Lifetime / Forever Storage

[DavidMcVay]

Hello All,

 

Apologies if this is in the wrong place or posted incorrectly (I don't think I've posted on a forum since 2008!)

 

About a month ago my 2 year old daughter passed away from a terminal condition. Knowing early on she wouldn't be with us for very long my wife and I decided to take as many photos and videos as humanly possible resulting in over 17,000 files. Currently they are on a raid 1 home server (mechanical drives) with a SSD at my parents as a backup. 

 

I am hyper paranoid that I will lose these photos. I know all drives will fail at some point. I'm 34, if I make it to 94 that's 60 years I need to make sure these photos survive!

It may be grief or just general anxiety but it keeps me up at night.

 

Any suggestions or help on how to make sure they will never be lost would be hugely appreciated.

 

Many many thanks

 

Dave

[Skiiwee29]

Getting a cloud storage account with like Google Photos or iCloud or similar services that absolutely wont be shut down in your life time baring anything catasrophic is your best bet. 

[Spotty]

21 minutes ago, DavidMcVay said:

Currently they are on a raid 1 home server (mechanical drives) with a SSD at my parents as a backup. 

Having an off-site backup is a pretty good start already. 

 

What's the size of all of the files that you need to backup?

 

If you want to add more I would suggest adding another backup copy that you keep as cold storage (drive physically removed and disconnected) or permanent media (DVD/Blu-ray) to protect a copy against things like ransomware encryption. Your copy at your parents house will do that but there's always the (small) chance it might get lost or when you go to recover the files from it find they're corrupted or the drive no longer works. Since the files are photos you won't be updating them very often so having a cold storage is as easy as copying the files once, removing the drive and forgetting about it. Just label the drive or disc with what is on it and store it in a cupboard/drawer somewhere.

 

Keep in mind very few storage options can be expected to last 60 years. There is m discs which supposedly last a thousand years if stored properly, if you're going with DVD discs as a cold backup then go with m discs. Realistically though a backup likely won't need to last 60 years. Most people upgrade and replace hardware at least once a decade so you'll likely end up copying the files to new drives every 10 years or so anyway, so you don't really need a hard drive that lasts 60 years.

[SleepDeprivationTheITGuy]

You could use optical media. It's slow and would definitely not be very fun to recover from in the event that you did somehow lose all other backups, but it keeps for a long time and would be relatively hard to break or lose.

 

It wouldn't be super cheap per GB, but M-Discs are generally a very safe way to archive data so that it won't be lost, destroyed, or unrecoverable for any reason other than physical damage or issues with whatever you're using to write to it/read it. Also important, you can only write to an M-disc once. Once you have filled it with photos, it's there and won't be going anywhere no matter what you do, but that sounds like exactly what you want. You can get five 25GB discs for $29 here at Amazon. You also need a specific type of drive to read M-discs and write to them, this ASUS on Amazon should do the trick for $31.

 

M-Discs are kind of an old way to do this, but I don't know if I would count on anything else to last for 60 years and still be recoverable after that. Not so sure about the 1000 year claim, but 60 years I would say is something that optical media specifically designed for this purpose can probably do. This obviously shouldn't be your primary method of storage, but for a 'cold storage' solution, it should be perfect.

 

Write to them, store them away in a fireproof safe, and hopefully you won't ever need to use them.

[DavidMcVay]

Thank you all for your reply's!

 

@Skiiwee29 I did think of Google or Microsoft, but I have so little faith in companies these days. I agree that its probably the best bet and will upload a copy (I'll probably stick a copy on all of them :P)

 

@Spotty @SleepDeprivationTheITGuy DVD/Blu-ray is a fantastic idea! Its about 60GB total so splitting it across a few disks should do nicely. I realistically know that I wont need a single solution for 60 years, but its nice to have a backup/process for when I upgrade my primary server storage. I'll just have to make sure I get into the habit of checking the backup before I go through any upgrade processes.

 

I cannot express how much better this has made me feel, Thank you all for your help

 

Dave

 

[Needfuldoer]

I'm so sorry for your loss.

 

I think archival cloud storage and M-Disc are your best options. (Aside from always keeping a local copy on your current tech.)

 

Services like Amazon Glacier will keep long-term backups in cold storage (probably tape libraries). You have to pay a maintenance fee, and pay again if you ever have to pull your data, but maintaining access to and readability of the archive is their responsibility. According to their listed prices, storing your 60 gigs in Glacier would cost about $0.22/mo. In my opinion, that's well worth the peace of mind in knowing there's always going to be a retrievable copy of your archive.

 

EDIT: As others said, services like Google Photos, iCloud, DropBox, and OneDrive are good cloud hosting options as well. Most will also give you instant access, whereas AWS Glacier is strictly a data archive.

 

M-Discs are writeable optical media specially formulated to last for decades as archival storage. Back everything up onto sets of M-Disc BD-Rs, and keep a spare USB or SATA Blu-Ray drive with your offsite copy. 

 

But as with everything, standards change. Data preservation is a process of migrating to newer standards as time goes on, and verifying file integrity along the way. Reassess every decade or so to make sure retrieving your archive is still viable with readily-available tools. That said, I don't think we'll see the end of Blu-Ray and USB backward compatibility any time soon.

Edited November 5, 2022 by Needfuldoer

[wseaton]

I've had this conversation many times in photography forums. 

 

Your worst option is physical home media. I dont recall the last time I've used a physical disc, blue ray or otherwise, and flash storage is not very reliable. Optical drives are rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

 

Hard drives are a solid choice, but interfaces change and in 10years I can't guarantee you will be able to interface with an existing sata port and drive.

 

My vote is to keep a copy locally on a standard Hard Drive or RAID set and another copy on BackBlaze, Glacier, google Etc. Those services aren't going to go offline unless there's massive economic/technological changes and you will likely have plenty of warning. 

 

Tape is the worst option. 

[OhioYJ]

9 hours ago, DavidMcVay said:

with a SSD at my parents as a backup. 

Something to consider.. I also keep drives off-site, but I always keep a pair of drives off-site. I keep my externals in pairs, to protect against a single drive failure. I have pairs of external drives in pelican cases, and I update them every so often, and rotate my off-site backup so it can be updated. 

 

Also you didn't mention what type of SSD it is, but the length of time it can store data without power is going to vary. 

[ToboRobot]

No product or solution exists for forever digital storage.  You can implement a system to have reasonably secure backup of important data.

3 Copies

=

2 Local
+
1 Off Site

Such as: A local server with the data + a backup of the data on optical discs in a safe + an offsite cloud storage archive

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/



 

[toytracker]

On 11/4/2022 at 10:33 PM, DavidMcVay said:

I am hyper paranoid that I will lose these photos. I know all drives will fail at some point. I'm 34, if I make it to 94 that's 60 years I need to make sure these photos survive!

Sorry for your loss, we've just started using Forever (dot com) which is a pay once solution for permanent private cloud storage of photos, they have a 100 year guarantee, which includes migrating to newer file formats as it becomes necessary. Also their app is super easy to use and tag / categorize photos for sharing. It's like having your camera roll on a private Dropbox, you can access it from any device. We bought 100GB for $750, probably overkill but my wife does not want to risk losing any pictures.

[toytracker]

On 11/4/2022 at 10:52 PM, Skiiwee29 said:

Getting a cloud storage account with like Google Photos or iCloud or similar services that absolutely wont be shut down in your life time baring anything catasrophic is your best bet

Does the name Google Picasa ring a bell?? I had many photos stored there (**way back** in the day) that I had tweaked, all of those edits were lost and it was cumbersome to get everything back when it went off-line. No trust from me regarding the longevity of Big Tech (let alone the privacy and potential subscription costs etc)

Rich