want to trust a hard drive (you should never trust one! But having multiple copies of data on multiple drives is pretty good) you can get good quality CDs and tyvek sleeves and archival storage boxes and some climate controlled rooms (again, mulitple rooms in different geographical locations).

Then, handle the discs correctly. (http://www.itl.nist.gov/iad/894.05/docs/disccare.html)

(http://www.archivalmethods.com/news/Binders%20and%20Albums/M...)