retrophiliac
Discoverer
1TB portable SSD ~₹2000!! Typo or wishful thinking?
Storage Solutions Want reliable storage for family photos
- Thread starter Danielman
- Start date
chetansha
Innovator
dvader
Forerunner
When it comes to storage remember the rule of thumb, "Two is one, one is none". Have a second (cheap) physical media storage with long shelf life. For industries, it's Magnetic tape (Note that even big cloud providers use it there is no getting away from big old magnetic tape) and for home users, it's blue ray. Buy 25G/50G blue ray drives and have two copies, store it in a cool dry place. I follow the strategy of storing one copy in my bank locker. I understand that an offshore copy will always be costly if you are privacy conscious like me but I don't even use public email providers so your appetite for privacy might be different. But you can just create a third blueray copy and store it at your parent's or brother's place as an offshore copy.
While you are doing this don't forget to,
1. Buy quality airtight cases (I use extra ESD safe Zip locks not that ESD safe is needed but why not) for your bluerays and keep them in a second box indexed by years.
2. Indexing, Indexing, Indexing. Write a physical note with each disk mentioning what it contains. Keep a readme inside just in case
3. Test your restores yearly. I can not emphasize this hard enough.
4. Keep an unencrypted copy, preferably the one you own. (You don't know what will happen in the future If I die I want my loved ones to have a way of getting the data easily)
5. Do not use any obscure, fancy, cracked software for data copying, encryption, organizing into an album, etc. Just plain old data copy nothing else. Just imagine you trying to look at your wedding photos when you are 75, you won't have the energy to decipher what you did 25 years back.
6. Have a rudimentary will or keep at least two people informed about where are all the disks and how to access it (that's why the bank locker in my case, it's unencrypted and easily accessible in case something goes south)
7. All this is cheap to achieve, it just takes some diligence on your end.
Note1: Missed some points
1. Go to Amazon Verbatim has lots of blueray/mdisks at a reasonable price.
2. Rotate/test your bank/personal copy every 3 years (Mdisk or Blueray doesn't matter)
3. You will be surprised by the fact that the actual data that you wanna protect this hard is actually less.
Note2: If you have stored intimate pics of you and your significant other (Nothing wrong with that, just a testament to your happy and healthy marriage/relationship/companionship)
1. Keep multiple notes, I mean multiple written in big bold letters, and use markers to write on the top of the disk (Mom-Dad Intimate works!!!). Keep a note inside the disk itself and name the folders the same way.
2. This is just to ensure that your kids don't get a heart attack or brain aneurysm and can burn the disks without actually ever touching them.
3. This of course is valid after all the concerned parties have already departed, so technically it won't affect you.
While you are doing this don't forget to,
1. Buy quality airtight cases (I use extra ESD safe Zip locks not that ESD safe is needed but why not) for your bluerays and keep them in a second box indexed by years.
2. Indexing, Indexing, Indexing. Write a physical note with each disk mentioning what it contains. Keep a readme inside just in case
3. Test your restores yearly. I can not emphasize this hard enough.
4. Keep an unencrypted copy, preferably the one you own. (You don't know what will happen in the future If I die I want my loved ones to have a way of getting the data easily)
5. Do not use any obscure, fancy, cracked software for data copying, encryption, organizing into an album, etc. Just plain old data copy nothing else. Just imagine you trying to look at your wedding photos when you are 75, you won't have the energy to decipher what you did 25 years back.
6. Have a rudimentary will or keep at least two people informed about where are all the disks and how to access it (that's why the bank locker in my case, it's unencrypted and easily accessible in case something goes south)
7. All this is cheap to achieve, it just takes some diligence on your end.
Note1: Missed some points
1. Go to Amazon Verbatim has lots of blueray/mdisks at a reasonable price.
2. Rotate/test your bank/personal copy every 3 years (Mdisk or Blueray doesn't matter)
3. You will be surprised by the fact that the actual data that you wanna protect this hard is actually less.
Note2: If you have stored intimate pics of you and your significant other (Nothing wrong with that, just a testament to your happy and healthy marriage/relationship/companionship)
1. Keep multiple notes, I mean multiple written in big bold letters, and use markers to write on the top of the disk (Mom-Dad Intimate works!!!). Keep a note inside the disk itself and name the folders the same way.
2. This is just to ensure that your kids don't get a heart attack or brain aneurysm and can burn the disks without actually ever touching them.
3. This of course is valid after all the concerned parties have already departed, so technically it won't affect you.
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In my work, we have data 'backed up' aka stored in external 4 TB hard drives. We are using VVV to index contents of the drive, and it is working great. We have labelled the drives and our data is stored by unique identifiers. We can search the contents of the drives without having to plug them it. If you already use a way to organize your media, this tool is def worth checking out.
Also works for DVD / Blurays and M-drive as well, any media essentially.
dvader
Forerunner
+1 for this. I have heard about this tool. Opensource and non-binary indexes. Just place the software (shouldn't be more than 50 MB even if you copy installers for all OSs) in each disk you create, In case the website goes down after a decade. or any rudimentary form of indexing if someone is not comfortable with this.
Just to remind everyone why indexing is more important than actually backing up data. After 20 years, you will forget what pictures you took much less that you even backed it up. An index gives a way to search and easily access what you have. Data is useless unless you can extract information from it.
