What do people use for a shelf-stable backup
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I have such a document, but it's not quite the same. I'm just as worried about my dumb ass losing the borg key and all data along with it...
I'm thinking a clearly labelled hard drive with instructions, rotating the hard drive with a new one every 5 years or so.
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I have a cloud backup, so this isn't about a critical loss of data. It's about an accessible copy that isn't encrypted and a layman could get the data off.
If my house burns down and I lose the copy, I can restore the data from the cloud backup (so long as I'm not in the house when it burns).
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Yeah I am thinking of getting a couple of drives and cloning across both. Update both at the same time. I didn't think of getting two drives at different times but that makes sense, thanks for the suggestion!
I am thinking printouts is a good idea too. I might get a big container, and keep a couple of mirrored drives as well as say 100 photos from each year. Every year I update the drives with additions and then print 100 photos from the previous year to add to the collection.
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Yeah I think I should do something like this. I really want to make sure the files are not getting corrupted in storage without me knowing.
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Just a hdd in usb caddy? IMHO good enough for 4 tier backup.
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exFAT is a newer and viable alternative to FAT32, with better size limits and some pretty good cross-platform capabilities. That said, if your primary access is through Windows, NTFS may have some better features and is at least read-only on other platforms.
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This is why I can’t/don’t have a lot of the “best practices” in my family archive. I’m not encrypting local drives, I’m not using BTRFS, or a ZFS pool. If I did I’d have to ensure my Will provided for the lawyer to hire a tech shop to help recover them. No, exFAT and NTFS, in the clear so those left behind can just plug them in and get to making their own copies. Otherwise the archive would die with me.
Does that mean someone could steal my drives and go through my family photos? Sure. I hope it brings them much guilt, something a garbled encrypted drive could never do.
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I personally prefer printed out books of our photos. We are missing quite a few years due to life getting in the way, but the end goal is to have actual books of photos with titles like 'Our family in 2018' and 'Sports of our first born at 2022'. In europe we have a company called 'ifolor' where you can design and order printouts of your photos. They're not really cheap, but the quality is pretty damn good. And their offerings go to pretty decent sized photo albums, up to A3 size and 180 pages (which is over 200€). So, not cheap, but at least so far their quality has been worth the money.
And they have cheaper options too, but personally I think it's worth the money to get the best quality you can for printouts. And even the smallest and cheapest option is far superior over not having anything at all due to hardware failure or whatever.
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I don't use Windows, I'm just thinking of someone needing to be able to pick up and use a drive, and for most people it's going to be Windows.
Maybe I just need to leave instructions that specify it needs to be my laptop they use to get the photos off.
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I've done some photo books in the past. A lot of work though, I prefer the idea of printed photos since it's less work. Plus if they are the only surviving photos, then it's nice to have them in an easily scannable format.
I came across this container, where each of the smaller containers holds 100 photos. Seems like it could be a good option, one container per year with 100 photos in each. 12 years per box. Get say 6 of them to cover the rest of my life (one could probably cover my life to date, a lot less photos before I had kids), put in a larger container that also holds a couple of (mirrored) hard drives. One big time capsule.
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Haha like
::: spoiler spoilers for the three body problem series
at the the end of the third three body problem book where they need to write something that will last for millions of years so they carve a message in huge letters into the rock
:::But I'm a millennial so if you think I own a huge amount of land you would be wrong
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For local backups it depends on what you want to have:
- The cheapest option is a usb or thumb drive. But you have to regularly plug it in and copy your backup on it.
- The lazy option is to buy a NAS and configure a backup job that regularly creates a backup. Versioned, incremental, differentials and full backups are possible as is WORM to add a bit of extra security. You can configure a NAS to only turn on specified times, do a backup and then turn off again. This will increase protection against encrypting malware. WORM also helps in this case.
Or just let it run 24/7, create backups every hour and install extra services on it like AI powered image analysis to identify people and objects and let it automatically tag your photos. Cool stuff! Check out QNAP and Synology or build a NAS yourself.
A NAS can also be configured to present its content in a LAN by itself. Any computer will automatically connect to it if the access isn't secured by user/password or certificate.
I recommend buying a NAS.
