Long Term Storage

[tronder]

Hi All, 

 

Was looking for advice into what was the best storage medium for a device that would backup important data such as Photos, documents and videos every say 5 months to be stored for years.

Tossing up between SSD or HD, is there any specifics?
This is mainly to back up NAS files in case of fire, flood, or it gets stolen 

[pelark]

I'd get an HDD, as you can pull the data off of it even when it's gone through a lot of crap, long as you have a computer shop or something near you that can do that.

[Ordinarily_Greater]

The HDD is fine if you are doing like "slow library system" which means you do not mind about "reading" the "book" fast

nice HDD = ST1000DM010

 

SSD is important for better speeds than the HDD like if you want to find datas so fast

[ac1999]

That depends on a few things, SSDs need to be powered on every now and then to keep data, but as you are planning a 5 month backup cycle it would not be a problem, HDs don't suffer from this.

Second is price, HDs are cheaper in terms of storage space per dollar, at the moment at least, and would last a lot longer if it was left unpowered for a long period of time.

Third, you can get HDs of up to 10 gb, SSDs so far as i can see right now, are at 2tb for A$2000+

and fourth, as stated above, recovery is much easier on a HDD than an SSD

Speed can also be a factor, HDs are slower than SSDs

[emosun]

tape is technically the best/cheapest still but not good for home use , better for businesses.

ALOT of people still swear by burning to disks. they are read only , and tend to have little to no aging problems and store longterm real well. You be burning to blu-ray obviously.

Other than that I might avoid mechanical hard drives for long term storage as the drives are made to be running more often than not and like to die from little to no use.

[Tiz]

HDD backup + cloud backup is all you need IMO. I wouldn't trust ANY single thing with something really important, at least 2 of them.

[JacobFW]

Redundancy.  Don't rely on a single method.  Have multiple backups of it.  

NAND flash is not good for longterm storage.  The electrons slowly leak from the cells over time,  

3D XPoint might actually be good for really longterm storage if it works the way I think it does.  Sadly there's still not enough information out to confirm that. 

Hard Drives platters will actually hold data for a good while, the biggest problem is the motors are likely to not last even if the data does.

Magnetic tape actually holds data for about the tape amount of time as Hard Drives.  there biggest advantage is that they're so simple.  Just spinning wheels.  The reader is external, so if it dies over time, you just get another one.  

 

A pretty good setup for a home user would be:

Have 1 or 2 cloud backups.

Get 3 NAS quality Hard Drives and set them up in a Raid 1.  That'll give you three copies of your data.  Then once a year, take one of the drives out, and put a new in it's place and let the Raid rebuild.  Then take that drive you just took out, and make that the rebuild drive for your array, so in case of the drives fails, it will automatically rebuild onto that drive.

 

You might not want to hear this, but if you want a good storage system, you'll have to put some work into it, there's no other way around it.

[seagate_surfer]

Utilize a 3-2-1 backup strategy. 3 copies of your data, 2 stored locally but on different mediums, and one stored offsite. 

As far as how you store that offsite copy/what you store it on, you could always go with a cloud storage company. What a lot of users on the NAS forums we frequent seem to prefer doing is using a NAS, backing up to external HDD, and backing up to a cloud storage service.

And thank you for knowing that RAID is not a backup. *Gives you a cookie*