4 ms·
CDs and DVDs are cheap and burning them is fast and easy. Make several copies, calculate the checksum, and store them in different places. Every few years see h
by fredophile 4y ago
CDs and DVDs are cheap and burning them is fast and easy. Make several copies, calculate the checksum, and store them in different places. Every few years see how badly they've degraded and after hitting some pre chosen threshold you can return all of them. If their data really is less than 1 GB they could even store 4-5 copies per DVD for additional redundancy. Even on a single disk I'd imagine the errors are unlikely to be in the same region on all 4 copies.
- vikingerik 4y agoOptical media doesn't hold enough, though. I've got a terabyte of downloaded media. Even with Blu-rays that hold 50 GB, I'm not going to bother burning and storing and keeping 40 of them. I go with simple external hard drives. I get a new one every couple years and copy everything to it as my main backup. The likelihood of my in-machine drive and fairly young backup drive failing at the same time is pretty low. Even if that happens, the previous backup drive will have a good portion of it. And my important docs folder also goes to Carbonite online backup.
- fredophile 4y agoThat's your use case (and probably fairly common). The original question specified < 1 GB so my comment was based on that. If I had to save 1 TB I'd probably save 1 copy with a specialized storage provider, 1 hdd in a safety deposit box and 1 hdd at home. You could also use tapes if you don't trust the HDD hardware to last.
- mixmastamyk 4y agoBlu-ray holds more than that.