What do people use for a shelf-stable backup
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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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Ah - I gotcha. That's some terrible luck with drives.
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If you buy your LTO drive new, then yes they rip you a new one, for sure!
Buy it used...but it still will cost you a few hundred. Like I said, if money is not a concern.
If losing the encryption key is a concern, then USB is still your best bet. Make two, keep them simple and unencrypted, stick em in two different safes, update them regularly. And print the documentation with pictures! -
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Ah good thinking. I am thinking a spare drive that I update once a year with new content and replace every few years with a new drive is a good idea.
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I mean, there are a lot of drives. Two laptops with a drive each. A desktop/server with three drives, and a spare laptop used for Kodi is the current setup. I'm not counting but I think it's three drives, one laptop, and one mobo since I started self-hosting perhaps 5 or 6 years ago.
The drives themselves, one was still under warranty, one was probably 3 or 4 years old, and the last was probably 6 or 8 and was in an old laptop and well used.
I think some of the drives have had a hard live while I messed around self-hosting, especially during my phase of trying out photo solutions.
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