Sealed pelican case has decent precedent. A small regional bank I was aware of used basically this exact strategy. There were couriers going between branches daily, so it was easy to cross-ship a sealed DR/backup box to a remote branch every day.
I debated doing this recently but ultimately spent a lot of money on an LTO-6 tape drive instead, just due to the cost efficiency over time for larger amounts of data. I justified it to myself as I needed to either expand my NAS or clear stuff off it, and the drive was the same price as buying two new HDDs to expand the NAS thanks to the obscene price inflation at the moment. As I’d likely need to further expand my NAS next year (I’m shooting a lot of photo and video) I think this works out a much more cost effective way of storing this data long term when I likely don’t need to access it much.
I am also considering an LTO solution of some kind, but I also found out that LTO drives seemingly need some TLC and maintenance if you don’t want your tapes to jam up. I feel like at least with optical media, it’s nearly impossible to screw it up.
I really wish a multi-terabyte optical media solution took off, because that would be the path I’d ultimately take, instead of going with expensive LTO devices and media.
I've been thinking about different techniques for making my NAS backup-able to cold storage and... the thing that has given me pause with tape is how closed-down the ecosystem for the LTO drives themselves seems to be. What's your strategy for knowing you'll be able to access your tapes to transfer them forward to the next generation in 10-15 years when the tapes start reaching the end of their dependable life?
Looks like I'm a bit out of date, but older generations of LTO drives were able to read tapes from up to two generations ago, and write tapes from one generation back. Looks like this isn't the case since LTO-8. It looks for 8 and 9 theycan read and write to tapes back one generation. 10 breaks the pattern and can only read LTO-10 tapes.
Are Verbatim's M-Disc Blu-Rays still really M-Disc? There was something about how they changed the recipe a few years ago, and the counter-argument was that Blu-Ray discs are non-organic anyway, which was the main feature of M-Disc DVD.
There's very few companies now making new Blu-Ray drives too. Pioneer has supposedly stopped producing them, and the ASUS drive I bought earlier this year was one of the only SKUs on the market. Sony stopped producing high-capacity recordable BDXL discs too which means they aren't much of an option now for large backups.
> While the immediate burn quality seems relatively satisfactory, I was still not satisfied as to whether these discs were truly worth their premium over commodity blank media. Looking at the discs, it seemed that the recording layers were likely made of similar materials based on the visual aspect, unlike the obvious difference with DVDs. Also, it seemed that regular recorders were intended to be able to record to the BD-R’s (according to the Verbatim text).
...
> Digging further around the M-disc site, it is noted that their section on longevity testing actually features no data about the BD-R discs at all. Indeed, if there were tests, the reports were not actually featured on the site at all. Further poking around in M-Disc Technology pages shows only references to their DVD products. In fact, it seems their patented “etched in stone” material may only apply to their DVD products.
...
> From my research into the data, it seems likely that the M-Disc BD-R is not substantially different from other quality BD-R discs on the market as they all use inorganic recording compounds (with the exception of BD-R LTH of course). From a visual inspection, the disc appears the same bright chocolate-brown, unlike the obvious distinction with regular dye based DVDs and the M-Disc DVD which was a silver-grey. But my main concern lies in the demonstrated lifetimes of quality BD-Rs which are similar to the M-Disc DVD (to which the M-Disc BD-R is claimed to have also achieved). In essence, it appears that the MKM/Verbatim BD-R DL has already reached the same level of endurance as the M-Disc DVD had claimed without being “special” at all. It is thus, hard to justify paying more for an M-Disc BD-R, and I cannot really recommend it.
The "not really M-Disc" stuff comes from a post somebody made on the "Data Hoarder" Reddit board a few years ago. The discs were changed to enable higher burning speeds which resulted in a slight difference in appearance, but he/she didn't seem to have realized that Blu-Ray M-Discs were never substantially different from BD-Rs and instead assumed that the tweaked discs were more of a scam than the originals.
I love curating my photo library but after I kick the bucket I have to assume the number of photos that my future relatives care about will number in the dozens.
I've talked to many deceased estate cleaners over the years, I have seen them in action many times. The amount of stuff people want to keep from relatives is a rounding error of 0%.
Whole lives of collecting sentimental goods all end up going in a giant bin, a whole house cleaned out in less than 2 hours. Photo albums are rarely kept, they just go in with it all and off to the tip usually in a single morning.
What you think is important to you, is basically just trash to your relatives/kids. They will probably have want they want before you are gone.
Blu-ray drives are becoming increasingly rare sadly, so it's not great to hand over to others in the years ahead. An external hard disk drive kept safe and secure might be your only option. I had the same issue 6 years ago winding down my company and archiving data. Only sensible options were M-DISC and external hard disks.
This has been my system for a while now. The funny side is that, I have yet to have a drive failure so the amount of local backups is getting silly.
The other thing I did was I ended up collecting HDD's out of old DVR's people were throwing out. Those drives are used for cold storage but not for anything important because they already have tens of thousands of hours on them and in not the best temperature conditions. Again, non have failed yet.
Funnily enough, the only HDD I have failing is a 2.1GB Quantum Fireball from 1997 in my Pentium 1! Really should swap that for an SD card via IDE.
The problem with archiving data is you always need to be prepared to use the "next big thing" once your preferred method becomes unobtainable.
I currently have :
- Photos in iCloud (Live working copy)
- Backup at home on NAS (updated nightly, snapshots)
- Backup in pCloud (lifetime, mine or theirs, no illusions, hopefully lasts a couple of months if I die unexpectedly)
- Yearly archive on external HDDs, identical copies stored in separate locations, clearly labeled "Photo backup". No encryption, no archiving, just plain APFS formatted drives that can be plugged into a computer and read.
- Yearly archive M-disc blu-ray discs, again, identical copies, stored in separate locations. One disc per year labeled as such, ie. "Photo Backup 2020". The idea being you restore them in chronological order and have a complete set.
Sorry if it was not clear: The NAS is at my house but houses may burn down. THE discs are at my parents house for off-site backup. Like the sibling poster says, I would be the one going through the things anyway. But if unsure you can also ask a friend to keep them, one blu-ray can hold tons of photos and doesnt take much space.
Fair. Nothing is risk free. Move overseas, be more than 10 days away, other sibs have the burdens "we threw out those old unreadable backups Dad had stashed from his time at the computer center".. But your strategy isn't the worst by far. My 3-2-1 has 2 of the 3 in the same physical location. Not good.
They probably will be the one going through their parents stuff and hopefully by the time its an issue can move it to their kids' place. Options for trusted free hosting are limited sometimes. ;)
LTO tapes are the worst possible format for passing on family photos to family members. I dread to think of anyone in my family trying to setup an LTO drive when they barely understand how to use their smartphone.
I mean if you don't print them and want digital and we're talking having them for the next generation(s) then pretty much whatever current format you choose, it won't be the one that's widely used in the future so it will require some tech knowledge. And LTO tech stayed pretty settled and compatible for quite a few years now.
LTO drives/tape are not friendly, consumer grade technology. One look on a search engine, and it's all obscure refurbished server parts costing hundreds. The prices of them going forwards might increase sharply too and make it unviable...a bit like external hard drives right now. So yeah, printing everything out and hoping for the best is the only sensible option...
There are companies that can read the tapes for you, especially for a one-off transfer.
This is an _additional_ layer of backups, on top of the usual iCloud/whatever things. LTO is certainly not user-friendly, but neither is it especially user-hostile.
And I think I trust tapes far better than any other alternative for long-term storage as they have by far the smallest areal density of information compared to disks (hard or optical).
I have DVD disks that are barely 10 years old and that I can't read anymore. Hard drives also die in storage and/or during transport.
These companies charge a megabuck. Maintaining the drives doesn't come cheap. I am (like other ageing former mainframe operatives) the holder of a variety of tape forms, and nobody local wants the hassle of giving me a bitstream, without significant vig. Like thousands.
Recently the computer museum helped recover early 1970s unix tapes. It was a big deal.
Your grandkids will just say "make me some memories" and their AI will look at your posting history and gen up some fresh new ancestors very similar to the originals.
I'm surprised this is not more common. I have been doing this since 2016 (started with DVDs and quickly moved to Bluray since writable DVDs are more prone to failure).
Do you periodically re-read the old discs to check them? I burn a par2 recovery set (around 10 percent) onto each disc alongside the data, and once a year run a full verify with dvdisaster or just par2 verify. A disc that starts throwing correctable errors gets re-burned while it can still be read cleanly, which matters more to me than the rated lifetime of any single disc.
100% everything here. That level of tamper evidence should be good enough for the reasonable individual, IMHO.
On the enterprise scale, the question I think everyone should be asking is: Do they have LTO tapes on a shelf? Fundamentally the same issue (but larger), in terms of needing to ensure it's physically separate, and secure, and tamper evident. =)
Anything in the cloud or connected to your network can be hacked. The backup of last resort must be on a shelf.
Just use a magnetic hard disk and your data will be fine for many decades if not centuries. You don't need M-Blu Rays (which have very limited capacity anyway). A hard disk is cheap and stores several Terabytes.
You obviously need to store the data in a physically remote place like your shed, car or safe deposit box in case your house burns down.
Never, ever use a SSD if you want your data to be safe for any amount of time. What's worse, SSDs can fail unexpectedly with almost zero chance of data recovery.
> Just use a magnetic hard disk and your data will be fine for many decades if not centuries.
A few months ago I needed to pull from an offline backup. The disk, which used CMR and was purchased new from an actual computer supply company (i.e. not Amazon), was burnt in for about 72 hours before it was loaded up with data and shoved in a padded box. Ten years later, the drive was pulled, and there were so many media surface errors that most of the data was unrecoverable. (I haven’t bothered opening the drive to see if there is some obvious sign of what exactly failed.)
In my case the backups were created in multiples using two different brands for exactly this reason, and the second copy was fine. But I wouldn’t say it’s the case a single magnetic disk can take the place of BD.
Mechanical disks are also getting expensive. The disk purchased to replace the failed backup was being sold at three times its original release MSRP. Some of this is due to the AI hysteria but some of it is also that the market is shrinking and becoming K-shaped.
Tell that to my circa-2000s WD MyBook that clicks and fails to initialize after ~17 years in climate-controlled storage in its original packaging. I'm about to attempt surgery on the heads to see if I can get it going again.
I also have a binder full of DVD-Rs, of about the same age and containing mostly the same data, that all read perfectly with no issues.
You're asking for trouble if you count on just one backup solution to keep your data safe.
Even if perfectly held still in a sealed box with perfect conditions, hard disk drives need controllers; they need the chipset to drive them, which has ROM and other stored microcode that is susceptible to bit flips due to cosmic ray impingement. I've traced faults in a few 20+ year old HDD's due to failed controllers likely due to such loss (either in the main controller fail, a ROM/BIOS chip fail, or less likely but still possible the cache IC, or motor controller). The data is there on the spinning rust, you just won't have a way to access it.
The failure of SSD's you warn of and the way the HDD's fail due to a dead controller aren't that different.
This won't happen with a physically written media like a CD, DVD, or Blu Ray disc. With physical media, you're separating out the media from the reader (the drive). If your disc reader dies or you cant find it, etc, you can go find any another one on ebay even decades from now, very likely.
Doing surgery on an HDD controller PCB to replace a dead controller, while possible, sucks, and may be incredibly difficult if not impossible to source parts for in the future.
> Just use a magnetic hard disk and your data will be fine for many decades if not centuries
It is absolutely not safe for many decades. If you haven't encountered any drive failures yet — you're lucky.
> A hard disk is cheap and stores several Terabytes
You should check prices again, I wouldn't say cheap considering price bump during the last year (or around so). M-Disks are way less convenient, but pretty reasonable for their cost.
Even with the inflated prices nowadays 3tb 3.5" sata drives are cheaper than 2.5tb LTO-6 tapes.
Personally I don't trust optical. I had some DVD-RW drives and many of them became unreadable after a very short time.
(I don't know what the absolute vs practicate reliability factors are for any of these)
EDIT: Hmmm... https://www.howtogeek.com/the-thousand-year-disc-that-failed...
I really wish a multi-terabyte optical media solution took off, because that would be the path I’d ultimately take, instead of going with expensive LTO devices and media.
https://www.lto.org/lto-generation-compatibility/
> While the immediate burn quality seems relatively satisfactory, I was still not satisfied as to whether these discs were truly worth their premium over commodity blank media. Looking at the discs, it seemed that the recording layers were likely made of similar materials based on the visual aspect, unlike the obvious difference with DVDs. Also, it seemed that regular recorders were intended to be able to record to the BD-R’s (according to the Verbatim text).
...
> Digging further around the M-disc site, it is noted that their section on longevity testing actually features no data about the BD-R discs at all. Indeed, if there were tests, the reports were not actually featured on the site at all. Further poking around in M-Disc Technology pages shows only references to their DVD products. In fact, it seems their patented “etched in stone” material may only apply to their DVD products.
...
> From my research into the data, it seems likely that the M-Disc BD-R is not substantially different from other quality BD-R discs on the market as they all use inorganic recording compounds (with the exception of BD-R LTH of course). From a visual inspection, the disc appears the same bright chocolate-brown, unlike the obvious distinction with regular dye based DVDs and the M-Disc DVD which was a silver-grey. But my main concern lies in the demonstrated lifetimes of quality BD-Rs which are similar to the M-Disc DVD (to which the M-Disc BD-R is claimed to have also achieved). In essence, it appears that the MKM/Verbatim BD-R DL has already reached the same level of endurance as the M-Disc DVD had claimed without being “special” at all. It is thus, hard to justify paying more for an M-Disc BD-R, and I cannot really recommend it.
The "not really M-Disc" stuff comes from a post somebody made on the "Data Hoarder" Reddit board a few years ago. The discs were changed to enable higher burning speeds which resulted in a slight difference in appearance, but he/she didn't seem to have realized that Blu-Ray M-Discs were never substantially different from BD-Rs and instead assumed that the tweaked discs were more of a scam than the originals.
Whole lives of collecting sentimental goods all end up going in a giant bin, a whole house cleaned out in less than 2 hours. Photo albums are rarely kept, they just go in with it all and off to the tip usually in a single morning.
What you think is important to you, is basically just trash to your relatives/kids. They will probably have want they want before you are gone.
Or just keep it attached to your system, so spyware, adware, and the NSA will make free backups for you!
The other thing I did was I ended up collecting HDD's out of old DVR's people were throwing out. Those drives are used for cold storage but not for anything important because they already have tens of thousands of hours on them and in not the best temperature conditions. Again, non have failed yet.
Funnily enough, the only HDD I have failing is a 2.1GB Quantum Fireball from 1997 in my Pentium 1! Really should swap that for an SD card via IDE.
The problem with archiving data is you always need to be prepared to use the "next big thing" once your preferred method becomes unobtainable.
I currently have :
- Photos in iCloud (Live working copy)
- Backup at home on NAS (updated nightly, snapshots)
- Backup in pCloud (lifetime, mine or theirs, no illusions, hopefully lasts a couple of months if I die unexpectedly)
- Yearly archive on external HDDs, identical copies stored in separate locations, clearly labeled "Photo backup". No encryption, no archiving, just plain APFS formatted drives that can be plugged into a computer and read.
- Yearly archive M-disc blu-ray discs, again, identical copies, stored in separate locations. One disc per year labeled as such, ie. "Photo Backup 2020". The idea being you restore them in chronological order and have a complete set.
- A photo album extended with a curated set of photos each year. The real deal!
- NAS at [my] home and blu-ray off site (parents home) for all photos
Updated: added [my] for clarification
This is an _additional_ layer of backups, on top of the usual iCloud/whatever things. LTO is certainly not user-friendly, but neither is it especially user-hostile.
And I think I trust tapes far better than any other alternative for long-term storage as they have by far the smallest areal density of information compared to disks (hard or optical).
I have DVD disks that are barely 10 years old and that I can't read anymore. Hard drives also die in storage and/or during transport.
Recently the computer museum helped recover early 1970s unix tapes. It was a big deal.
On the enterprise scale, the question I think everyone should be asking is: Do they have LTO tapes on a shelf? Fundamentally the same issue (but larger), in terms of needing to ensure it's physically separate, and secure, and tamper evident. =)
Anything in the cloud or connected to your network can be hacked. The backup of last resort must be on a shelf.
Most enterprise gigs I've worked sent them to Iron Mountain or equivalent.
Just use a magnetic hard disk and your data will be fine for many decades if not centuries. You don't need M-Blu Rays (which have very limited capacity anyway). A hard disk is cheap and stores several Terabytes.
You obviously need to store the data in a physically remote place like your shed, car or safe deposit box in case your house burns down.
Never, ever use a SSD if you want your data to be safe for any amount of time. What's worse, SSDs can fail unexpectedly with almost zero chance of data recovery.
A few months ago I needed to pull from an offline backup. The disk, which used CMR and was purchased new from an actual computer supply company (i.e. not Amazon), was burnt in for about 72 hours before it was loaded up with data and shoved in a padded box. Ten years later, the drive was pulled, and there were so many media surface errors that most of the data was unrecoverable. (I haven’t bothered opening the drive to see if there is some obvious sign of what exactly failed.)
In my case the backups were created in multiples using two different brands for exactly this reason, and the second copy was fine. But I wouldn’t say it’s the case a single magnetic disk can take the place of BD.
Mechanical disks are also getting expensive. The disk purchased to replace the failed backup was being sold at three times its original release MSRP. Some of this is due to the AI hysteria but some of it is also that the market is shrinking and becoming K-shaped.
I also have a binder full of DVD-Rs, of about the same age and containing mostly the same data, that all read perfectly with no issues.
You're asking for trouble if you count on just one backup solution to keep your data safe.
The failure of SSD's you warn of and the way the HDD's fail due to a dead controller aren't that different.
This won't happen with a physically written media like a CD, DVD, or Blu Ray disc. With physical media, you're separating out the media from the reader (the drive). If your disc reader dies or you cant find it, etc, you can go find any another one on ebay even decades from now, very likely.
Doing surgery on an HDD controller PCB to replace a dead controller, while possible, sucks, and may be incredibly difficult if not impossible to source parts for in the future.
It is absolutely not safe for many decades. If you haven't encountered any drive failures yet — you're lucky.
> A hard disk is cheap and stores several Terabytes
You should check prices again, I wouldn't say cheap considering price bump during the last year (or around so). M-Disks are way less convenient, but pretty reasonable for their cost.
Comically untrue, and trivial to verify that it is.
You obviously need to store the data in a physically remote place like your shed, car
Let's make it worse by keeping them someplace with terrible environmentals.
If you're gonna be wrong, don't be just a little wrong...
I have so many photos of vacations and people who I've buried over the years, that I don't want to lose.
So I was thinking about using Blu-ray M-Disks as well, these last couple of months.