this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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Best way to backup files (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 5 months ago by emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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I have about 500GB of data (photos, documents, videos etc.) that I have accumulated over the years. Currently, I keep them on my computer and rsync all additions / changes once a month or so to an external hard drive. Do I need to be worried about data loss (sectors going bad, bit rot, bit flip, whatever it is called)?

To clarify,

  1. None of this is commercially important; I just don't want to get into a situation where I look up an old family photo or video twenty years down the line and it has got corrupted.

  2. Both my computer and the external HD are HDDs. They are fairly cheap here (and very cheap if second hand). Buying SSDs or dedicated hardware would be expensive.

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[โ€“] user224@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I also just do this. However I have already found 2 photos that got randomly corrupted, and I don't know how to prevent that.

So far my only idea was using md5sum, but checking all files like that takes a loooooooooong time.

I am paranoid about cloud. I do have my music backed up on OneDrive, encrypted with GPG using AES256, but I don't even fully trust that. I know, it sounds stupid, but maybe in the future it will be quite easy to break.

But I don't know much about encryption. Just reading the man page, I put these options together:

--s2k-cipher-algo AES256 --s2k-digest-algo SHA512 --s2k-mode 3 --s2k-count 65011712

but whether I can consider that safe enough, I don't know.

And since I don't know enough about it, I prefer not to trust it.

[โ€“] treesoid@lemmy.world 4 points 5 months ago

I also just do this. However I have already found 2 photos that got randomly corrupted, and I don't know how to prevent that.

If you are fine with changing your file system, check out zfs. It stores checksums with your data, and can, if configured to store multiple copies, repair corruption.