Comment on What do people use for a shelf-stable backup
IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
After reading the previous discussion I think that you should get more than single drive to store cold backups. That way you can at least spread out the risk of single drive failing. 2TB spinning drives are pretty cheap today and if you have, for example, 4 of them, you can buy one now, write your backups to it and in 6 months buy another, write data on that and so on.
This way you’ll have drives with year or two difference on purchase date, so it’s pretty unlikely all of them fail at once and a single drive gets powered on and checked every other year or so. My personal experience is that spinning drives are pretty stable on the shelf, but I wouldn’t rely on them for decades. And of course even with multiple drives you’ll still want to replace them every 3-5 years each. Plus with multiple drives, if I were to build setup like that, I’d set up some sort of scripts or other solution where I can just plug the thing in and doubleclick an icon on desktop to refresh the data and maybe get a notification automatically that the drive you’re using should be replaced.
And for actual, long term storage, printouts are the way to go. At least in here you can get books made out of photo paper with your pictures. That’s one media which is actually stable over long period and using them doesn’t require a lot of technical knowledge nor hardware. But I’d still keep digital copies around, as the printouts aren’t resistant to things like house fire or water damage.
Dave@lemmy.nz 2 weeks ago
Yeah I am thinking of getting a couple of drives and cloning across both. Update both at the same time. I didn’t think of getting two drives at different times but that makes sense, thanks for the suggestion!
I am thinking printouts is a good idea too. I might get a big container, and keep a couple of mirrored drives as well as say 100 photos from each year. Every year I update the drives with additions and then print 100 photos from the previous year to add to the collection.
IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
I personally prefer printed out books of our photos. We are missing quite a few years due to life getting in the way, but the end goal is to have actual books of photos with titles like ‘Our family in 2018’ and ‘Sports of our first born at 2022’. In europe we have a company called ‘ifolor’ where you can design and order printouts of your photos. They’re not really cheap, but the quality is pretty damn good. And their offerings go to pretty decent sized photo albums, up to A3 size and 180 pages (which is over 200€). So, not cheap, but at least so far their quality has been worth the money.
And they have cheaper options too, but personally I think it’s worth the money to get the best quality you can for printouts. And even the smallest and cheapest option is far superior over not having anything at all due to hardware failure or whatever.
Dave@lemmy.nz 2 weeks ago
I’ve done some photo books in the past. A lot of work though, I prefer the idea of printed photos. Plus if they are the only surviving photos, then it’s nice to have them in an easily scannable format.
I came across this container, where each of the smaller containers holds 100 photos. Seems like it could be a good option, one container per year with 100 photos in each. 12 years per box. Get say 6 of them to cover the rest of my life (one could probably cover my life to date, a lot less photos before I had kids), put in a larger container that also holds a couple of (mirrored) hard drives. One big time capsule.