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Best choice for long term external storage? (self.hardware)

submitted 2 years ago by silas to c/hardware@lemmy.ml

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I'm looking for a trustful method for offline (external) storage. I used to save stuff in 4 GB DVDs because they are cheap, although have very small storage limit for nowadays standards.

If I go for external HDDs, I'll probably have to buy a NAS or something, so I'm considering go for DVDs again. Are they considered reasonably trustful?

Any suggestions, considering I'm look for a not very expensive solution?

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[–] ono@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 years ago

Magnetic media are still the best for offline backup. A good tape drive, or hard drives if tape is not your cup of tea. If you don't want a NAS, you can get a hot-swap SATA drive bay that allows plugging one drive into your computer at a time.

Recordable optical discs are a bit of a gamble for long term storage. Sometimes they last for ages, and sometimes they don't. There are some made for "archival" purposes, but those are generally expensive and as far as I know not exactly well proven. Another drawback is that you need a lot of discs, all of which will eventually become plastic waste.

Don't use flash drives for offline backup. Their charge decays when left unpowered, and your data with it.

Whatever medium you choose, be sure to make more than one copy, in case one of them fails.