For me I had a stack dvd blanks left over, I decided to save a little bit of money and used them to back up folders of childhood photos, documents etc and place them inside their own jewel cases.
I do have a 2TB external HDD, But that I throw on LARGE steam game back ups and movies.
Sure, the “cloud” exists and I use that too but what if your intewebz goes down, good luck getting your backups until it’s back up.
What do you use? Optical media, tape drives etc?
Burnable discs have a limited life span. Make sure you have duplicates, and test them regularly.
Iirc it’s about 20-25 years for DVDs. But like 75 years for Blu ray
10-15 years for DVD. I have extensive experience with DVDs. I don’t have experience with Blu-ray but I would expect it to be half the rated lifespan too.
I’ve got oodles of 20-25 year old DVDs and never found a dud. But it’s good to set expectations.
Burned DVD’s or mass manufactured? Purchased can last forever although aluminum substrate corrosion has happened in humid environments.
Burned! I have soooo many data discs hahahaha
M-discs are supposed to last longer
A few years ago I went through a 15-year-old collection of DVDs and a surprising number of the burned discs were no longer usable.
Size-wise I’d probably just get a handful of 256 gig USB sticks and make multiple copies keep them in a temperature and humidity controlled environment.
Get M-discs. It’s a special type of Blu-ray that lasts for hundrets if not thousands of years. You can use a regular Blu-ray burner to write to it.
I have absolutely no trust in those discs
They throw around the thousand year and 500 year and 5,000 year dates on the different brands
I’ve seen people report failures and some of the different brands of archival discs that claim the super long lifetimes.
Also keeping in mind that regular burnable DVDs are reported to have hundreds of years of lifetime I definitely have a great deal of those that failed that were burned in the early 2000s.
And there’s the fact that I would need 10 of them for my must-haves and probably 60 for my nice to haves
I really rather have it all on tape, there are tons of peer-reviewed studies on long time tape archiving. In every 7 years you can just read copy or set to freshen it up. but that s*** still too expensive.
If you’re this paranoid for your backups, I’d just go with AWS Glacia and dump all your encrypted data twice a year. You can get a TB of backup for about 1 € / month.
Do you have any idea what the cost is to restore 50 TB from that?
What happens when they decide to raise the price? It kind of leaves a person trapped there. And it’s also not like Amazon hasn’t lost data before. About 7 years ago couple of my S3 buckets disappeared and came back 6 months older than when they disappeared.
I’m right around that 50 to 60 TB mark. It’s annoying because it’s too expensive for hobbiest live storage too big for most removable media storage.
I currently keep a small hot store of the most important things. And I’m slowly splitting up the less important ISOs and putting them on cheap rotational media for cold store.
I’m really sad that crash plan shut down their consumer client. They had a really cool feature where you could run a client locally, run another client at a friend or family member’s house and back up to their target with full and to end encryption and encryption at rest. But there doesn’t appear to be anything that clean anymore.
Long-term goal, there was a guy I saw about 10 years ago that buried a raspberry pie with a POE hat in a large PVC tube 3 ft underground. He made it a I-SCSI target. I figure if the eight terabyte NVMe’s ever come down in price, I’ll stack up some PCI Express switching and make something truly magnificent.
I assumed you’re only paying per GB storage. At least that’s what their S3 pricing page says. I believe transfer cost only applies if you transfer from one S3 solution to another. I’m not using it myself, so I don’t know the details. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
If you depend on AWS you’re doing something wrong. You should at least adher to the 3-2-1 backup plan. If you do so, you can switch away from AWS any time they change their policy.
Storing 60 tb in deep glacier for a year is about 3 grand.
Retrieving it from glacier is 4 grand, and it incurs five grand in transfer costs.
Backblaze B2 is closer to six grand a year but doesn’t have any egress or transfer fees.
The problem is, at those prices I could just buy discs in a nice pelican case, every year.
USB sticks are only rated for 10 years. So you should only expect 5. Physically they will last much longer but the electrons leak out of the floating gate unless re-written.
I usually wrap my USBs in a few layers of tape to reduce the leakage
M-Disc Blu-rays last a thousand years literally. It will outlive all of your other mediums a hundred-fold.