What do people use for a shelf-stable backup
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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.
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After reading the previous discussion I think that you should get more than single drive to store cold backups. That way you can at least spread out the risk of single drive failing. 2TB spinning drives are pretty cheap today and if you have, for example, 4 of them, you can buy one now, write your backups to it and in 6 months buy another, write data on that and so on.
This way you'll have drives with year or two difference on purchase date, so it's pretty unlikely all of them fail at once and a single drive gets powered on and checked every other year or so. My personal experience is that spinning drives are pretty stable on the shelf, but I wouldn't rely on them for decades. And of course even with multiple drives you'll still want to replace them every 3-5 years each. Plus with multiple drives, if I were to build setup like that, I'd set up some sort of scripts or other solution where I can just plug the thing in and doubleclick an icon on desktop to refresh the data and maybe get a notification automatically that the drive you're using should be replaced.
And for actual, long term storage, printouts are the way to go. At least in here you can get books made out of photo paper with your pictures. That's one media which is actually stable over long period and using them doesn't require a lot of technical knowledge nor hardware. But I'd still keep digital copies around, as the printouts aren't resistant to things like house fire or water damage.
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I'm thinking of using a HDD and keeping it at work, which is climate controlled. I'd bring it back every few months to sync the latest.
Since it's constantly being used, I'm pretty confident it'll be usable as a backup if my NAS fails, so it only needs to be "shelf stable" for a few months at a time. If you're retired or something, a safe deposit box at your local bank should do the trick.
