this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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Yeah if you're looking for long term it needs to be archival media. Many people think the flash drive will hold it forever but they are potentially the most fickle.
But what actually is "archival"?
Like, what technology normal person has access to counts at least as enthusiast level archival?
Magnetic tape, optical media, flash, HDD all rot away, potentially within frighteningly short timeframes and often with subtle bitrot.
Cloud storage? Store it on 2 different providers like B2 and iDrive or something, pretty low complexity.
Is it? It's rather expensive and would you really know, if the data is gone or corrupted?
You'd have to download every single file in certain intervals and check it. That's not really low complexity.
Good backup software will just do that as part of its thing, like Restic for example.
And who does that?
I think you don't really get my point. I'm not arguing that there are no ways to archive data. I'm arguing that there are no technologies available for average Joe.
It is hardly a good strategy to basically set up half a datacenter at home.
Yeah that's fair.
Common cloud storage such as google drive should be pretty resilient for the average person, data stored there is replicated in multiple data centers and verified with checksums, and it provides a trashcan and versioning in case of accidental deletion.
I've got photos in Flickr dating from 1999 onwards. Ten thousand or so of them, and a couple of the early ones are now corrupted.
But they are my "other backup" for Google photos so I don't mind too much. I also have a USB Blu-ray drive at home that I use to periodically burn M-Discs that I hand out to a few relatives.
That's about as good as I can conveniently do for backup, and it's probably better than the single-point-of-failure box of negatives that my parents have in their cupboard.