What do people use for a shelf-stable backup
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I have not used them myself, but M-DISC sounds like what you’re looking for. There are a few other alternatives listed on that Wikipedia article, too.
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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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USB hard drive? If we're talking about a cold backup that's easy to access a USB drive is reliable and easy.
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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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So the drive doesn't need to be hot, I can just plug in once a year and it auto-repairs?
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I have had terrible experience with USBs failing, including losing a bunch of photos beyond recovery (some 15 years ago, but it still hurts). Plus it's quite aot of data.
I'm thinking a hard drive + USB SATA cable might be my best option. Add the new content each year. Work out some way of verifying it's not corrupted. Replace drive every 5 years or something, it can be swapped in when I get a failure and the new one can be the new backup.
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Yeah based on the suggestions so far this seems like the best option. Just need to make sure I have a way to verify no files are corrupted (and if they are, which ones), and remember to swap it out for a new one every 5 years or so or each time I need a new drive.
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Yeah I will read up on it, thanks for the tip!
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Thanks! I think this is probably a big risk of not being able to find the hardware to play it.
Through other conversations I think the answer is to instead get a normal drive, USB connection, and every few years replace the drive and copy the data to the new drive, using an error resistant file system and something like rsync that validates that the files arrived correctly.
As technology changes, I'd move the files as needed onto the more modern media.
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Thanks, I think the risk here is that there may not be hardware to read it.
From the suggestions here I'm thinking a hard drive with USB connection would be best. It won't last 50 years but instead I'd replace it every 5 years or so. I'd use an error resistant file system and plug it in each year to add the new files.
This way I also get the chance to move it to newer technology in future instead of a new hard drive. It would then only need to survive for some period of time after I last replaced it, so there's a good chance of it remaining readable for most of my life.
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I'd rather cold storage but am thinking of looking along these lines, ZFS or btrfs on a standard HDD that I add files on to once a year and replace the disk every few years.
I have a standard backup setup I just want something that is more point in time and not connected to all the automation, in case I automatically delete everything.
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Yeah after looking at the price of a drive, I agree it doesn't seem necessary at the level of data I have.
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Tape isn't readable by normal people even if they found it tomorrow with a drive already configured to be used.
In 50 years good luck finding a working drive compatible with LTO4 when LTO32 is out (it's backwards compatible only with previous gen).
Unless you write on the box "here there are the keys for 100k bitcoins" they'll just trash the tape
