How Do I Safely Store My Data..Long Term

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bwcolor

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I have a volume of 3.6TB that is just about full. It is backed up to a network raid 5 volume of much larger size and to yet another local 5TB raid 5 Time Machine. I would like to offload older photos and videos.

25GB Blu-Ray media is now less than one U.S. dollar, but is such a backup a reliable way to go? I've had multiple Blu-Ray media cease to be readable within a year.
 
If you aren't using tape drives, I think the easiest, most affordable method of backup is to do what you are doing. Multiple copies on multiple drives. Store a copy in a different location. I don't think you have any choice but to migrate your data every few years to newer and larger hard drives.
 
Long term... how long? 10 years, 20 years? 200 years? 2000 years ? That are the questions here.

All storage drives will eventually fail. Some after 3 years, some after 20 years, of sitting in the dust ... Multiple copies, multiple storage locations help. Constantly keeping up/repairing the infrastructure helps. So buy a new 10++ Terabyte storage device every 2 years, load everything onto the new one, all that forever stuff, and try to keep a dozen + older ones alive until they slowly die. Then you will always have a few usable devices.

Unless a big power surge, a Texas wildfire, a flood wipes out the whole lot ... So set up sets of yearly renewing super big storage devices in various locations around the globe. At grandmothers, the cottage in Colorado, ... until granny dies, the house burns, gets sold ... a nuclear disaster occurs, a flood, ...

But all else will eventually fail.

Why do you want to keep stuff for long, forever?
 
The basic plan is:

redundant on-site storage (which you seem to have covered)

off-site storage at a safe location on a regular schedule

The definition of a safe location is debatable. Clearly a bank safety deposit box is safer than the closet of a friend/relative on the next block. The safety deposit box is much less convenient. Decades ago we sent scientific data (monthly backups) on tape to an abandoned salt mine. This is really safe, but really inconvenient.

Another possibility is the Cloud. But 3.6 TB on the cloud will be rather expensive.
 
I've given up on CD/DVD media. Not that I've had so many errors, but life is too short to try to figure out which disc for a certain photo.

I think plain old hard disk drives are the way to go. I keep my files on a big external drive, and there are two other copies of this same drive. I retire the drives after two years and copy everything to the next new bigger drive. Current files are also backed up by Apple's Time Machine.

File format is another question. So much for PhotoCD as a long term archival approach. Who will be able to read a current camera raw in twenty years. Or a Lightroom catalog? I do keep Nikon raw (NEF), xmp sidecar files, and a good jpg of the final rendered image.
 
I store recent photos, or 'keepers' on an external hard drive and on my current machine. It's a lot more convenient for me to access them, but I do not depend on them for long term storage.

I archive photos on a DVD disc and have all images archived and stored appropriately; the Lightroom catalogue is cross-referenced with a separate database in Excel. Image location is noted, and so are disc locations. It's not infallible., but it works well for me.
 
Funny, a few years ago I found negatives from 1979-93.

I was trying to use DVDs but heard that they fail. I have a few external HDs now. They're getting progressively larger and I'm up to 4T.
 
Gad's! I'm a piker with a mere 300 gigs. I had a bunch of DVD media fail on me and did some research on archival media (CD & DVD). Seems most of the grocery store media is aluminum based and will oxidize if not sealed good. Gold based media has a hundred year rating with the expectation of longer according to the sellers and several reviews I read. This particular brand was touted as the best. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...a=X&ei=RRN0TpPPI_HdiALX14C0Ag&ved=0CFwQ9AsoAA
 
I heard that pros were making copies of their best printed digital images using Kodachrome film.
 
Darthfeeble said:
Gad's! I'm a piker with a mere 300 gigs. I had a bunch of DVD media fail on me and did some research on archival media (CD & DVD). Seems most of the grocery store media is aluminum based and will oxidize if not sealed good. Gold based media has a hundred year rating with the expectation of longer according to the sellers and several reviews I read. This particular brand was touted as the best. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...a=X&ei=RRN0TpPPI_HdiALX14C0Ag&ved=0CFwQ9AsoAA
Click to expand...

DVDs are a non-starter. The capacity is quite small. Are there Blu-Ray equivalents at less than their weight in gold?
 
I have had a number of four bay raid units and have always avoided Drobo because of their slow interface, but just purchased my first... there are now rebates on many of their units. They are amazingly forgiving. You can use different size drives and continue to change drive size, one at a time, until you reach drive capacity. I think my four bay tops out at 17TB. Now have seven TB of drives which results in a bit less than 5TB of space. Really great choice.
 
My $.02 for FWIW:

I am no Luddite. I have 40 years in the management of technology companies. I have seen much storage technology obsoleted over the years. I like to think my experience causes me to be pragmatic and broad minded.

I believe anyone who is debating HDD vs. gold plated DVDs is missing the forest for focusing on the trees.

I archive my important photos by acid free prints in a light tight box. I am not going to be impacted by technological obsolesce. Yes, they are on multiple HDDs as well, but I remember the 8" floppy disk.

You say you have 3.6Tb of photos. Allow me to be gracious and ask if all of that is really worth saving? Is there a possibility you could never find the good photo you are looking for because it is included with so much else?

I would encourage you to let history and some very broad minded thinking influence what you consider to be viable long term storage.
 
I'm printing to a Blurb album once or twice per year. Not exactly exhibition quality, but better than rarely viewing photos on a hard drive. Just sent off another 947 images. I've been recently rating my photos, but have another 25K to go. So, the idea of backing up just the best photos makes sense. My videos are the time consuming items and I just don't have time to edit them, but imagine that someday I will. Probably a fantasy that will never come true. I need to get a handle on the video side of things.
 
What Bob said. Print. And negatives. For digital files, print will last longest. That's a good idea to photograph keeper digital pictures on whatever will be the stable film successor to Kodachrome. Meanwhile, editing to a hard drive of keepers is a good idea, with minimum two copies. And you need to access those drives regularly to make sure the files are OK. And when one file is corrupted, reformat and copy after checking the other two, and so on. Maybe checking the file structure of the whole disk would go some way towards this, but I doubt that would be certain enough.

I have every negative of every film photograph I have taken with the exception of four rolls, and that's since 1972. My neat little portable LaCie hard drive is the old FireWire connection, just five years old, and I have one expensive FireWire 400 to FireWire 800 cable, that works, for now. Print....print....print....stop Dave,.....will you stop Dave?
 
How long do you NEED to keep pictures? Probably only long enough for your children to acquire a spouse, who'll be interested, and maybe not even that long. But for their children to then see their parents as children, that's a lot of fun. What's the chance my non-photographer friends will have a single working digital file of their infant children 20 years later? I suspect it will be close to zero.
 
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