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Backing up data

~shoebx

Howdy folks, been a while!

I have a network-attached storage of the homemade, extremely hacked kind. It almost looks like it shouldn't work but it's been doing fine for a couple of years by now and with no sign of stopping any time soon.

I've been working on backing it up for the last few months (It's actually not that much data, I'm just very slow) by cataloging everything, compressing what I can and planning other stuff like what formats to use, how to tier stuff (some stuff is way more important than others) and where to put it in the first place.

As I looked up a good cold storage solution the only conclusion that comes is that everything, in one way or another, will definitely and inexorably fail.

That makes sense, but it somehow put a weird dread in me which I couldn't explain, until I stumbled somehow on the Wikipedia page for the concept of "memento mori" and then everything clicked.

Memento mori [...] is an artistic or symbolic trope acting as a reminder of the inevitability of death.

Backing up, in a way, has the same effect: it's a stark reminder of the inevitability of (digital) death. Your hard drives will one day fail. Your back up will one day fail, too.

Hell, if you think about it, data preservation itself, hot or cold that is, revolves about this concept, just applied to other hardware: that website will stop existing, your desktop might fail and so on.

In a way, long-term preservation all boils down to making data last enough that it will at least live as much as you do or, in other words, make it so that you fail before your data.

At least, we can still try to refresh stuff and make multiple copies but, every time I SSH into my NAS, the thought is always there in the back of my mind, expanding into life itself.

That's quite grim to me.

~bartender, how about some apple juice today? Thank you.

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Replies

~peony3 wrote (thread):

I've been thinking about this a lot recently, and maybe "Memento mori" is what I needed to hear. I want to go into archiving, but I think generally it's more about "preservation to serve the future generations" rather than "preservation just because." If something is no longer serving me or someone else, than maybe it's okay to let it go.

~inquiry wrote (thread):

Some related what-might-be-called "non-attachment news" I"ve found making increasing sense with increasing age: the best storage solution is to have nothing to save.

~tffb wrote (thread):

hi shoebx, yea I store things locally for fast access and zero downloads time, but beyond that nothing long-term. I mean I suppose some items get back up over and over again, but I watch/consume them over and over again. Kind of like localized streaming. When a video or music thing is "done with", I delete them.

I think NAS are effectively digital storage sheds for the media hoarder, not to piss on someone's library or (as some claim, "ingenious" fle-naming methods) but any video/song(s) I am done with for a long period of time, I delete as they're online one spot or another indefinitely, anyway.

~bartender, red eye coffee. Full day of clubhouse today with a million things to do, ha