I really wish a multi-terabyte optical media solution took off, because that would be the path I’d ultimately take, instead of going with expensive LTO devices and media.
Even with the inflated prices nowadays 3tb 3.5" sata drives are cheaper than 2.5tb LTO-6 tapes.
Personally I don't trust optical. I had some DVD-RW drives and many of them became unreadable after a very short time.
(I don't know what the absolute vs practicate reliability factors are for any of these)
EDIT: Hmmm... https://www.howtogeek.com/the-thousand-year-disc-that-failed...
I just keep my offsite backup drives in my office drawer. There is a note on them that says they are personal backup and not to be plugged into company equipment. If you have an office this is probably the easiest solution.
If a disaster wipes out my home and my office then there are bigger things to worry about than my data.
On the enterprise scale, the question I think everyone should be asking is: Do they have LTO tapes on a shelf? Fundamentally the same issue (but larger), in terms of needing to ensure it's physically separate, and secure, and tamper evident. =)
Anything in the cloud or connected to your network can be hacked. The backup of last resort must be on a shelf.
Most enterprise gigs I've worked sent them to Iron Mountain or equivalent.
Just use a magnetic hard disk and your data will be fine for many decades if not centuries. You don't need M-Blu Rays (which have very limited capacity anyway). A hard disk is cheap and stores several Terabytes.
You obviously need to store the data in a physically remote place like your shed, car or safe deposit box in case your house burns down.
Never, ever use a SSD if you want your data to be safe for any amount of time. What's worse, SSDs can fail unexpectedly with almost zero chance of data recovery.
> While the immediate burn quality seems relatively satisfactory, I was still not satisfied as to whether these discs were truly worth their premium over commodity blank media. Looking at the discs, it seemed that the recording layers were likely made of similar materials based on the visual aspect, unlike the obvious difference with DVDs. Also, it seemed that regular recorders were intended to be able to record to the BD-R’s (according to the Verbatim text).
...
> Digging further around the M-disc site, it is noted that their section on longevity testing actually features no data about the BD-R discs at all. Indeed, if there were tests, the reports were not actually featured on the site at all. Further poking around in M-Disc Technology pages shows only references to their DVD products. In fact, it seems their patented “etched in stone” material may only apply to their DVD products.
...
> From my research into the data, it seems likely that the M-Disc BD-R is not substantially different from other quality BD-R discs on the market as they all use inorganic recording compounds (with the exception of BD-R LTH of course). From a visual inspection, the disc appears the same bright chocolate-brown, unlike the obvious distinction with regular dye based DVDs and the M-Disc DVD which was a silver-grey. But my main concern lies in the demonstrated lifetimes of quality BD-Rs which are similar to the M-Disc DVD (to which the M-Disc BD-R is claimed to have also achieved). In essence, it appears that the MKM/Verbatim BD-R DL has already reached the same level of endurance as the M-Disc DVD had claimed without being “special” at all. It is thus, hard to justify paying more for an M-Disc BD-R, and I cannot really recommend it.
The "not really M-Disc" stuff comes from a post somebody made on the "Data Hoarder" Reddit board a few years ago. The discs were changed to enable higher burning speeds which resulted in a slight difference in appearance, but he/she didn't seem to have realized that Blu-Ray M-Discs were never substantially different from BD-Rs and instead assumed that the tweaked discs were more of a scam than the originals.
Now it's their problem to take care of, ignore, make fun of, or whatever, which was always ultimately going to be the case anyway.
This allows you to back with living your life while you still have one.
There's little point to bothering with predicting what the future will look like after you're dead, and even less point to trying to influence how others will behave on your behalf.
So why is it that photos >20 years old just aren't that interesting any more? Because photos need to be augmented by memories, or by stories from others. Once they're just pictures... and once I'm gone... no more interest.
We'd never throw out old physical photo albums. We have a cupboard full of them that my mom left behind. Some of the photos in them are of people we didn't even know, and now won't even know the names of. We keep them because we still have a little bit of connection to them - we knew the people to whom they were significant. But soon they'll just be landfill.
That's how human memory must work. We can't have every generation leave behind hundreds of thousands of pictures, piling up forever. Memories of past generations get purged until 2-3 generations back they're forgotten.
Of course there are exceptions to every rule. An uncle was persuaded to write his memoirs about his childhood on the farm in the middle of the last century. That will still be a good read after he, and those who knew him as a person, are gone. Assuming the books survive - it was a small, private printing only.
Whole lives of collecting sentimental goods all end up going in a giant bin, a whole house cleaned out in less than 2 hours. Photo albums are rarely kept, they just go in with it all and off to the tip usually in a single morning.
What you think is important to you, is basically just trash to your relatives/kids. They will probably have want they want before you are gone.
Or just keep it attached to your system, so spyware, adware, and the NSA will make free backups for you!
The other thing I did was I ended up collecting HDD's out of old DVR's people were throwing out. Those drives are used for cold storage but not for anything important because they already have tens of thousands of hours on them and in not the best temperature conditions. Again, non have failed yet.
Funnily enough, the only HDD I have failing is a 2.1GB Quantum Fireball from 1997 in my Pentium 1! Really should swap that for an SD card via IDE.
The problem with archiving data is you always need to be prepared to use the "next big thing" once your preferred method becomes unobtainable.
I currently have :
- Photos in iCloud (Live working copy)
- Backup at home on NAS (updated nightly, snapshots)
- Backup in pCloud (lifetime, mine or theirs, no illusions, hopefully lasts a couple of months if I die unexpectedly)
- Yearly archive on external HDDs, identical copies stored in separate locations, clearly labeled "Photo backup". No encryption, no archiving, just plain APFS formatted drives that can be plugged into a computer and read.
- Yearly archive M-disc blu-ray discs, again, identical copies, stored in separate locations. One disc per year labeled as such, ie. "Photo Backup 2020". The idea being you restore them in chronological order and have a complete set.
- A photo album extended with a curated set of photos each year. The real deal!
- NAS at [my] home and blu-ray off site (parents home) for all photos
Updated: added [my] for clarification
A few months ago I needed to pull from an offline backup. The disk, which used CMR and was purchased new from an actual computer supply company (i.e. not Amazon), was burnt in for about 72 hours before it was loaded up with data and shoved in a padded box. Ten years later, the drive was pulled, and there were so many media surface errors that most of the data was unrecoverable. (I haven’t bothered opening the drive to see if there is some obvious sign of what exactly failed.)
In my case the backups were created in multiples using two different brands for exactly this reason, and the second copy was fine. But I wouldn’t say it’s the case a single magnetic disk can take the place of BD.
Mechanical disks are also getting expensive. The disk purchased to replace the failed backup was being sold at three times its original release MSRP. Some of this is due to the AI hysteria but some of it is also that the market is shrinking and becoming K-shaped.
For example, if most files are multiple gigabytes, the drive has 3 million tracks, and 3 thousand of those tracks are ruined: one degraded copy leads to most files being broken, two degraded copies leads to only a single digit number of files being broken, and three degraded copies means >99% odds of recovering everything.
And with the magic of par2 files, a single drive with a couple percent of corrupted tracks can be fully recoverable. Any cold backup I do gets some of those.
Comically untrue, and trivial to verify that it is.
You obviously need to store the data in a physically remote place like your shed, car
Let's make it worse by keeping them someplace with terrible environmentals.
If you're gonna be wrong, don't be just a little wrong...
I also have a binder full of DVD-Rs, of about the same age and containing mostly the same data, that all read perfectly with no issues.
You're asking for trouble if you count on just one backup solution to keep your data safe.
It is absolutely not safe for many decades. If you haven't encountered any drive failures yet — you're lucky.
> A hard disk is cheap and stores several Terabytes
You should check prices again, I wouldn't say cheap considering price bump during the last year (or around so). M-Disks are way less convenient, but pretty reasonable for their cost.
The failure of SSD's you warn of and the way the HDD's fail due to a dead controller aren't that different.
This won't happen with a physically written media like a CD, DVD, or Blu Ray disc. With physical media, you're separating out the media from the reader (the drive). If your disc reader dies or you cant find it, etc, you can go find any another one on ebay even decades from now, very likely.
Doing surgery on an HDD controller PCB to replace a dead controller, while possible, sucks, and may be incredibly difficult if not impossible to source parts for in the future.
I have so many photos of vacations and people who I've buried over the years, that I don't want to lose.
So I was thinking about using Blu-ray M-Disks as well, these last couple of months.
This is an _additional_ layer of backups, on top of the usual iCloud/whatever things. LTO is certainly not user-friendly, but neither is it especially user-hostile.
And I think I trust tapes far better than any other alternative for long-term storage as they have by far the smallest areal density of information compared to disks (hard or optical).
I have DVD disks that are barely 10 years old and that I can't read anymore. Hard drives also die in storage and/or during transport.
Recently the computer museum helped recover early 1970s unix tapes. It was a big deal.
And let's not exaggerate the complexity of setting up external tape drives, even on Windows/macOS.