MalVeauX
Contributor
- Joined
- Aug 6, 2020
- Messages
- 110
Greetings all,
I'm starting to consider going a bit deeper into real backup solutions and I'm curious what the community is doing out there for important data. But not large pools of living working data sets, more like archival approach to small but important data sets. The common 3, 2, 1 method of course comes to mind. However, that requires refreshing fairly often and that will become super tedious when you consider over the course of a few decades. But maybe it's still superior? This is why I'm looking to see what others are doing.
Data sets to consider:
Basically anything archival such as family photos and some basic documents, records, etc. Mostly doesn't take up a lot of space. Anywhere from 250Gb to 1TB per year at best (when video is involved, its near that 1TB mark, when it's less video, it's near that 250GB mark). The size is mostly due to RAW formats of photos. Also looking to maybe backup any important videos and all my music library as that would be dreadful to attempt to rebuild one day. I don't care so much about losing video as most of it is not important and can be gotten again without much fuss. The music however would be difficult. The photos would be impossible of course to retrieve without true backups.
Current backup solutions I use:
Currently I'm using one or two living copies of the data (the photos for example). I have them on a 2nd hard drive as a second physical copy. I have most of them also off site in a cloud, but only the JPG format, not my RAW's. So currently I feel fairly ok. But I'd like to go a bit farther than this and start archiving the RAW stuff too.
Considering new solutions or reinforced current solutions:
HDD will only be ok for a few years, then must be refreshed.
Cloud requires internet connection.
Optical formats (M-Disc) can last our lifetime, but are low capacity and slow to write.
Tape is.... still around?
SSD is not good enough for archival class backup yet.
Flash is not good enough for archival class backup yet.
Sort of leaning towards M-Disc for the small data sets for archival purposes. Seems pretty bullet proof. Maybe I'm missing something?
Again, this is from the idea of archival backup, not simply redundant data sets. For redundancy of living data, I will have all my data available on my live system as a physical copy, on my NAS with redundancy as a second physical copy (technically three physical copies as a mirror) and I'm considering a 3rd copy on a physical hard drive to be refreshed every 3~4 years in a fireproof box. But I'm thinking, how about a long term archival approach to the smaller data to avoid the constant refresh? Maybe optical?
So what are you guys doing for archival backup solutions for the long term?
Very best,
I'm starting to consider going a bit deeper into real backup solutions and I'm curious what the community is doing out there for important data. But not large pools of living working data sets, more like archival approach to small but important data sets. The common 3, 2, 1 method of course comes to mind. However, that requires refreshing fairly often and that will become super tedious when you consider over the course of a few decades. But maybe it's still superior? This is why I'm looking to see what others are doing.
Data sets to consider:
Basically anything archival such as family photos and some basic documents, records, etc. Mostly doesn't take up a lot of space. Anywhere from 250Gb to 1TB per year at best (when video is involved, its near that 1TB mark, when it's less video, it's near that 250GB mark). The size is mostly due to RAW formats of photos. Also looking to maybe backup any important videos and all my music library as that would be dreadful to attempt to rebuild one day. I don't care so much about losing video as most of it is not important and can be gotten again without much fuss. The music however would be difficult. The photos would be impossible of course to retrieve without true backups.
Current backup solutions I use:
Currently I'm using one or two living copies of the data (the photos for example). I have them on a 2nd hard drive as a second physical copy. I have most of them also off site in a cloud, but only the JPG format, not my RAW's. So currently I feel fairly ok. But I'd like to go a bit farther than this and start archiving the RAW stuff too.
Considering new solutions or reinforced current solutions:
HDD will only be ok for a few years, then must be refreshed.
Cloud requires internet connection.
Optical formats (M-Disc) can last our lifetime, but are low capacity and slow to write.
Tape is.... still around?
SSD is not good enough for archival class backup yet.
Flash is not good enough for archival class backup yet.
Sort of leaning towards M-Disc for the small data sets for archival purposes. Seems pretty bullet proof. Maybe I'm missing something?
Again, this is from the idea of archival backup, not simply redundant data sets. For redundancy of living data, I will have all my data available on my live system as a physical copy, on my NAS with redundancy as a second physical copy (technically three physical copies as a mirror) and I'm considering a 3rd copy on a physical hard drive to be refreshed every 3~4 years in a fireproof box. But I'm thinking, how about a long term archival approach to the smaller data to avoid the constant refresh? Maybe optical?
So what are you guys doing for archival backup solutions for the long term?
Very best,