Long term file storage

shifty_uk

shifty_uk

shifty_uk

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Wasn't sure wether to put this in the Hardware section or not as it's more of a general best practice question..

I recently tried to access an old Iomega HDD(from around 2010) for photos but it won't connect, I'm gutted!

I'm not getting any younger so it's got me thinking about how best to store things long term as outside of work stuff, it's something I don't take too seriously.

For work/business:
Everything is on cloud servers with recurring backups. I also backup files and repositories periodically to SSD's.

For personal:
I do a dump of my macs HD to SSD cards periodically and typically write any photos or important documents to them aswell. I've got several 1TB cards.

This sounds good in practice but I've heard that SSD's can be unreliable when they aren't powered up over periods of time?

My head is saying NAS but like the Iomega situation.. could it fail in 5-10 years time with no hope of retrieving? It does sound better than spinning up an instance of S3 for important family stuff.

Thoughts welcome :)
 
Mechanical HDDs stored correctly are usually good for a very long time - personally I have a mini PC acting as a backup server with NVME internally and does real time replication to a HDD and I periodically snapshot it to a small number of external HDDs I keep in rotation.

Solid state storage generally beyond about 4 years unpowered it can't be depended on - not a long term storage medium.
 
As suggested above, you need multiple copies of the data and whatever works for you. I've got a NAS, external HD's, some cloud storage etc.
 
I used to have a NAS with 2 drives in mirrored mode. I would stagger the age of the drives to reduce the possibility of them both failing at the same time. However, getting the right mechanical drives for it started to become a pain, and rather than shell out a load of dosh for a new NAS, I decided to just pay for increased google storage instead. So I pay for 200GB of storage which is more than enough for photo's in original quality and some documents.
I also have a USB drive copy which stays in a fire proof safe.

With almost gigabit internet speeds, it's no slower copying stuff to cloud than it is to NAS, actually faster in some cases. We forgot how slow mechanical drives can be.
 
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Thanks all, plenty of sensible advice here. Lots of NAS users, I'm assuming no one's had any major issues?
Nutty667 said:
I used to have a NAS with 2 drives in mirrored mode. I would stagger the age of the drives to reduce the possibility of them both failing at the same time. However, getting the right mechanical drives for it started to become a pain, and rather than shell out a load of dosh for a new NAS, I decided to just pay for increased google storage instead.
Click to expand...
That was a worry with investing in a home NAS setup, it's just added hardware that can fail like everything else.

I use Google Drive for business but hadn't considered it for personal stuff.. I know Google like to scan directories but outside of important documents which I can encrypt, there's nothing to hide.

Based on what's been said, I'm thinking the periodic backups to the SSD's (which are always plugged in anyway) with a backup of longer term photos and documents to the cloud may just suffice. I'd be happy to pay that bit extra every month for the added storage.

I'll definitely look at NAS further and also like the idea of the M-disks.. No idea how you'd go about burning a disc these days but it's probably the most solid way.
 
I tried OneDrive found it painful.

Short term storage to external NVME(s)
Long term to multiple external Hard Drives.
 
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Regarding the NAS's and issues, just remember you need to back that up to something else and ideally don't open it up to the internet
 
Caracus2k said:
If you're serious about wanting to keep stuff from decades your best bet is redundancy (multiple copies) and M-disks

en.wikipedia.org

M-DISC - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
Click to expand...

This is a tempting solution. I don’t have an optical reader hooked up, and of course one issue will be that any mechanical device can have a failure. Older CD players require servicing for example. I like our NAS running mirrored 4Tb drives, but it’s not a permanent solution for sure.
 
Store it in a vault in Svalbard - https://arcticworldarchive.org/about/
(obviously it has its purpose for super critical stuff, but I'm joking here)


I use OneDrive and occasionally backup to an external disk, I trust Microsoft more than myself for keeping up to date backups.
 
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