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The best way to plan for 50 years is to continually have a 1, 5 and 10 year plan. Your 50 year requirement is the real tough problem here. I would have a hard

The best way to plan for 50 years is to continually have a 1, 5 and 10 year plan. Your 50 year requirement is the real tough problem here. I would have a hard time recommending any of the types of services your are referring to for more than a year at a time. To achieve anything beyond that you need to look for a service that is VERY standards based and portable. You do not mention a need for "backup/restore" or "version history. So lets treat sync & cloud access separately from backup & versioning. File Sync and Cloud Access I think any thing that syncs local files to the cloud will do as long as you don't rely on special features of a specific service. This sort of means that iCloud and S3 are out of the running since neither of them is a cross-platform file directory syncing system. You could keep copies on one or more systems that you control and using the service to provide sync and cloud access. Then if you decided that the service that you are currently use no longer meets your needs, or is out of business, you could easily switch to a different syncing/cloud service. Today I would say that Dropbox is the best solution. Personally, I am beginning to replace Dropbox with BitTorrent Sync and keeping a close eye on syncthing.net. Although, BT Sync doesn't have a web interface, I consider that a plus for privacy, and BT Sync's mobile apps and built in sharing features replace most of what I need from Dropbox's web interface. Backup/Versioning This is where it gets really tricky looking out 50 years. I simply can not recommend thinking out that long term. I think you can look out 10 years at a time, and then make choices for the next 10 years. Something like rdiff-backup with would last at least 10 years, but it doesn't have the easy to access interface. (last I check the radio-backup web interfaces where not very good). Personally, I use a combination of diff-backup and Crashplan pointed at local and remote storage. CrashPlan gives me remote access via the web and apps, and a professionally managed data store. (I feel that while I don't trust others with protecting my data, I don't trust myself 100% either). I also use Arq (with now has a Windows client, and provide an open source code for doing a restore) and backup to a remote site. https://www.crashplan.com https://www.crashplan.com https://www.arqbackup.com https://www.arqbackup.com http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup https://syncthing.net https://syncthing.net https://www.getsync.com https://www.getsync.com

baldfat 11y ago
I have been using Crashplan for around 4 years and I highly recommend it. I bought 4 years worth of storage 2 years ago. I have backups for my own computer and my in-laws. Great deal and great service. Everything points to my Linux NAS and than I backup to CrashPlan.
acdha 11y ago
> The best way to plan for 50 years is to continually have a 1, 5 and 10 year plan. This is the key point to focus on: you don't actually have a backup plan if you don't regularly access the stored data – until then, it's just hope. I like the CrashPlan + Dropbox approach but there's a key gap: you need something else to check strong signatures (SHA-256/512) on data to avoid scenarios where a bit flips on one of your computers, the file is updated and you don't notice it for a long time, which is really easy for data which is infrequently accessed or where the client programs typically cover minor flaws (most image/video/audio formats). My favorite example is a JPEG-2000 file which had corruption in the middle of its tile hierarchy – either a thumbnail or full 1:1 zoom looked fine but something like a 50% zoom would show corruption. You'll probably never find something like that without automated checksums until it's too late to recover a copy from somewhere else. What I'd really like is something like a mature large-file optimized Git repo where there's a strong, checksumed history and it's immediately obvious if a remote version is out of sync. https://github.com/bup/bup https://github.com/bup/bup and https://git-annex.branchable.com/ https://git-annex.branchable.com/ are very interesting. Archive Team is trying git-annex as a way to back up the Internet Archive globally, which will likely lead to changes helping that tool become solid for general usage: http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK

baldfat 11y ago

I have been using Crashplan for around 4 years and I highly recommend it. I bought 4 years worth of storage 2 years ago. I have backups for my own computer and my in-laws. Great deal and great service. Everything points to my Linux NAS and than I backup to CrashPlan.

acdha 11y ago

> The best way to plan for 50 years is to continually have a 1, 5 and 10 year plan. This is the key point to focus on: you don't actually have a backup plan if you don't regularly access the stored data – until then, it's just hope. I like the CrashPlan + Dropbox approach but there's a key gap: you need something else to check strong signatures (SHA-256/512) on data to avoid scenarios where a bit flips on one of your computers, the file is updated and you don't notice it for a long time, which is really easy for data which is infrequently accessed or where the client programs typically cover minor flaws (most image/video/audio formats). My favorite example is a JPEG-2000 file which had corruption in the middle of its tile hierarchy – either a thumbnail or full 1:1 zoom looked fine but something like a 50% zoom would show corruption. You'll probably never find something like that without automated checksums until it's too late to recover a copy from somewhere else. What I'd really like is something like a mature large-file optimized Git repo where there's a strong, checksumed history and it's immediately obvious if a remote version is out of sync. https://github.com/bup/bup https://github.com/bup/bup and https://git-annex.branchable.com/ https://git-annex.branchable.com/ are very interesting. Archive Team is trying git-annex as a way to back up the Internet Archive globally, which will likely lead to changes helping that tool become solid for general usage: http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK