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What do people use for a shelf-stable backup (lemmy.nz)

submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The format is the tape in the drive, or the disk or whatever.

Tape existed 50 years ago: nothing modern and in production can read those tapes.

The problem is, given a big enough time window, the literal drives to read it will simply no longer exist, and you won't be able to access even non-rotted media because of that.

As for data integrity, there's a lot of options: you can make a md5 sum of each file, and then do it again and see if anything is different.

The only caveat here is you have to make sure whatever you're using to make the checksums gets stored somewhere that's not JUST on the drive because if the drive DOES corrupt itself, and your only record of the "good" hashes is on the drive, well, you can't necessarily trust those hashes either.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Ah good thinking. I am thinking a spare drive that I update once a year with new content and replace every few years with a new drive is a good idea.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That could probably work.

Were it me, I'd build a script that would re-hash and compare all the data to the previous hash as the first step of adding more files, and if the data comes out consistent, I'd copy the files over, hash everything again, save the hash results elsewhere and then repeat as needed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

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.