What do people use for a shelf-stable backup
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I'm using blu-ray disks for the 3rd copy, but I'm not backing up nearly as much data as you are.
The only problem with optical media is that you should only expect it to be readable for a couple of years, best case, at this point and probably not even that as the tier 1 guys all stop making it and you're left with the dregs.
You almost certainly want some sort of tape option, assuming you want long retention periods and are only likely to add incremental changes to a large dataset.
Edit: I know there's longer-life archival optical media, but for what that costs, uh, you want tape if at all possible.
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The other thing is if I get hit by a bus and no one can work out how to decrypt a backup or whatever.
Documentation, documentation, documentation. No matter what system you have, make sure your loved ones have a detailed, image-heavy, easy to follow guide on how restorations work - at the file level, at the VM level, at whatever level you are using.
That being said, DVDs actually have quite a short shelf life, all things considered. I'd be more inclined to use a pair of archival strength USB NVME drive, updated and tested routinely(quarterly, yearly, whatever makes sense). Or even an LTO tape, if you want to purchase the drive and some tapes.
You can put your backups in something like VeraCrypt. Set an insanely long password, encoded in a QR code, printed on paper. Store it in the same secured location you store your USB drives (or elsewhere, if you have a security posture).
You may also consider, if money is not a concern, a cloud VPS or other online file storage, similarly encrypted. This can provide an easy URL to access for the less tech-savvy, along with secured credentials for recovery efforts. Depending on what your successors might need to access, this could be a very straightforward way to log into a website and download what they need in an emergency.
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Same.
Bought a Blu-ray burner and "archive grade" disks for third location backups.
I made a list of files that is just a text document (3MB!) that sits on the root of the Blu-ray. There's probably a better way of doing that, but it works for me.
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This is why I do my first-level of backups with
rsnapshot. It backs up to the plain filesystem using rsync and uses hard-links to de-dup between backups. No special filesystem, no encryption, restore is just an 'rsync' away. -
Tape. Amazon glacier if you're okay with that.
And regular test restores. An untested backup is not a backup.
But when considering what I need to back up, I usually overestimate how much I or other people will care if it's lost. Family photos are great, but what are the odds of someone saying "damn I wish we still had two dozen photos of that one barbecue?*
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I use tape but haven't been happy with my drive for a while, where do you get your drives? (Also OP I wouldn't recommend tape until you cross the 10TB mark personally)
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For your amount, just an external hard drive attached to a NAS or something is fine, or a 2-bay synology would be more than enough. Drives are coming in 20-24TB models now, that'd keep you going for a long time.
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I don't personally use tape, but I get most of my stuff from eBay. Tape drives are surprising expensive, even LTO-6 is going to run you a few hundred. But you still can't beat the density and longevity.
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Hmm I am keen for something that could be left in the cupboard for 50 years and still works when brought out.
What does it take me to do home tape storage? Do the tapes needs to be stored with climate control or are they pretty stable? Is it feasible for the average person to load the contents?
I'm thinking of pulling a suitcase out of the cupboard of all the baby photos, but digital files or photo and video.
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In your scenario, I'd be looking at ZFS or BTRFS for your live data, especially when taking photos into account. They'll self-repair files that may run into decay issues, which I've seen a lot of with photos in all formats. Since you already keep off-site backups, I'd then just keep an extra drive around that you snapshot to from time to time.
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I have cloud with B2, I'm looking for cupboard storage that a random family member can pull out and browse through after I get put in a resthome (only half joking).
Is home tape storage feasible (and good for this use-case)?
In terms of what to backup, I'm running on the assumption that technology will be able to autofilter the good stuff at some point, no need to put much effort in now haha.
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As much as I'm worried about family not being able to do it, I'm just as worried that I will do something dumb and lose the encryption key, losing everything. I am keen on the digital equivalent of a suitcase full of photos that could be stumbled upon.
I also already have borg backup set up to a backup drive and synced to the cloud (Backblaze B2).
For tape drives, is many thousands of dollars a normal price? Not sure I'm that keen.
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That's effectively what I have now. However I seem to kill a drive every couple of years, so I am keen for something that can be stored for many years (preferably decades).
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Yes my issue is that I seem to be replacing a drive somewhere every couple of years. I am keen for something that can be stored in a cupboard for years, preferably a decent chance at lasting decades.
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So my offsites are an incremental backup, but at some point the oldest version is gone. I am keen for a completely separate, long term snapshot of what I had that could be thrown in a cupboard, and any random family member clearing my house out as I get moved into a rest home at 108 can go through the photos and find a good one to put on my headstone.
I am also keen for protection against doing something dumb and losing everything (like losing my hard drive and finding out for some reason I can't access my backups because I lost the encryption key because I put it in bitwarden and they shut down years ago and I never moved the key over because I forgot it was stored there).
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So, 50 years isn't a reasonable goal unless you have a pretty big budget for this. Essentially no media is likely to survive that long and be readable unless they're stored in a vault, under perfect climate controlled conditions. And even if the media is fine, finding an ancient drive to read a format that no longer exists is not a guaranteed proposition.
You frankly should be expecting to have to replace everything every couple of years, and maybe more often if your routine tests of the media show it's started rotting.
Long term archival storage really isn't just a dump it to some media and lock it up and never look at ever again.
Alternately, you could just make someone else pay for all of this, and shove all of this to something like Glacier and make the media Amazon's problem. (Assuming Amazon is around that long and that nothing catches fire.)
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Hmm damn. I don't really think cloud is the right answer for what I'm trying to do.
I disagree that formats like JPEG won't be readable in 50 years. I feel like there would be big demand for being able to read the format even if it's been superceded, on account of all the JPEGs that still living people have.
Maybe I get a big drive. Each year I copy over files from the last year. Every X years I swap the hard drive for a new one, copy all data.
How can I tell if individual files get corrupted? Like the hard drive failed in that section, then I copy the corrupted file to the new drive, and I'd never know. Can I test in bulk? 50k+ photos and videos so far.
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The format is the tape in the drive, or the disk or whatever.
Tape existed 50 years ago: nothing modern and in production can read those tapes.
The problem is, given a big enough time window, the literal drives to read it will simply no longer exist, and you won't be able to access even non-rotted media because of that.
As for data integrity, there's a lot of options: you can make a md5 sum of each file, and then do it again and see if anything is different.
The only caveat here is you have to make sure whatever you're using to make the checksums gets stored somewhere that's not JUST on the drive because if the drive DOES corrupt itself, and your only record of the "good" hashes is on the drive, well, you can't necessarily trust those hashes either.
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ZFS and BTRFS both provide that functionality. Have a look into the features.
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