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I spent a long time devising a solid photo archive strategy. For "current year" photos i store them on my NAS, backed up nightly, locally and remote. Every ye

I spent a long time devising a solid photo archive strategy. For "current year" photos i store them on my NAS, backed up nightly, locally and remote. Every year i then archive the previous years photos onto an identical pair of M-disc BDXL discs (100GB), and store one copy locally and one copy at a "temperature controlled" remote place. I use no compression, encryption or archiving. If there is degration of the physical media i want to minimize the damage. Along with the archive BDXL media, i store an external drive which contains a complete copy of all photos. I also update this drive every year, and run a non destructive badblocks test on it as well as a long smart test before updating it. The drive is then updated, and rotated with the remote one (typically when storing new M-disc media), and i repeat the process for the retrieved drive. Again, plain ext4 filesystem (i HOPE FAT32 will finally be dead in a couple of decades), no compression, archiving or encryption. I never delete the photos from my NAS. The archive is simply "disaster recovery". I only archive photos. Any document will probably have little value in a decade or two. I'm also fully prepared to migrate my entire archive onto whatever the "next big thing" in archiving becomes. No archives are truly forever. Optical media can go away, USB 2/3 will certainly become obsolete at some point. There's no point in having an archive i cannot access. And yes, i have considered just creating physical copies of the images and storing them in identical photo albums, but sadly nobody "develops film" anymore, and everything is printed, which also degrades over time, and unlike film of old there are no negatives to reprint images from.

dsego 6y ago
My family lost all our printed family albums a few years ago. We still can't get over it. Unfortunately my parents didn't understand the importance of keeping the negatives around. Printed photos degrade over time, you can see the colors shift. But more importantly, we didn't have multiple prints and all the albums were in one drawer in a bedroom. My brother decided to burn down all the photos in one of his fits of rage. But it could've happened in other ways, like the room burning down, an earthquake etc. Btw, do you think there is a difference between 25GB single layer and 100GB M-Discs regarding the media robustness and safety of data?
- 8fingerlouie 6y ago
  > Btw, do you think there is a difference between 25GB single layer and 100GB M-Discs regarding the media robustness and safety of data? As i understand it, the 100GB discs add another data layer, and assuming it works like all other optical media, this is achieved by angling the laser at a different angle, so logically a scratch on the physical media will incur read errors on another layer. Apart from physical damage, the media density is higher. I would assume that the 25GB discs have a longer lifetime than the 100GB ones, but I have no illusions that either of them will last a millennia. If the media is still readable 1000 years from now, let’s hope they still make optical drives to read them :-) I’ll be happy if they last 10-20 years, and considering some of the early CD ROM disc that were burned are still readable despite using dye (which degrades) I’d say there’s a good chance of that either size will survive just fine. I store mine in jewel cases, in a dark closet at room temperature. The worst enemies are temperature, light and humidity.

dsego 6y ago

My family lost all our printed family albums a few years ago. We still can't get over it. Unfortunately my parents didn't understand the importance of keeping the negatives around. Printed photos degrade over time, you can see the colors shift. But more importantly, we didn't have multiple prints and all the albums were in one drawer in a bedroom. My brother decided to burn down all the photos in one of his fits of rage. But it could've happened in other ways, like the room burning down, an earthquake etc. Btw, do you think there is a difference between 25GB single layer and 100GB M-Discs regarding the media robustness and safety of data?

8fingerlouie 6y ago
> Btw, do you think there is a difference between 25GB single layer and 100GB M-Discs regarding the media robustness and safety of data? As i understand it, the 100GB discs add another data layer, and assuming it works like all other optical media, this is achieved by angling the laser at a different angle, so logically a scratch on the physical media will incur read errors on another layer. Apart from physical damage, the media density is higher. I would assume that the 25GB discs have a longer lifetime than the 100GB ones, but I have no illusions that either of them will last a millennia. If the media is still readable 1000 years from now, let’s hope they still make optical drives to read them :-) I’ll be happy if they last 10-20 years, and considering some of the early CD ROM disc that were burned are still readable despite using dye (which degrades) I’d say there’s a good chance of that either size will survive just fine. I store mine in jewel cases, in a dark closet at room temperature. The worst enemies are temperature, light and humidity.