Comment on What do people use for a shelf-stable backup
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
I’m thinking of using a HDD and keeping it at work, which is climate controlled. I’d bring it back every few months to sync the latest.
Since it’s constantly being used, I’m pretty confident it’ll be usable as a backup if my NAS fails, so it only needs to be “shelf stable” for a few months at a time. If you’re retired or something, a safe deposit box at your local bank should do the trick.
I have a cloud backup, so this isn’t about a critical loss of data. It’s about an accessible copy that isn’t encrypted and a layman could get the data off.
If my house burns down and I lose the copy, I can restore the data from the cloud backup (so long as I’m not in the house when it burns).
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 4 months ago
If it’s powered off, you’ll have no idea when it dies. And they do die just sitting there.
I’ve actually had more failures of drives sitting around than ones running constantly.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
But I will because it won’t work the next time I take it home to sync. The chance that it’ll fail during the few months between a sync and an emergency is incredibly low.
I wouldn’t leave it on a shelf for years, just a few months at a time (approximately quarterly).