Lets talk long term storage.
What are the best ways to store your files for the rest of your life? Is optical media shit? 50gb blurays looks reasonable but can you trust them? i know big companies have tape robots but that doesnt seem viable for home use.
Any ideas /g/?
>>52122675
Any ideas /g/?
Try hurling your body into fast moving traffic.
>>52122675
LTO tape.
>>52122675
Tape or those paper thing with 1s cutout and 0s not cut out.
check out M-DISC
>>52122675
what's wrong with the cloud? backup to s3.
>>52122883
literally $7 a terabyte per month.
Bump for intersection
>>52122823
>$30 for a terabyte
Well that's not so-
>the machines are 2-3k
What in the fuck?
>>52122883
This site is for people over 18 years old.
>>52122675
cloud
>>52122998
>>52122898
then you should be able to afford paying money for a service that works well.
Tapes. Tape drives are expensive, but the storage itself is ridiculously cheap per gigabyte. They also retain information the longest
>>52122823
I wish LTO was more affordable.
I mean drives, media is cheap but man, drives...
>>52122675
No single medium will ever be sufficient over a long time, both in terms of space requirements and longevity. Nobody wants to sort data into (leave alone restore from) hundreds of optical discs.
Use whatever large media is cheap at the moment (e.g., 4 or 6 TB hard drives) and keep migrating to newer ones every few years. Always keep multiple copies.
Don't trust the cloud, once a company goes out of business your data is gone.
>>52122675
The life span of a CD is ~3-10 years, and even many of my pressed CDs with DOS games are no longer readable.
Multiple copies and constant vigilance is the only way. Fortunately you can pay cloud providers to that.
>>52123020
It isn't about the money grasshopper.
For the same reasons that publicly posting your life away on facebook is a very bad idea uploading your personal data to the cloud even if encrypted is a bad idea that is why it is personal to begin with.
You don't know if one day to the next that company will disappear, if they have backups to your data when they fuck up, when they do fuck up will you get no more than "oh sorry about that", if someone uses their service for some cheese pizza authorities will simply take everything there goes your data. There is so much that can go wrong with "the cloud", look into mega download, we didn't even get into the botnet/nsa argument.
>>52122675
Backups. As long as your data is on at least two drives you'll be fine, just replace them whenever they fail individually, they probably wont fail at the same time.
>>52123121
> even many of my pressed CDs with DOS games are no longer readable.
I have never experienced anything remotely similar, and I have used some very old (~20 years) CDs recently.
Question that doesn't merit its own thread:
I have what is referred to as a "Limited Two Year Warranty" on a WD 2TB HDD. I've got about 6 months before it expires. Basically the thing is a crapshoot, I only ever wrote about 10GB to it before it started giving me BSODs. I still have all my receipts from when I built the rig.
If I bring it in along with the receiot and ask for an equal exchange, is Fry's just gonna chuckle and hand-wave me away?
>>52123340
>>>/g/sqt
RMA it
>>52122675
older LTO standard, store tapes in proper area
Cheapest $:GB, great for long term storage
>>52123070
You can get LTO4 for 100USD if you are really lucky. Anything above that is not affordable generally
>>52122973
>>52122823
>>52124857
I got my LTO4 drive for £99. Tapes are £9 for 800GB/1.6TB. Once I'm over around 10 tapes it starts getting much cheaper for capacity over HDD for cold storage, not to mention how long it'll last. I'm looking at 800GB monthly backups of OS images and media etc, for around £9 a month. It's comparable to cloud prices, but local storage so I get to keep it safe myself (and play with toys etc)
>>52124909
basically this
In the US market, where offlease enterprise is even cheaper it's even better.
My prices are basically the same as yours except in USD.
100USD for an LTO tape drive, $9 USD, (even lower if I'm lucky) for tapes.
>>52124834
And hope you can find a working drive for them when the time comes?
How about drivers for the hardware? Maybe you'll keep a pristine PC loaded with WinXp just for reading those tapes.
People are starting to find it difficult to acquire working QIC drives or Zip drives (let alone other exotic drives) for their numberless archive disks and tapes.
Here's my situation. I lost all my photos a few years back on an ex's laptop HDD that died and she never worked with me to restore it. I'm in desperate need of a storage solution. Been reading about RAID and Zfs and all sorts of shit and I dunno what to do. Anything I do at this point would be better than what I'm currently doing, even RAID 0 would be an upgrade. I want to digitize everything I have. I don't have an awful lot, maybe a few (2-3) Tb of photos and documents max. Most of the stuff won't be used much. literally I plug my shitty HDD in, copy stuff, then unplug it and put it away for weeks on end.
>>52126203
lto tapes are used heavily in business for long term data storage or archival
it's not like those shitty meme zip drives
>>52126816
Yeah, but in enterprise situation your sign agreements, SLAs and shit, you're guaranteed by your provider they can restore your stuff, if not -> $$$.
In home situation you have to overprovision everything by yourself, buy extra spare drives, keep legacy old pc to be able to use them etc etc.
IMO better invest in newest LTO if you have a lot to archive or stick with other backup solutions.
>>52126910
Kill yourself
>>52126816
Are they suitable for a NAS?
>>52126786
Depends on how much you want to spend. You could make a small file server that is in raid 1 (raid 1 is the redundant one, raid 0 is generally a bad idea unless you aren't concerned about losing the data on the array) and just move all of your important files over to it. Get the slow rpm drives that are intended for this sort of thing.
>>52122883
why the fuck would I trust my data to a cloud service in the middle of a hype bubble?
How many HDDs in a RAID 5 or 6 would you feel reasonably certain your data has into immortal?
>>52122675
I'm also interested in this, I'm looking into M-Disc right now to store some inventory data on family heirloom pieces
>>52122722
Nigga don't know how to quote
>>52127299
No amount. I woukd need off-site backups in multiple locations as well as a huge amount of redundancy to feel completely safe.
>>52126203
>Zip drives
>hard to find
I kick that shit around all day, and it's not like it would be difficult to keep an XP-era system going for file archiving, the only real points of failure on that shit are hard disks and sometimes power supplies.
>>52127364
amazon glacier
>>52127364
I figured backups were implied. I'm talking just a NAS.
>>52127155
sure but since the drive is the expensive part, you usually send the backups to a server with the drive, and then take the tape and put it in a safe for a couple of years.
Our company use it for old projects and billing information and store one copy in a safe in the office and one in a safe off site.
I doubt we ever need to access them again, but you know how they feel about this stuff
>>52122675
Blu ray xl
Let's talk about file access and search for a minute. I've never given a damn about this, buts it's something I should probably know. Instead of putting all my shit into folders, what software can allow me to tag my files, photos, etc which would then allow me to search for the files by tag instead of name or location?
>>52128072
Additionally, if I were to tag something using one method, would it be visible in other software suites or OSes?
>>52122675
bluray burners when?
>>52128072
normally people use a database for this.
Then you can sort by various entries as you whish
In other situations you want a hash table as it will allow easy lookup if you know the index.
The software you use for databases is usually something sql. sql is the language you use to interact and search in the database and is the same regardless of what software you use (in theory at least)
I use mysql
the cloud :^)
Magnetic tapes inside lead containers inside fire/water proof safe, with duplicates inside bank safe deposits.
>>52128402
I don't know much about sql, but would that be overkill for small scale home use?
Are bluray discs much cheaper if bought by like the 100s or something? Everywhere I look they're $25 for 10 discs. Figure 50gb per disc thats $25 per 500gb of data. $50 for a TB. For $40 I can get a 1TB hdd.
Or are there bluray discs that hold more than 50gb? Forgive my ignorance. I use a single 4TB hdd external I made as my backup for my 2tb single drive and 2tb raid 10 setup.
>>52128718
Depends on your needs.
You can use your file system (probably a b-tree or something similar) which is fast if you know the path to the file.
But most servers use mysql, but if you use something like sqlite, it is not overkill.
Generally, I would use what the software recommends as you probably won't write your own solution if you doesn't know anything about databases.
It also makes it easy to encrypt data.
What's diff between a "home server" and NAS?
You backup from HDD array 0 to HDD array 1 and HDD array 2 at one of your peers.
Tape is a lie. Almost no one uses it. Probably around 2% of people in our datacenter have tape in their environment.
>>52123340
Retail manager here. After Fry's return policy on the item has expired, which it definitely has at 18 months, you're at the mercy of WD. If you've bought thousands and thousands of dollars worth of stuff from them and got so the warranties and extra shit that makes their numbers look good Fry's may help you out but I doubt you did. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. Save yourself the trip to Fry's and just contact WD customer support.
>>52126816
I have no fucking clue what the issue with support is. There are still LTO1 tape drives being sold and my FC LTO4 works with hardware passthrough on a VM without issue, doesn't even need any special hardware or drivers.
>>52129394
So tape is still being used then.
>>52129333
both are empty meme words that are thrown around this board
NAS technically stands for Network Attached Storage but by the standards of this board that's basically anything
>>52129394
>Tape is a lie. Almost no one uses it.
Tape is for people that can afford it and deal with large quantities of data so you're not going to see low level companies implementing it
I have the possibility of getting an LTO4 for £100, with 5 1TB tapes. Should I pull the trigger?
Also.... If tape is the best media.. is this image a meme?
>>52129949
Floppy disks are pretty resilient if they're taken care of, you can definitely expect more than 2 years out of them at least.
Tapes are known to last multiple decades in storage.
A hard drive wont last 34 years if its being regularly used but if stored offline they could last that long perhaps.
Data stored on flash memory doesn't last when stored offline. It would probably last 10 years offline before corruption started to occur.
Writable CDs/DVDs have dyes in them that start to break down after 10-20 years.
Pressed CDs/DVDs(ie CR-ROMs, DVD-ROMs) last as long as you store them safety.
>>52129949
>Cloud
>Forever
it lasts for as long as the service provider wants it to.
LTO5 MINIMUM LTO
1K FOR THE DRIVE
>>52129949
This image isn't even a meme, this is marketing bullshit.
What about a SAS drive, great speeds, hard disk. Lasts for a long ass time
>>52129595
In super specialized applications everything exists that's not the point. As ye olde backup solution tape is no more.
Watch out for that rotational velocidensity
>>52130768
You can't say it's dead when LTO sales are rising.
It's jsut that cloud/distributed backups outgrown tape backups, since more and more data require hot storage.
>>52126786
RAID shouldn't be considered a backup.
>>52130768
that's not exactly true. Cold storage of data has only been increasing due to the rise in processing power and drop in storage prices. It has become a lot more viable to store large data sets for mining with big operations. Tape is not used for small companies because harddisk prices justify keeping everything in easy access storage but data warehouses in charge of cold storage have only grown
What makes LOT4 better than LOT6?
>>52131398
Nothing but lower prices for drives.
You cannot use LTFS on LTO4, due to lack of partioning.
>>52131398
LTO4 IS CHEAP BUT THE TAPES ARE SMALL
YOU WANT AT LEAST LTO5 BUT ITS ALL ENTERPRISE GRADE EQUIPMENT SO THE DRIVE PRICES ARE HIGH, LTO6 DRIVE IS LIKE 2K, LTO5 LIKE 1K
>>52122675
If cloud isn't an option or you are a little (lot) tinfoil
then burning discs would be good for static storage as long as you didn't handle the discs often or the data WONT change.
Otherwise NAS with redundant RAID would
do the job.
