Hey guys, I just had a curiosity on the multiple ways of storaging stuff and how long would that hold, take backing it up to a newer storage after some years out of the table.
So how did this come in my mind, I was just reminiscing about how I used to play games with inserting a CD or Cartridge onto the device and how I miss that flavour.
I would like to do it again, I already like having my games dependancy free (praise mr goldmountain), and I am saving up some money to spend on hoarding possibilities. I would like to know what would have the longest storage life, would burning games into bluray discs be too unhinged or is something I am missing?
Thanks in advance in helping me out witht his brainstorm.
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Discs aren’t very suitable for long term storage. Really the only thing truly suited for long term storage of digital media is archival tape. Which isn’t cheap or accessible. The only accessible solution is to keep it alive in a raid and keep rebuilding as disks fail over the years.
Discs aren’t very suitable for long term storage.
M-DISC may well be a good option for long term storage.
Ah, cool, quite expensive (I see prices in my area around $20 USD / 100 GB) but uses no electricity.
Thanks for informing me. If you have TBs of data it’s not a sustainable solution unless you’re really into indexing. But for family photos and other long term archival its pretty great actually.
Might be an option, but I bet these things aren’t cheap.
I still backup on DVDs, make multiple copies so one doesn’t go bad. In adition, I also have a storage, so I think I’m good.
Adding to this, what would be the best way to store videos, pictures and music over a long period of time?
get a nas for you primary storage… SSDs raided for that sweet redundancy. . replicate that to another identical, stand alone nas. replicated that to a cloud provider. problem solved. kinda pricey.
Bluray would likely provide the greatest cost-benefit as of today. If stored correctly they should last for decades.
Otherwise, if money is of no concern, cloud service providers. Data is replicated across multiple drives and their filesystems have bitrot protection. Unless you stop paying, it’s likely your data would remain intact and accessible for just as long as a bluray. If it’s good enough for critical government and corporate data, it’s good enough for your data.
LTO most probably… but the tapes are expensive, so are the devices.
EDIT: We use them at work. They’re enterprise grade, so long term storage is not a problem, the price is though.
The storage medium you choose really isn’t as critical as making multiple copies, storing them in separate physical locations, and testing that you can recover the data when you need it. Diversity in the physical medium you choose is probably a good thing too long term. Archival discs aren’t really that long lived though. You could try, but unless you are regularly checking the discs and making additional copies, you’re going to loose data eventually. I gave up using discs as any kind of backup because it was too much hassle. Copying hard drives was much more straightforward and reliable.
Something like Amazon Glacier is your best bet if you don’t access data often and are okay with paying a (per-GB) monthly fee. Otherwise, you may want to build a NAS PC with high levels of disk redundancy (RAID5 or RAIDZ2)
Thanks for all the input everyone! I got really interested in that M-Disc!
