I have backups on a backup hard drive and also synced to B2, but I am thinking about backing up to some format to put in the cupboard.
The issue I see is that if I don’t have a catastrophic failure and instead just accidentally delete some files one day while organising and don’t realise, at some point the oldest backup state is removed and the files are gone.
The other thing is if I get hit by a bus and no one can work out how to decrypt a backup or whatever.
So I’m thinking of a plain old unencrypted copy of photos etc that anyone could find and use. Bonus points if I can just do a new CD or whatever each year with additions.
I have about 700GB of photos and videos which is the main content I’m concerned about. Do people use DVDs for this or is there something bigger? I am adding 60GB or more each year, would be nice to do one annual addition or something like that.
I believe M-Disc to be the best consumer grade, optical solution out there. If you want to go commercial grade you are looking for LTO tapes, but your costs begin rising exponentially. If M-Disc claims are to be believed, they should last well longer than your requirement and be able to handle your data footprint using multiple, but not an unreasonable amount of discs.
No matter which solution you choose, if you are targeting multiple decades, you must save not only the media, but ideally the drive, computer and software used to archive. There is no guarantee that any of the existing technology will be relevant or backward compatible across several decades.
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.