What do people use for a shelf-stable backup
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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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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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Yup, turn it on, let it do a scrub, then turn it off. I'd still use redudnancy though. Not merely to cover the case of the drive failing, but also to cover the bit rot use case. It's exceedingly unlikely bits to rot at the exact same spot on two or more disks. When ZFS finds a checksum mismatch during a scrub (which indicates bit rot), it'll be able to trivially recover the data from the drive where the checksum matches. It'll then rewrite the rotten part.
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Yeah from some other comments I think my initial plan (that I'll research some more) will be:
- buy a new HDD, format with ZFS or btrfs for error correction
- copy data onto drive
- store in cupboard with sata-> USB cable and instructions about what it is, how to access .
- every year, load the previous year's data onto the drive
- about every 5 years, replace the drive by copying onto a brand new one (timeframe will likely depend on when my other HDD drives die)
This way I should get a chance to update storage medium as technology changes as well.
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Yeah that's an idea. It does seem like I'd need a lot of disks though. And I don't actually have a disk reader or writer at all at the moment.
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archival strength USB NVME drive,
Does such a thing exist? Ordinary flash storage is pretty bad at keeping its content when powered off for a long time, due to how flash memory works. I'd be curious about such drives.
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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.
