...

 

They are all much of a muchness to be honest (although I work for one of the largest storage companies and shouldn't say that ).

The key is to make sure that you back everything up several times. So you can put things on a hard drive, back it up periodically to another hard drive and use an offsite back company like Online Backup, Data Backup & Remote Backup Solutions from Mozy.com ? Welcome

Steve

 

As above. If the data is that precious, then keeping it on a single hard drive is not very wise at all - just one tiny glitch, be it the drive itself, power supply or motherboard fault can render a whole drive useless. Probablilty is small, but over such a long time period there is always a risk.

(although data can be recovered, last time I was quoted for retreiving data off a failed drive it was £300 - with no guarantee that everything could be recovered).

I'd be tempted to keep a secondary data set backup in the form of removable media like DVD-Rs, If thats not large enough, you can get writeable blue-ray disks which are good for 25gig. Generally, for these to die they have to be subject to physical damage or sustained UV/chemical exposure.

Who knows what will be around in 60 years time that will be backwards compatible (seen a computer with a 5.25" floppy drive recently?). Devices that use USB, an RJ45 ethernet connector, or DVD/Blueray disks is probably the most futureproof.

 

60 years is an absurdly long time for technological advancement. We have 9 and 21 track tapes that are 'only' 35-40 years old which have stiction issues resulting in data loss. We have the equipment, but how many places would be able to read and recover from that media these days?

Without plugging the sensible option as mentioned is to use a secure data storage company.

If you really do want to keep the media yourself I'd use a good brand hard drive and check the data regulaly, upgrading to newer, more reliable, more modern models where necessary. I can't say I'd recommend any removeable media typesm, except as a backup or a backup.

 

Another vote for Mozy, The only problem I have is that at the start of each back up I have to reconfigure it again ie I don't want some stuff backing up and just use it for reseeding purposes

 

Blimey, how expensive is that?

Just worked out that to back up my photos and home video, it would cost me around $150 a month!!!!

I'll stick with my NAS drive (RAIDed for data protection), and a fire safe.

 

Don't use a hard drive to maintain the data - far too much can go wrong with it, and technology changes too fast.


First of all, how much data are you talking about?

For a few hundred megabytes, a CD-R is probably a good bet, as they will be readable for a good many years 'cos you can still get music on 'em (for those old-timers who like to own physical media ). Keep them at a steady temperature and out of the sun.

DVD or BlueRay will probably be OK for larger amounts of data, but stick to a simple format and not some proprietary DV+-*REW/MK2 type stuff.


Secondly, what is the format of the data itself?

JPEGs are probably OK, along with MPEG1/2, but once you get into WMV and other fancy formats - they might offer slight immediate benefits (speed of decoding, compression etc.) but long-term they may become impossible to read.

The same goes for documents. In the last ten years Microsoft Word had been through quite a few incompatible formats, so pick a simple basic type (ASCII has lasted well ) that still maintains what you want to store.


To be honest, the physical medium is the least of your worries, because you can digitally copy it to the "latest and greatest" every so often. The format of the data is the thing to watch!

mb (who still has a few half-inch 800bpi mag-tapes that he can't read)

 

I've had several cd-r and dvd-r discs corrupt on me (good quality ones as well, kept out of the sun etc). I wouldn't rely on those at all.

For me, I back up to an external NAS drive with two discs in RAID (so the data is duplicated across both drives). I also back up to an external disc which is kept in a small fire safe. For really important stuff, I also burn to dvd.

 

Surely a solid state drive would be better than a traditional hard drive?

 

Most of the online kind of services are not set up for video as it is so large. Mozy is good for email, documents and photos. I have about 40gb on there.

Steve

 

I've got 250gb of photos (not counting the video)

 

Online services are fine but I'd only use as a level 3 backup.
How secure/reliable are their systems? What backups do they use? Does the company have a sustainable business model? What's to stop them implementing a $500 recovery charge in 2015 and holding your data to ransom?

Introduce redundancy to your primary location.
Replicate data to a secondary device.
Archive data to suitable media and store somewhere other than your primary site.
Refresh archives regularly (both media type and data format)

Job done
(and I only do a couple of those and should know better having paid the price before.)

People also forget that a great backup for photos is to get the bloomin' things printed and stick them in an album! Cheap, cheerful and effective.

 

Has no1 mentioned usb ramsticks yet? Why not? They are alot more reliable than a HDD and as you can buy them in 64GB and soon more, plenty of space.

I myself backup mp3s to CDR (not very reliable as CDR's detoriate over time) and as little as possible to DVDR now. All other important data is on another HDD (caddy, stored away) and a few large ram sticks.

 

I don't think they are reliable; I've had more corrupt data on me than hard drives (8 Sticks vs 4 HDs). Admittedly the once was when it was pulled out of an XP machine without right-clicking "remove USB device" but still, it lost all the data and had to be reformatted.

Silly really, because being solid state devices, they "should" be almost bomb proof. But they maybe OK as a secondary means of backup, or for data that's currently in use that has already been backed up using other means.

 

Surprisingly I've had a couple of memory sticks stop working as well. As above they *should* be the most reliable: No moving parts etc...

Steve

 

I've had USB stick go as well. It's all electronics. Things degrade etc. There is no single safe medium. That's why I back up onto more than one thing

 

Yea you must remove them safely, maybe Vista handles that better than XP does? Or it depends on the quality of the stick? I've not lost any stick data in 2 yrs, *touch wood

 

Maybe they don't like being posted?

We started posting data out to clients using them (wrapped in a second envelope with instructions on how to correctly remove them titled "WARNING" printed in bold red letters).

Since, we resorted back to CDs (seeing some had a habit of not sending back the sticks - robbing gits, still, will billed them instead ). Of course this is for the clients that can't fathom how to use email attachments (seriously, the feejiits I have to deal with ).

 

I guess a postal x-ray scanner could play merry hell with some electronics possibly?

 

Had one stick just last 2 months before it died completely. On the other hand, I've another which I've been using for 2+ years. Like everything else, sometimes you get a dodgy one, and the only way you find out is when it goes phut. One of the reasons why it makes sense to back up to more than one place/medium.

 

The only thing which will last sixty years is paper. No hard drive is likely to last more than ten, and five years is common. CDs are reckoned to have a life of about ten to twenty years, no matter how stored. You also need to remember the constant changes in format, as a couple of people have pointed out, so old data may become unreadable. Best bet is probably rolling backups: to a new HDD every couple of years, and backed up to the latest media at least every month. On-line sounds good, but what happens to the data if the company goes under?


M