What do people use for a shelf-stable backup
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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.
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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.
