Hi,

I’m not sure if this is the right community for my question, but as my daily driver is Linux, it feels somewhat relevant.

I have a lot of data on my backup drives, and recently added 50GB to my already 300GB of storage (I can already hear the comments about how low/high/boring that is). It’s mostly family pictures, videos, and documents since 2004, much of which has already been compressed using self-made bash scripts (so it’s Linux-related ^^).

I have a lot of data that I don’t need regular access to and won’t be changing anymore. I’m looking for a way to archive it securely, separate from my backup but still safe.

My initial thought was to burn it onto DVDs, but that’s quite outdated and DVDs don’t hold much data. Blu-ray discs can store more, but I’m unsure about their longevity. Is there a better option? I’m looking for something immutable, safe, easy to use, and that will stand the test of time.

I read about data crystals, but they seem to be still in the research phase and not available for consumers. What about using old hard drives? Don’t they need to be powered on every few months/years to maintain the magnetic charges?

What do you think? How do you archive data that won’t change and doesn’t need to be very accessible?

Cheers

  • zephiriz@lemmy.ml
    1·
    3 months ago

    I am using https://duplicati.com/ and https://www.backblaze.com/ ( use their b2 cloud storage its variable and 6$ a month for 1TB or less depending on how much you use) run a schedule beckup every night for my photos. It’s compressed and encrypted. I save a config file to my google so say if my house and server burn down. I just pull my config from google then redownload duplicati and boom pull my back up down. The whole set up backs up incremental so once you do the first back up its only changes that are uploaded. I love the whole set up.

    Edit: You can also just pull files you need not the whole backup.