Hi,

I’m not sure if this is the right community for my question, but as my daily driver is Linux, it feels somewhat relevant.

I have a lot of data on my backup drives, and recently added 50GB to my already 300GB of storage (I can already hear the comments about how low/high/boring that is). It’s mostly family pictures, videos, and documents since 2004, much of which has already been compressed using self-made bash scripts (so it’s Linux-related ^^).

I have a lot of data that I don’t need regular access to and won’t be changing anymore. I’m looking for a way to archive it securely, separate from my backup but still safe.

My initial thought was to burn it onto DVDs, but that’s quite outdated and DVDs don’t hold much data. Blu-ray discs can store more, but I’m unsure about their longevity. Is there a better option? I’m looking for something immutable, safe, easy to use, and that will stand the test of time.

I read about data crystals, but they seem to be still in the research phase and not available for consumers. What about using old hard drives? Don’t they need to be powered on every few months/years to maintain the magnetic charges?

What do you think? How do you archive data that won’t change and doesn’t need to be very accessible?

Cheers

  • @[email protected]
    19•2 months ago

    This is actually a real problem… A lot of digital documents from the 90’s and early 2000’s are lost forever. Hard drives die over time, and nobody out there has come up with a good way to permanently archive all that stuff.

    I am a crazy person, so I have RAID, Ceph, and JBOD in various and sundry forms. Still, drives die.

    • @[email protected]English
      12•2 months ago

      nobody out there has come up with a good way to permanently archive all that stuff

      Personally I can’t wait for these glass hard drives being researched to come at the consumer or even corporate level. Yes they’re only writable one time and read only after that, but I absolutely love the concept of being able to write my entire Plex server to a glass harddrive, plug it in and never have to sorry about it again.

        • @[email protected]English
          3•2 months ago

          This is interesting, haven’t heard of it. I think the problem with the disc format is you aren’t getting 28 TB of content on there unless you span multiple discs which is a pain in the ass

          • @[email protected]
            1•2 months ago

            That was my thought as well. I’m also thinking it might be a challenge to get something to read them in 100 years.

    • @Peffse
      6•2 months ago

      It’s crazy that there isn’t a company out there making viable cold storage for the average consumer. I feel like we’re getting even further away from viability now that we use QLC by default in SSDs. The rot will be so fast.