I'm planning a few encrypted long-term backups (ie. stick it in a temperature controlled safe for a few years).
What's the best medium for this? SSD or HDD?
What's the best medium for this? SSD or HDD?
SSDs don't have this archival longevity yet, and hard drives are better when powered up and the data is always hot for scrubbing and migrating when indicators of drive failure present.
But HDD isn't your only other option. How important is the data, How often will you need to access it, and will you need to rewrite to the storage medium? You might want to consider Blu Ray. Or both, stored in different locations. Also look into LTO tape drives. LTO 6 drives should be cheaper than 7/8 (though still not cheap) and have a capacity around 6TB.
AFAIK a post on /r/datahoarders says that the breakeven point for tapes vs shucked hard drives from a pure storage perspective is around 50TB. Given the hassle associated with dealing with tapes, it's probably only really worth it if you have 100+TB of data to store.
The amount of hassle depends on your workflow. If you create a backup every day and then bring the media off-site, tape is easier. Easy enough to put a tape in your drive, make the backup, and eject. Tape is not sensitive to shock and you can just chuck the tapes in your care or shove them in your backpack.
Apocryphal story from university - somebody did this and reckons electro-magnetic leakage from their heated seats wrecked their info
LTO is nice in that they mandate backwards compatibility by two revisions, which come out once every 3 years or so. So that gives you time to roll forward to new media onto a new drive without breaking the bank, and giving time for the secondary market to settle.
Adding: This was a deliberate decision by the LTO Consortium; they wanted users to perceive LTO as the safest option for data retention standards.
If you really need it to last and re-writability isn't an issue, M Disc claims 1,000 years.
Those extra bits they squeeze into QLC etc literally do make SSDs worse at power off retention
Personally I think safe is.. unnecessary. What is it protecting you from when your data is encrypted? If you put it in a safe then you probably care enough about the data not to have it in a single location no matter how secure it seemingly is.
various forms of physical damage, including fire and accidental crushing
where do you think they ought to store their drives?
a little safe that will hold easily 100TB costs $50 and can hold your passport and such too.
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-fireproof-do...
Break-ins are not in my threat model for a document safe. If they were, I'd get a deposit box at a bank. I just want some of my personal mementos and documents to survive a fire.
I think there was a French study that compared DVDs, M Discs and BDs and the HTL BDs fared very well. Can't find the document though.
https://club.myce.com/t/french-study-on-bd-r-for-archival/30...
https://francearchives.fr/file/5f281a39048987dcef88202816a5c...
Mechanically and electrically, everything is rated to last several times longer than the head
In other words, you just need to buy two used drives (one as spare) and verify they can write a full tape and their head hours and other error counters are sane. There is no reasonable need to refurbish a tape drive other than a head replacement, which is easy to do at home but so expensive (for older generations) that you might as well buy a new drive. All the testing you could hope for is done in POST and by LTT/equivalent (writing a tape and reading logs is good enough)
1. Backup to external SSD or NAS. This is the backup you will rely on if your PC loses all data. It will be fast to replicate to.
2. Mirror the external backup to a second external SSD. And sync it every week or month. Sync more often if your data is changing a lot.
3. The third layer is an external HDD mirror for the long term off-site backups. HDD are cheaper and more suited for being switched off long term.
4. If you can afford the expense of a forth step, every year buy another external HDD and put the previous one aside as an archive to be brought into service if the current one fails to boot.
I recommend separating your data into some short of hierarchy and choose what needs to be backed up to what level. So if you have some software ISOs that you could repurchase/redownload, then have a separate drive for junk like that and don't have it go all the way through the backup steps listed above.
Save the rest on two of Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud, some other cloud storage, a backup service or copy to a computer in your home. Make your selection based on things that you will "touch" in some way at least every 12-24 months. Everything else will fail in a few years.
Don’t save crap you don’t need. Don't futz around with optical media, tape or other nonsense. Don't buy safes or safe deposit boxes unless that's going to be part of your routine in some way.
I tend to agree with this although it can be hard to determine what you won't want/need in advance and it probably takes at least some effort to winnow things down.
That said, I'm in the middle of going through my photos right now and deleting a bunch of stuff. (Which is a big job.) It's not so much for the storage space as I'll "only" be deleting a few hundred GB. But it's a lot easier to look for stuff and manage it when you don't have reams of near-identical or just lousy pics. One of my takeaways from this exercise is that I should really be better at pruning when I ingest a new batch.
I think that effort is worth it. As it stands, we've all become digital hoarders as the up-front cost to accumulate stuff like photos and documents goes to zero. The problem is you're dumping LOTS of cost into the future.
Photos are a big thing for me.
Initially, I used applications (Picasa and later iPhoto) to tag photos with metadata to indicate importance, etc. Applications tend to have zero respect for to commitment to preserving metadata. So by the time my kids are going to college, my family is going to have 200,000+ photos alone. What's the point? Am I getting pleasure (or to borrow from the Netflix organizational guru "Does it bring joy?") from this data?
Personally, my new strategy, having been burned by the tools is a pyramid:
1. Print and Frame/preserve important or significant pictures (Say 20-30/year)
2. Curate others that we care about. (Say 500/year or 5-8%)
3. Purge stuff of no value. (Say 2500/year or ~25%)
Based on my "performance" today, if I keep at it, I'll be able to reduce the rate of growth.
Otherwise HDD.
Archiving is not a one-time thing, but a process.
If you care about the data, you should periodically check the media and at some point replace the media as they age.
I've had three external hard drives for 7 years, and none have stopped working. I have one, and keep two somewhere else (office, family). I connect one for a few hours every week/month to update, then leave alone until needed, or rotated with one elsewhere.
Sounds like a good fit for SMR archive HDD.
Your lubricant drying out will be the biggest threat in my eye as your startup after 10 years may cause a lot of damage on the mechanical bits.
Modern SSDs not only sacrifice endurance and sustained performance, they also sacrifice power off data retention