We all know cd's/dvd's go bad after years of nothingness. Many of my old cd's are garbage nowadays. I plan on putting some important data on a media to store for many years, what is the best plan? Should I buy an external hard drive, will these last if not used for 10 years? What about a flash drive? Any ideas? It's basically for a backup I can count on if my machine blows up (god forbid) Any ideas? Thanks!
Acid free paper... Get some gold, archive CDR. They are said to last 30-100 years in proper storage. Make ten of each disc, put them in a properly humid / no light environ in a vertical rack. Rotate them every year vertically.
Maybe a cyberbrain? Or some kind of hard stone, the tools to work it, and a lot of patience and sweat! More seriously, what about pressed discs?
Open the files in an hex editor, get some granite stones and write each file into those. When you want to open them, just write the content of the stones into the hex editor.
There was a thread on this about a year ago. AFAIK, the most reasonable and trustworthy medium is tape. Optical is out. However, if you have under 2TB of data, you can either buy or make a RAID1 device which is quite sturdy. Since SAMBA for Linux is pretty crappy in terms of performance and reliability, I need my drives mounted as NFS, and the only RAID1 NFS devices are absurdly expensive ($1500 last I checked). Fuck that. I built a whole Linux box w/ 2 1TB drives (mirrored) for $1000. Of course, this doesn't protect them from my stupidity when I'm on the mount as root and type "rm *" but I'm pretty careful. If I really had to I could only mount when I wanted to copy data. The ultimate solution is of course a RAID1 disk pair, and then have them backed up to a separate device on a 3-5 day rotation depending on size.
Online on multiple servers in ZIP and then onto discs that you restore and reburn every 3 years. There is no real affordable long term storage solution. You'll need to maintain the back ups over the course of years. Tape is not guaranteed past a few years either.
Upload to Gmail then it's no longer your problem, they're up to 7.1GiB/acct now. While there's a small chance this won't work for 10 years, once the Google buzz dies down, it's probable that before then Google will actually offer free reliable file archival. Google wants to be the world's hard drive anyway, so let them, just remember to encrypt any personal files so there's no chance they'll get legally inherited into Google's massive library or incriminating files so nobody will ever know
There is no such thing as a perfect backup system. The best thing that you can do is make regular backups stored in multiple locations. Local redundancy (RAID) is great for short term storage, but is vulnerable to environmental hazards such as fire or theft. Online storage helps offset those risks, but you have little to no recourse if your storage provider loses your data. A physical backup in a secured storage location, such as a safety deposit box, provides a level of security that can be generally high. The problem then becomes the media. If your data is static, it can still be beneficial to have multiple copies at a single location (multiple points of failure). If your data changes over time, then you will need to work out a storage regimine. Something like using a RAID5 array for local storage, backed up to DVD and an online provide every week and backed up to a tape stored in a remote location monthly should probably give you more protection than most really need.
My solution doesn't take into account storm or fire. Only off site will prevent those. I think when your house is destroyed, you write off most data as well. Times are changing (it's still not affordable) but obviously that has to be taken into account.
