What do people use for a shelf-stable backup
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Would that be two disks under a type of RAID or does ZFS have something?
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I usually use a dehydrator for ~3 days on my drives to make them sell stable. So far I haven’t had any issues.
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With 2 disks that would be type mirror in ZFS-speak, completely built-in. Equivalent to RAID1 in terms of hardware fault tolerance.
You could do a 3-disk mirror or n-disk mirror really. The RAID5/6 rough equivalents are called RAIDzN where N is the number of disk failures they tolerate. E g. RAIDz1, RAIDz2, etc. You probably want a mirror unless you need more space than a single disk provides.
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Ah thanks, that gives me something to research.
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you need to use fat32 if you want normal people to access the files
Otherwise, they will get the "You need to format the disk in drive
before using it. Do you want to format it?" dialog, they blindly click "yes", then they will mumble to themselves "weird, he left behind a massive collection of blank drives..." -
If this is your fear, why not just have a will or something that specifically describes what to do and where to go?
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This was a recent point of discussion on the 2.5 Admins podcast (https://2.5admins.com/2-5-admins-228/). Some good discussion on there.
My own thought is the best way to handle your family-member-finding-your-old-photos problem is the analog way: make some prints. It’s absolutely idiot proof, the methodology of keeping paper goods is well understood, and the technology is platform independent.
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For photos? Archival prints. As a bonus, you also get a cool album to reminisce later in life.
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Having actual prints has always been the consensus among activists. No digital media lasts as long. The media may persist but the technology to read them is long gone.
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After reading the previous discussion I think that you should get more than single drive to store cold backups. That way you can at least spread out the risk of single drive failing. 2TB spinning drives are pretty cheap today and if you have, for example, 4 of them, you can buy one now, write your backups to it and in 6 months buy another, write data on that and so on.
This way you'll have drives with year or two difference on purchase date, so it's pretty unlikely all of them fail at once and a single drive gets powered on and checked every other year or so. My personal experience is that spinning drives are pretty stable on the shelf, but I wouldn't rely on them for decades. And of course even with multiple drives you'll still want to replace them every 3-5 years each. Plus with multiple drives, if I were to build setup like that, I'd set up some sort of scripts or other solution where I can just plug the thing in and doubleclick an icon on desktop to refresh the data and maybe get a notification automatically that the drive you're using should be replaced.
And for actual, long term storage, printouts are the way to go. At least in here you can get books made out of photo paper with your pictures. That's one media which is actually stable over long period and using them doesn't require a lot of technical knowledge nor hardware. But I'd still keep digital copies around, as the printouts aren't resistant to things like house fire or water damage.
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I'm thinking of using a HDD and keeping it at work, which is climate controlled. I'd bring it back every few months to sync the latest.
Since it's constantly being used, I'm pretty confident it'll be usable as a backup if my NAS fails, so it only needs to be "shelf stable" for a few months at a time. If you're retired or something, a safe deposit box at your local bank should do the trick.
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If it's powered off, you'll have no idea when it dies. And they do die just sitting there.
I've actually had more failures of drives sitting around than ones running constantly.
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Cloud can be surprisingly cost effective, as part of a 3-2-1 backup.
Check out storj.io
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But I will because it won't work the next time I take it home to sync. The chance that it'll fail during the few months between a sync and an emergency is incredibly low.
I wouldn't leave it on a shelf for years, just a few months at a time (approximately quarterly).
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Exactly. I have a document for my SO that describes what to do if I pass (where the money is, how the WiFi is set up, various important accounts, etc). It's not a will (nothing about who gets what, though that's assumed by the state to be my SO, or my kids equally if we pass together), just a document that explains the stuff I handle.
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How can I tell if individual files get corrupted?
Checksums. A good filesystem will do this for you, but you can do it yourself if you want.
If you sync a drive with rsync or something periodically, it'll replace files with different checksums, fixing any corruption as you go. Then smart tests should tell you if there's any corruption the drive is aware of. I'm sure automated backup tools have options for this.
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That could probably work.
Were it me, I'd build a script that would re-hash and compare all the data to the previous hash as the first step of adding more files, and if the data comes out consistent, I'd copy the files over, hash everything again, save the hash results elsewhere and then repeat as needed.
