Long Term Offsite Backup

[The Google Maps Guy]

Hello all,

 

I have over 4 TB in videos and photos (mostly photos) that I have backed up several times over. As y'all know you can't have too many backups.

2 external HDDs

2 cloud services (Backblaze and Google)

1 Synology DiskStation (on site at home)

 

But I am needing something physical off-site, not just a cloud backup. I need something that can easily be added to every month or so.

 

Since I have a safe deposit box at a nearby bank that is plenty big enough, here's what I was thinking...

 

Getting some media, copying all my photos and videos to the media and putting it in that box then adding to it every couple months.

Here is the question.

 

Which storage media would be best for this approach?

1. Getting a bunch of SanDisk 512 GB flash drives and using those to back up my files, then when I fill up another drive, drop it in the safe deposit box.

2. A couple 5 TB portable HDDs, copying my files to that, going to the bank every couple months, bringing the drive home, adding all new files, then dropping it off at the bank again.

 

Or does anyone have any better ideas?

[manikyath]

burn blurays. you store them in an airtight enclosure in the safe, and each time you have more data to store, you just add more blurays to the safe.

 

a burned disk is much more long-term stabile than flash media or spinning rust, so you dont have to worry about data rot.

 

[mariushm]

 

There's also amazon Glacier for long term storage, but it costs quite a bit, like 3.5-5$ a month for 1 TB (0.0036$ per GB for some US locations, 0.004$ per GB for some Europe locations) of backup, then it costs more to get data back, like 1 cent per GB retrieved.

 

If you go with optical media, also include a couple external bluray drives in the safe. 

Don't like optical media, you can still get bitrot, the edges can go bad due to air and humidity getting inside the layers if the edge is not glued well... 

Get a standard mechanical hard drive, maybe two ... put the pictures on it, make a copy of the pictures in another folder so you have multiple copies of the files on the drive.. 

Make a rar archive of the pictures with 10-20% recovery record, or make zip/7zip archive (you can make archives with NO compression or minimal compression, just to have the stuff in nice packages) and then use something like QuickPar to add recovery information (10-20% should be enough)

 

Maybe once every 6 months or so, get the hard drive, let it get back to ambient temperature, connect it to pc, copy the images to the computer, write them back, basically "refresh" the pictures on the mechanical drive, let the drive spin for half an hour or so

 

[manikyath]

7 minutes ago, mariushm said:

There's also amazon Glacier for long term storage,

i feel like you missed this:

1 hour ago, The Google Maps Guy said:

But I am needing something physical off-site, not just a cloud backup.

 

beyond that:

8 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Don't like optical media, you can still get bitrot, the edges can go bad due to air and humidity getting inside the layers if the edge is not glued well... 

i have piles upon piles upon piles of optical media ranging from the early 90s all the way to 'basicly last week'. in that entire pile there's only one bad disk, and it's a very shitty CD-R of which the label has flaked off (on a CD, data is on the label side), but that's a failure mode that has been fixed in DVD.

 

given that safe rooms are often quite well controlled in terms of humidity and temperature, i'd give the optical disks a longer lifespan than the mechanical aspect of spinning rust.

 

to me, that's the major advantage of optical media: you're just storing a piece of plastic, your data isnt connected to a mechanism that wears out over time, and there is no maintenance to the data being stored.

[Kilrah]

When I got my archives off optical media a good 30% of the discs had become unreadable, and I haven't lost data since. So I'd very much advise against optical media.

 

Quality media might last, but you're not going to know whether it really is until it fails. There have been some "scandals" of low grade discs being advertised as "Archival grade" before.