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Comment by satellite2 | Hacker News Reader

M-DISC. It's more expensive by size but for (private I'm assuming) pictures it doesn't make a difference.

TBH i've never heard about it before. And I even have a drive that records it! Thank you!!!!

However what I've been thinking before you wrote about M-DISC - was making a set of HDD that I'd dump my photos and videos and rewrite each year for example, i.e. copy from one drive to another. This copying 4TB of data should be enough to store them for a few years.

I'm mostly concerned with family photos and videos, and maybe music, but I tend to buy CDs of the most important music for me. I'd say that other data would be expendible...

You’ll want to protect yourself against bit rot too. Don’t go copying bad files every year.

bit rot... What about good filesystems? Like ZFS which has checksums. Or maybe a zip with additional recovery data... I wonder if there is a ready-made solution that allows this to not require me scripting (and losing those scripts later or failing to run them because Bash was upgraded from 4 to 5 and Python from 3 to 4)

At least if you don't encrypt and those are jpeg it doesn't matter. I lost two discs at once with theWD debacle a few years back and couldn't recover anything as I encrypted the disk. Another drive that got bad, I easily recovered 90% of the files using foremost.

So no encryption on the local backup for me, only the emails dump by encrypting the zip that contains them. It's not perfect but that's the compromise I (think I) have to make. (The remote one is encrypted though)

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