Long Term Digital File Storage

I suspect mostly because I am lazy, and haven't tried so hard.

 

The reason for not putting all on one device is redundancy.

 

How you do the redundancy is the question.

 

RAID gives you some built-in redundancy, but there is still the possibility of

more than one drive dying at the same time. (Well, then there is RAID 6.)

 

In addition to the 4x2TB RAID array SAN, I also have a 3GB SAN, which I use more for ordinary

file storage, NFS mounted on different house computers.

 

Keeping files on many different computers seems to be the easy way to lose them, after you

forget which are on which computer.

 

Yes I haven't tried cloud back-up yet. That means finding one that will be around for many years,

which doesn't always happen. What guarantee to cloud providers give you?

 

Or maybe it is that I like playing with computers.

 

Not arguing, just answering, my friend, Thanks for your thoughtful response.

 

I have redundancy with my BackBlaze backup. Very importantly, backblaze is offsite redundancy. If BackBlaze goes away, I'll find another provider. I've had two friends lose their lives' work in house fires. RAID to the inth degree provides no protection from fire and flood.

 

I have a tertiary cloud backup of my full-resolution JPEGs, on Flickr, where I have over 20,000 files. They just doubled the price of a "Pro" membership. Flickr also facilitates a clean and easy interface with Pixsy, which is constantly scouring the internet for infringements of my copyrights. That's been a nice little side generator of revenue, with several thousand per year coming in in settlements. (I have an independant attorney and don't use Pixsy's attorneys.)

I am not a professional photographer, or I might need something different.

 

Still, I suspect many peoples' favorite family pictures are going away, as people upgrade computers and

forget to transfer, or othterwise lose track of the files.

 

It is easy to see the value in negatives, though many people aren't all that good at keeping

them safe. Harder to see what is in a CF or SD card, and easier to lose track of.

I keep reminding people that flash memory (USB thumb drives, SSDs, and memory cards) aren't reliable for archival storage, especially when disconnected from a computer. The transistors that store our data gradually leak electrons and eventually become unreadable. Heat and nearby electromagnetic fields can accelerate the leakage.

 

Newer flash memory tends to have less retention than older flash memory because the more-advanced smaller transistors hold fewer electrons. Also, flash memory that stores more than one bit per transistor (e.g., MLC, TLC, and QLC) has less retention than flash memory that stores only one bit per transistor (SLC) because each bit is encoded with fewer electrons.

 

I've been told by experts that SSDs connected to a computer (continuously or periodically) will retain their data almost indefinitely. The SSD controller occasionally shuffles the data by recopying it to unused regions of the flash memory. This process refreshes the data. It happens transparently, without user intervention, like automatic defragging on a hard disk drive but for different reasons. However, the simpler controllers on USB thumb drives and memory cards may not do this shuffling. And a disconnected SSD will gradually lose its data if not connected and powered up for a long time. Hard drives don't leak data in this manner but are vulnerable to mechanical failures and electromagnetic fields.

Last week loaded a 4T Western Digital Passport - small, inexpensive and easy to use. Loaded a 2.7 T backup - took 30 odd hours the first time, just a few moments the second time. Now a question of keeping an eye on technology as it advances and shifting ahead when it makes sense. Quite pleased with it.

I'm currently using various Seagate multi-terabyte SSD's for backup. As per Sandy, slow the first go, faster on updates. No problems so far...

Long ago I found I could massively reduce the size of my image files by converting to JPEGs for storage and compressing them using Easy Thumbnails:

 

Easy Thumbnails

 

Keeping the image size the same but selecting 90% quality reduced the filesize of each image from my 1Ds MkII to about 2-3MB.

 

Yes, I know this may sound insane but there is minimal loss of quality and as I am no longer a professional photographer I worry less about the minutia of the process.

 

I have found I can now put about 15000 such JPEGs onto a single Blu_Ray disc (the ablative kind) .

 

I also store them on Mega which gives free 50GB cloud storage.

 

www.mega.nz

 

And on 2 separate HDDs to make sure I never lose any.

Long ago I found I could massively reduce the size of my image files by converting to JPEGs for storage and compressing them using Easy Thumbnails:

 

Easy Thumbnails

 

Keeping the image size the same but selecting 90% quality reduced the filesize of each image from my 1Ds MkII to about 2-3MB.

 

Yes, I know this may sound insane but there is minimal loss of quality and as I am no longer a professional photographer I worry less about the minutia of the process.

 

I have found I can now put about 15000 such JPEGs onto a single Blu_Ray disc (the ablative kind) .

 

I also store them on Mega which gives free 50GB cloud storage.

 

www.mega.nz

 

And on 2 separate HDDs to make sure I never lose any.

 

Use THREE drives in rotation

I have a 4x2TB RAID 5 array SAN that I use for my home storage, not just pictures, but

also WAV files for audio, and anything else I do on my home computers.

 

One that hasn't been mentioned, though I haven't been keeping up quite fast enough,

is Ultrium tape. Ultrium 3 is 400GB per tape cartridge, which is much more than

CD-R, DVD-R, or even BD-R.

 

 

I gave up on tape drives a long time ago.

• HD capacity used to be less than tape. Then the HD capacity shot past tape, so I needed multiple tapes to backup a single drive.
  I went through several generations of tape drives (555, floppy controller, DAT, DLT), ending with a 20GB native DLT tape drive. All became obsolete due to the quickly increasing HD capacity. I finally gave up chasing tape drive capacity, and went with external USB HD. The cost of tape drives (even used) became too expensive for a home operation, and external HD increased in capacity while dropping in price.
   
  
• In a disaster recovery the new computer will have a USB3 port to plug the HD into. Tape requires finding and buying a tape drive and the appropriate interface card in the computer. IOW, the hardware side of recovery with a HD was just plain easier than tape.
  

Similarly I gave up on RAID at home, cuz it was not worth the hassle.

As a techie it was fun to setup and neat to have, but the hassle to rebuild the computer or a new computer was not worth it. After I retired, the fun factor was lost. So, rather than striping drives, I just went with LARGE drives, and sometimes mirrored them.

 

I switched to the KISS principle for most of my home computing.