4 ms·

Did you consider using OneDrive or Google Drive ? Something like http://www.duplicati.com/ http://www.duplicati.com/

cm2187 10y ago
I'd say the only thing more volatile than a forgotten hard drive is a cloud service. They will come and go, go bust or get shut down, get depreciated and replaced. And if you forget to pay, don't count on finding your old forgotten data in 15 years.
- drdaeman 10y ago
  Glacier, Nearline or B2 are "cloud" services as well, and while they're more stable than ordinary-consumer-grade services (like Google Drive or OneDrive), the it's not like their future is set in stone (affordability, service policies, etc) I believe the way to get the best reliability is to keep multiple replicas of the archive (git-annex's great here) over storage options from as many different vendors as possible, and hope the chance of everyone going down at nearly the same time is too low. And probably schedule some periodic fully-automated checks to minimize the chance some service had degraded and had silently lost the data.
  - cm2187 10y ago
    In that respect my recommendation is to buy some of these massive Seagate archive disks. I don't know how durable they are but given you can have 8TB for less than $200, I would have one or two in independent places. But I would encrypt the data though. But then where do you store long term the key (brain is a bad choice!)? And as technologies evolve, in 5y there will probably be cheap 30TB HDD, so it will make sense to consolidated, etc
    - Intermernet 10y ago
      > where do you store long term the key I know this is clunky, but I'd print out the key (or possible laser-cut the key!) onto durable media and store it in a safe / safety deposit box etc. It's going to be annoying to manually type it in, but it's a reliable method of last-resort.
      - drdaeman 10y ago
        > manually type it in Laser-cut the key represented as a QR code, paired with classic textual hexadecimal (not even base64, to not have to worry about "o"s and zeroes) representation. Problem solved.
    - drdaeman 10y ago
      > buy some of these massive Seagate archive disks Be careful. There's a tendency that if one drive fails, the other will follow very soon. Especially if the drives are from the same batch (I was bitten by this), but not necessarily. I'm not expert on the topic, but I believe that when planning for long-term HDD reliability, buying drives from multiple different vendors is a must.
      - ValentineC 10y ago
        I guess it's a good thing that Western Digital and HGST (which should now be thought of as a WD variant) have introduced their own 8TB drives too. Seagate also has "Surveillance" and "Enterprise" variants of 8TB size.

I'd say the only thing more volatile than a forgotten hard drive is a cloud service. They will come and go, go bust or get shut down, get depreciated and replaced. And if you forget to pay, don't count on finding your old forgotten data in 15 years.

drdaeman 10y ago
Glacier, Nearline or B2 are "cloud" services as well, and while they're more stable than ordinary-consumer-grade services (like Google Drive or OneDrive), the it's not like their future is set in stone (affordability, service policies, etc) I believe the way to get the best reliability is to keep multiple replicas of the archive (git-annex's great here) over storage options from as many different vendors as possible, and hope the chance of everyone going down at nearly the same time is too low. And probably schedule some periodic fully-automated checks to minimize the chance some service had degraded and had silently lost the data.
- cm2187 10y ago
  In that respect my recommendation is to buy some of these massive Seagate archive disks. I don't know how durable they are but given you can have 8TB for less than $200, I would have one or two in independent places. But I would encrypt the data though. But then where do you store long term the key (brain is a bad choice!)? And as technologies evolve, in 5y there will probably be cheap 30TB HDD, so it will make sense to consolidated, etc
  - Intermernet 10y ago
    > where do you store long term the key I know this is clunky, but I'd print out the key (or possible laser-cut the key!) onto durable media and store it in a safe / safety deposit box etc. It's going to be annoying to manually type it in, but it's a reliable method of last-resort.
    - drdaeman 10y ago
      > manually type it in Laser-cut the key represented as a QR code, paired with classic textual hexadecimal (not even base64, to not have to worry about "o"s and zeroes) representation. Problem solved.
  - drdaeman 10y ago
    > buy some of these massive Seagate archive disks Be careful. There's a tendency that if one drive fails, the other will follow very soon. Especially if the drives are from the same batch (I was bitten by this), but not necessarily. I'm not expert on the topic, but I believe that when planning for long-term HDD reliability, buying drives from multiple different vendors is a must.
    - ValentineC 10y ago
      I guess it's a good thing that Western Digital and HGST (which should now be thought of as a WD variant) have introduced their own 8TB drives too. Seagate also has "Surveillance" and "Enterprise" variants of 8TB size.