Long term storage solutions?

[Illah]

So I'm very much engrained into the 'digital lifestyle' and have a ton of things that would be terrible to lose on my computer. Pictures, videos, papers, website backups, documents, etc. all in digital form. So I started to think worst case scenario and the thought of long term storage came up.

Right now I tend to keep the really important stuff in multiple places, i.e. ghetto redundancy, such as on my computer, my fiances, external drive, and burned on CD. That way any one or two can die and I'm still OK. I'm wondering if there's a better way. Let's say hypothetically I buy a drive, dump data on it, zip it up in an anti-static and stick it in a bank safety deposit box. How long would that last? Big downside is it would be stupid annoying to keep it up do date.

So how do you all handle this?

--Illah

[ckj]

An easier way would be to buy a fireretardant safe and use an external drive as back up. Just store it in the safe in an anti-static bag and pull it out when you need to add to it.

[JCLW]

My Dad and I each run file servers and give each other FTP access. We each keep a copy of each others stuff. Both servers contain redundant RAID arrays, and we live ~250km apart.

The largest portion of the data is digital pictures, followed by a combined collection of MP3s. The rest is made up of personal and business documents.

A bonus is that if I'm travelling and need a file I can just FTP in and grab it from anywhere.

[Highendtoys]

I use the Ghetto method also but one of the pieces is a RAID 3 array. I use the XFX REVO64 card. They are great cards and a version of it was used in the Maximum PC Dream Machine or whatever it is called.

[Fu_Man_Chew]

Bit Rot..... How i love it. My understanding is it happens with most any digital media storing a single copy. So my question is how do you pervent it?

[Celeron_Phreak]

There was something about this on Tech TV a long time ago. Their data on compact discs tend to degrade quickly, sometimes over a period of months, while their data on hard drives never did, understandably. CD data tends to deteriorate from UV light easilly. I'd just do as ckj said. Get another hard drive, back everything up to it, and put it in a fire proof safe.

[9mmCensor]

Tape Drives!!!!!!!

[Celeron_Phreak]

Hey, that works to. ;)

I've got about 15 old 600 foot Hewlett Packard 6 inch tape cartridges here. You supply the drive. ;)

[shellshock]

Tape Drives!!!!!!!

I dont think that would be the best, imo, Tapes degrade pretty quicly. Ever watched a old vhs, and its all distorted and bad quality? Then you know what i mean.

I think dual layer dvd's would be the best, or external hard drives

[Fu_Man_Chew]

hmm... I was going to go the hard drive route but is that really safe. Is it a good idea to back everything up and assume it to be there in a month or so. Granted the disk would be used more often. and what about checking the data integrity. Just because the file seems to be there how could you check it to make sure its not corrupt without having to open every file.

I ask because I have moved all my CD’s to mp3 and all my photos are on the computer. So were talking thousands of photos and songs and it would suck to loose them. For a piece of mind solution I was thinking of keeping 3 copies and then check them against each other to look for bit rot/croup data. (so if you have 3 copies and one is different assume its corrupt and and correct it by copying from the other two)

Now am I being to paranoid about loosing my data because I can’t imagine loosing it all! And is there a program that will do what I ask about checking copies of files against each other?

[{PMS}fishy]

So I'm very much engrained into the 'digital lifestyle' and have a ton of things that would be terrible to lose on my computer. Pictures, videos, papers, website backups, documents, etc. all in digital form. So I started to think worst case scenario and the thought of long term storage came up.

Right now I tend to keep the really important stuff in multiple places, i.e. ghetto redundancy, such as on my computer, my fiances, external drive, and burned on CD. That way any one or two can die and I'm still OK. I'm wondering if there's a better way. Let's say hypothetically I buy a drive, dump data on it, zip it up in an anti-static and stick it in a bank safety deposit box. How long would that last? Big downside is it would be stupid annoying to keep it up do date.

So how do you all handle this?

--Illah


Raid on your PC to protect against HDD failure.

Storage on some type of backup media. Wether it be DVD/CD/Tape.

Off site storage in case of disaster. (2 copies of the DVD/CD/Tape, and keep one in a safe deposit box, or work, or someplace not home)

Tapes are good if you have lots of stuff, we have 200/400gb tapes at work, and you would only need a few of those to back up almost anything.

Personally I'd be against any type of mechanical back up as a secondary line, in case somethere were to happen to it. You wouldn't want the motor on your back up HDD to fail. Get something with no/less moving parts.

Currently I run RAID1 on my PC, and backup everything to DVD and keep copies at work. I'm looking to move to RAID 5, and possibly a NAS array for very important back-ups.

[{PMS}fishy]

I dont think that would be the best, imo, Tapes degrade pretty quicly. Ever watched a old vhs, and its all distorted and bad quality? Then you know what i mean.

I think dual layer dvd's would be the best, or external hard drives

In the right enviroment, tapes keep very well.

Its still what most all big businesses use for backup.

[emboss]

Tape is definately much longer lived than HDDs. Most (quality) current tapes are specc'd for a minimum 30 year archival life, and accelerated-aging analysis suggest that archival lives could be as high as 50 to 100 years (in proper storage conditions, of course). At work here we sometimes pull data off 10-15 year old DLT tapes, and never have had any problems. Not to say that a HDD *couldn't* pull this off, just that they are definately not designed for this type of task.

Of course, this is more or less completely irrelevant for your average computer user. Tape drives are quite expensive, and very rarely anything but SCSI. Plus you have the problem of tape storage in proper environmental conditions.

The options for your average home user are then CD/DVD, or hard drives. First of all, don't use CD-R or DVD-R discs for stuff that's really important. These are much more vulnerable to dye fading or decomposition. The rewritable options operate via a phase change and are much more stable over time. I've had several CDR's fail on me, made back in the day when 2x CD writing was the New Thing (10ish years ago). Ironically, the ones that have had the most failures were Kodac Gold ones, the that were supposed to have ultra-stable dyes and the like. The much cheaper Imation blue CDRs of the same vintage have (IIRC) only had one failure. I haven't had any failures on any of the CDRW media (various manufacturers) but I don't have anywhere near the same number of them as CDRs.

Fortunately, I've been re-duplicating the important CDs every 5 years so it hasn't been a problem. They haven't been stored in environmentally controlled conditions (just a cool, dry room) but neither have they been left lying in the sun or things like that.

Hard drives, IMO, should not be used for long-term storage, solely because of the mechanical factor. While the data on the platters themselves is probably very long-lived in a good environment, I wouldn't be surprised to see mechanical failures in long-term-stored drives. You could probably reduce the chance of this happening by spinning up the drives regularily (and checking for errors at the same time), but they were still not designed for this sort of thing.

Finally, DVD-RAM discs are usually very high quality and made to tigher specifications than other rewritable DVD discs. Although pricier than other options, I would definately recommend them over the other types. So my ordered list of backup media would be (excluding tape):
DVD-RAM (best)
DVD+/-RW
CD-RW
DVD+/-R
CD-R
Hard drive

Most important though is good storage conditions. Ideal storage conditions for optical media are 10-20 deg C, 30% to 50% relative humidity, and minimal temperature and relative humidity gradients.