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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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[–] fraenki@feddit.de 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Tape is cheap but very sensitive. They absolutely need dark places with stable temperature and humidity.

I sugest you either grab a few HDDs that'll last 3 - 8 years on average or pick SSDs. SSDs are expensive but very robust. You can exect a livespan of over 10 years while manhandling them. Both HDDs and SSDs nerd to be plugged in regulary to refresh the magnetic fields that contains your data - at least once per year. That means you have to copy everything to make sure it's refreshed.

No matter what you pick you'll nerd a strategy against bit rot. That usually involves at least 3 copies of your data. The hashes of said data of each copy are compared. If one hash doesn't match the other 2 that copy will be deleted and restored from one of the other copies.