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Finding a Backup Solution

~immy

Recently I realised that my data is in far too few places. Worse than that, I realised that I've lost far too much data through being careless like this. I realised that if I still want the data that I have now in the future I need to put some sort of system in place. Particularly, I'd like to be able to look back on the things I've made and done now in a few decades time. Also, as a content creator I feel it important to have an archive of my work since I can't trust platforms to keep it.

I'd also like to keep an archive of sorts to try and play a small part in helping to combat lost media and link rot.

So what am I to do? Well, the industry standards for keeping backups is 3-2-1: Keep three copies of a file, two on two different storage mediums (i.e. a harddrive and CD) and one off-site (i.e. cloud storage or a hard drive stored at another location). For the sake of my precious data I plan to follow this industry standard.

For the first copy of my data I intend to have a 'live' copy, in other words a version of the file that I'm actively working on. For the second copy of my data I'm looking into setting up a NAS with an old Mac Mini I found on eBay for a tenner, I plan to install Linux or FreeBSD on it, connect two hard drives and either run them in RAID 1 or rsync data between them at set intervals. It won't be a fast or even good system but it'll work and hopefully be reliable given the redundancy of two drives. For the third copy of data I plan to regularly backup my most important data to my Nextcloud, that way if something happens to my house my data is safe.

Finally, I want to invest in some cold storage, perhaps another external hard drive. I find M-Discs to be particularly interesting, they're reasonably inexpensive and can supposedly last for centuries. While I'm under no illusions that these discs won't actually last for as long as advertised I have no doubt that they'll outlast me. Although I don't currently have even the modest hardware required to use these discs.

Finally, I find myself interested in LTO tapes. The actual tapes are relatively inexpensive and have supposedly very impressive longevity. The main difficulty wth these tapes is that the actual tape readers are extremely expensive and difficult to connect to. I'd like to buy a inexpensive used tape reader at some point and see what I can get setup as a long term goal though.

So yeah, that's an overly long post about my plans to actually backup data ;P

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Replies

~beefox wrote:

another suggestion i have is using an incremental backup system such as borg, idk how it would work with m discs, it means saving much less data because after the inital backup, only new/changed data is saved.

this all presumes read/write infrastructure however, and mdisc is a write once sort of thing. maybe you could do a hybrid where you backup your archive every so often, so you can have a daily backup that once a month gets saved into a cold storage?

my personal system is a hard drive, some cloud storage, and an encrypted borg archive. i save my daily stuff to my cloud storage, and each month make a backup on my disc. this way i have all my data minus up to 24 hours if something goes catastrophically wrong, and i have my monthly backup to restore to a point where i can access my daily backups with ease

~shoebx wrote:

I have the same problem, although I generate a lot less data when it comes to deeply personal and important stuff. I think I could fit all my projects with room to spare in a common SD card (8 gigs, right?!).

Regarding M-Disk, if you don't care about super-mega-hyper long

term, "I heard" that blu rays are presumably quite similar to M-Disks, as they're "by default" made with inorganic dies, which are superior from the organic stuff in DVDs and CDs. So presumably an mdisk CD/DVD makes a lot more sense than an mkdisk bluray, so to speak.

The keywords "HTL vs LTH" might also be the opening for the rabbit hole, if you wanna get in there deep.

I haven't found any resource highlighting precisely what's different from bluray mdisks and regular blurays, but I have a feeling that the regular kind will do fine for your usecase and let you save quite some money ;)

Whatever you'll pick, optical disks are a lot of fun! Blu-rays can hold A LOT of data compared to DVDs and I love them :D