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Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?

#41

Post by WalterBright »

I have media going back 50 years. A common theme is all of it becomes unreadable after a while - not because the media degrades, but because you can't get a device that can read them (or it becomes very expensive to obtain such a device). Punch cards, paper tape, magtapes, 8" floppies, 5.25" floppies, PC hard drives, cartridge tapes, DECtapes, zip discs, hard drives, etc.

The easiest by far solution is to simply copy them forward to new media once every year. Have an offsite copy.

I don't trust any cloud backup. They can go dark at any time for any reason, you can lose your password, you can get "canceled", a hacker can ransomware it, etc.

I periodically check that ransomware hasn't infected my backups by seeing if an unrelated device, like a media server box, can read the files on it.

I have no faith in "archival quality" media, as if you can't find a device to read it, it's worthless. Have you noticed that computers increasingly don't come with CD drives anymore? Why would anyone want them, since a 64Gb USB stick goes for $6? Soon there will be no way to read those "archival quality" CDs.

Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?

#42

Post by causi »

A bigger question is indexing that content. I would pay good money for a software suite that would let me scan all my old family photos and attach both text and audio. I'd love to sit down with my mother and one-by-one go through them and let her record the story behind them. I don't understand why such a format doesn't exist.

Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?

#43

Post by throwamon »

irrational wrote: post #27
superkuh wrote: post #6

Keep it simple. No raid or weird filesystems, no special NAS computers, no encryption, no remote services. I stuff every computer I assemble with hard drives until it can support no more then mirror important data from every computer to every other computer with rsync.

But, are all those computers in the same location? Just one fire away from losing everything? I have all my photos and videos on local storage, but it is all mirrored to a secure cloud storage service that costs hardly anything. I’ve pulled the backups from that cloud service (you can’t access the files directly) to make sure it works properly.

> a secure cloud storage service that costs hardly anything

Which is...?

Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?

#44

Post by WalterBright »

WalterBright wrote: post #41

I have media going back 50 years. A common theme is all of it becomes unreadable after a while - not because the media degrades, but because you can't get a device that can read them (or it becomes very expensive to obtain such a device). Punch cards, paper tape, magtapes, 8" floppies, 5.25" floppies, PC hard drives, cartridge tapes, DECtapes, zip discs, hard drives, etc. The easiest by far solution is to simply copy…

In going through my Dad's papers, I found a listing of the first game I wrote (in DECSystem 10 Basic). I thought that was lost in the mists of time. It was fun reading the ancient code. I scanned it and put it on my backup drive.

I threw away my old punch cards, paper tape, magtape, DECtape, etc., as it wasn't worth the effort to find a machine that could read them.

Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?

#46

Post by mxuribe »

irrational wrote: post #27
superkuh wrote: post #6

Keep it simple. No raid or weird filesystems, no special NAS computers, no encryption, no remote services. I stuff every computer I assemble with hard drives until it can support no more then mirror important data from every computer to every other computer with rsync.

But, are all those computers in the same location? Just one fire away from losing everything? I have all my photos and videos on local storage, but it is all mirrored to a secure cloud storage service that costs hardly anything. I’ve pulled the backups from that cloud service (you can’t access the files directly) to make sure it works properly.

I'm really curious to learn which cloud service that you use which "costs hardly anything". Would you kindly share?

Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?

#47

Post by ngetchell »

gwbas1c wrote: post #22
WesleyLivesay wrote: post #7

I think the best way to hand that stuff off to your children is to wait until they get to a point where they hand off can happen, when they are adults, and then hand them a highly curated set of photos on a USB drive and let them do with it what they will. The key is in the curation though, it is unlikely that your child will want to sort through thousands of blurry, duplicate, or unrelated photos. 100 really good an…

> The key is in the curation though, it is unlikely that your child will want to sort through thousands of blurry, duplicate, or unrelated photos. 100 really good and special photos/videos are better than a mixed up mass of 5,000. Honestly, I would really enjoy sifting through 5,000 photos from my grandparents or parents. (Sometimes the best photos are the embarrassing or private photos, like the time my dad asked me…

I think the act of developing film meant that photographs had a higher signal to noise/duplicate/blurry factor. It's trivial to take 100 pictures in an afternoon, with only 1-2 being worth saving.

Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?

#48

Post by mxuribe »

epc wrote: post #2

I have two pocket SSDs that I archive to on an irregular basis (basically quarterly) of selected documents and photos. Each is in a small faraday bag, whichever one is in the house is in a safe, the other is in a safe deposit box at my bank. The drives themselves are unencrypted but some of the documents are encrypted (e.g. I export my 1Password vaults quarterly and encrypt those). I don’t have any kids nor plans to…

> ...Each is in a small faraday bag...

Now that is a great idea! I do something similar to you with the exception of using faraday bags. Thanks for sharing!

Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?

#49

Post by PaulKeeble »

WalterBright wrote: post #41

I have media going back 50 years. A common theme is all of it becomes unreadable after a while - not because the media degrades, but because you can't get a device that can read them (or it becomes very expensive to obtain such a device). Punch cards, paper tape, magtapes, 8" floppies, 5.25" floppies, PC hard drives, cartridge tapes, DECtapes, zip discs, hard drives, etc. The easiest by far solution is to simply copy…

3-2-1 seems to be a reasonable strategy for keeping the data relatively safe over the long time and maintaining some offsite backup saves it in the event of house fires and the cloud is convenient for that it just can't be the only storage. But the bigger issue is often conversion of data, there is often a window in which a format can be converted from an old format to a newer or more popular one and you often have to assess that yearly.

Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?

#50

Post by neilv »

If you're ready to share all that, and it's just family photos&videos (nothing too sensitive that you won't mind them leaking through ordinary bad security and social media), then you could give them access as soon as they have their own online accounts, and they could just grow up always accessing it.

But, for financial/estate data that my heirs might eventually needed, I have a script that `rsync`s select data to (multiple copies of) an unencrypted external USB drive, in FAT32 format.

Included on the drives, and also stored printed with them, is a one-page `READ-THIS-FIRST.txt` file that says what info is on the drive, as well as top-level summary about other things they might need to know (like what insurances I have, any will, and how to access the GnuCash files).

There's also a PDF&paper one-pager assets&liabilities report from GnuCash, for use before anyone gets around to installing GnuCash. This enumerates all the accounts where money is stored or owed, and sets expectations for the reader's very-very tiny inheritance.

There's also passwords. Mine are currently handwritten in a redundant pair of Rite In The Rain paper notebooks, one off-site. But you could also use a password manager service, and some services can release more passwords to family members upon your expiration. Your survivors being able to just one of those accounts, might save them a lot of headache, and you don't know which one that will be.

Even for only family photos that they can already access, you even might want to have a one-pager bus-factor document that includes things like how to keep the photos from disappearing (such as by not getting locked out of access, not failing to pay a cloud service bill, or not donating the old junk servers that were storing them). If this one-pager is accessible to kids, maybe structure it as notes for yourself of how things are set up, like an engineering nerd, without alluding too much that they'll someday need to do it.

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