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I have used two computers and both computers almost full with my children's pictures, videos etc. Now, I need trusty storage devices or something like this. I don't trust hard disks on my computers or external hard disks for keeping these long life. I think maybe, I might store on the Blu-ray discs for keeping these items. On the other hand, I'm talking about these files will take 300 GB storage. What should I use? |
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My advice, just use removable hard disks. But use more than one (I recently had a friend who lost his entire collection of digital photos due to disk failure). I keep them on my primary machine at home. I have a 500 GB USB disk that I occasionally bring home from work to update and test, then I take it back to work and lock it in the drawer. I have another two 1 TB drives at the houses of my brother-in-law and sister-in-law which I also do the same to. Basically, once a month, I cycle amongst the three backup locations doing an update and test. I am not going to be the one explaining to my wife that I've lost all the records of the childhood of our two children. That would be a Lorena Bobbitt moment for me, I'd never be able to sleep again. If one of the drives fails, I just replace it. If USB ever goes the way of the dinosaurs, I'll have plenty of time to upgrade to whatever is replacing it. You need to protect against it as much as possible. The only cataclysm that would take out both all my locations is going to be annihilation of a sizable portion of the state so photos will be the least of my worries. Having said that, I may end up shipping another hard disk to the other side of the country just in case :-) |
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According to our organization's archivist, the records retention best practice is to refresh your storage technology every three years. This protect you against both obsoleting mediums, as well as deterioration. Granted, it is also recommended that you store them in the lowest level way possible, that is, text on paper, which doesn't work too well for pictures. That being said, I synchronize my data across 3 computers (laptop, home desktop, work desktop) for regular use. Then keep a DVD and hard drive in a safe deposit box. The hard drive for the large data stores, and the DVD for HBAB problems. I have things like GPG encrypted password files, GPG key, instructions to the wife for using GPG to open the password files. Any disk drives you store this way, just make sure to check it out every few weeks/months. Hard drives that sit idle for a long time tend not to like to spin up. As a corollary, drives that run for a long time and then are shut down, tend not to like to spin up either. If you want to spend some more money, you could get a RAID 5 capable NAS. That will protect you somewhat from disk failures, whilst providing easy centralized access from all your systems at home. For the really paranoid you could buy online storage space and let someone else manage the physical failures. Something like Amazon S3 or Mozy both work well for this. |
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Put it all on a hard disk (external or internal), but clone the disk to another HD and take the copy offsite. There are probably companies near you that specialist in long-term data storage, but if not, find an indoor storage locker or safe that you can ensure is not too damp/ cold/ warm. Keep in mind, whatever storage system you use will be obsolete in 10 years or so, so you'll need an old device to connect to it. That's actually good, because you can migrate your 'offsite' copy to a new disk/ storage medium every few years, ensuring it's instantly accessible, while also increasing the lifespan of your data. |
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I'm pretty sure optical discs deteriorate over time. Hard drives are cheap enough that you can just buy larger drives every year or so. Just run RAID 1 or something. |
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If you want a reliable storage for a long time, nothing beats paper. You can't be sure the storage technology of today is available in the future. For example who still uses 3.5 (or even 5 1/4) floppies. |
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From an ease of use point of view I would get a drobo unit. I've heard nothing but good things about these units. They cost a bit of money but you can mix drive sizes and replace drives as your storage capacity grows. And they automatically keep the data safe using an advanced parity mechanism that is more sophisticated than your standard RAID technologies. However the standard version only does N+1 redundancy, equivalent to RAID 5. The DroboPro will do N+2 redundancy, equivalent to RAID 6. However no storage solution is a replacement to a good backup strategy. I would suggest an online backup solution like Mozy or Carbonite for near continuous off site backups in the cloud. Or as the first poster suggests an external hard drive that you keep off site somewhere which you sync with at a set interval. |
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