I just keep them on a local fileserver, and do backups of that as normal.
Local, as in your own home? What happens when the home burns down and you aren’t there to grad the backups?
My backups are not in my home.
Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?
51–60 of 73 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?
#52I 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 t…
I tend to archive things in the most common formats, and haven't had much trouble with it.
For example, in the 80s I'd use various compression programs. When I eventually archived them, I uncompressed them with the old compression programs.
I store pdfs with a .txt version of their contents, too.
Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?
#53I was sad to learn that many of my IG stories (and presumably applies to reels too) have broken music links (even though the item is still in the library) . That means I cannot rely on IG to adequately safeguard my memories.
You shouldn't rely on any company to adequately safeguard your important data in the long term.
Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?
#54A 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.
Put them in your PowerPoint alternative of choice and record narration?
Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah and I think people overestimate how much interest their kids will have in old photos of their ancestors. I cleaned out boxes of photos from my late parents house. Lots of pics from my childhood years, somewhat sparser selection of older photos. Never look at any of them. I have a framed photo of my parents on a shelf; that's enough. I also basically stopped taking photos of stuff about 15 years ago when I realiz…
Pro tip to parents out there: Your kids will want to see other people in those childhood photos, more than they'll want to see 100,000 photos of their own faces. You, when you were younger; their now-gone grandparents; that friend they had for two grades before one of them moved ("OMG I totally forgot about them!"), that kind of thing. You'll get way more than enough photos of your kids, so far as your kids themselve…
yes yes yes! not only that, the graduation ceremony won’t be as interesting as a casual day at home. What are the kids playing with? what’s on TV? or on the computer screen or phone (that’s going to be vintage in 20 years). Cars on the street and signs on shop or on buses. The dull daily stuff can become super fun to look back on.
source: me looking at family videos from the 90s
Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?
#56On this topic, does anyone have recommendations for good and relatively affordable home NAS hardware? A lot of the ones you can buy with all the bells and whistles included are quite expensive and the cheaper ones out there look kind of shoddy. I bought a little kit for turning a Raspberry Pi into a NAS device using a SATA hat but the connection seems dodgy or something as it doesn't recognise the hard drives persist…
You can check out the data hoarder subreddit, which often has good suggestions. My current setup is Ryzen on an AsRock motherboard (let's me use Unbuffered ECC RAM), and you use LSI HBA cards (see art of server on EBAY) which gives you more SATA ports. Still in the range of $500-$1000 (no HDD) depending on how you spec it out, but far more powerful and expandable for anything even close to that price range. If you ar…
Would you mind posting your AsRock hardware?
I was considering AsRock x300 mini desktop, but it supports only 2.5” HDDs. I am looking for two 3.5” HDDs, one NVMe and ECC RAM, low power CPU, around $600 or so.
Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?
#57I 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…
I would assume that outboard CD/DVD drives (USB, maybe others) will be available for a long time to come.
3.5 inch USB floppy drives are still routine. 5.25 inch, try the used market. Who knows what happens in 10 years?
That's for recovery. I wouldn't use floppies as a primary medium these days. CD/DVD might be on OK choice.
Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?
#58Cold storage may not be a great idea. With warm storage, you can run frequent checks like scrubs. Storing data with two cloud providers is a good option.
But Online storage must be encrypted. So the question is, what backup or encryption software do you use to be able to decrypt the data in 10—15 years or so?
Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?
#59I 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…
Just be aware that SSDs are not stable long-term stores - they need to be periodically powered up or they will eventually lose data.
Am hoping that monthly/quarterly use is enough but that’s a good point to research.
Re: Ask HN: How do you plan to archive all your digital content?
#60I 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!
I don’t know that it would shield from another Carrington event but figure it can’t hurt. Am assuming I will have more important problems in the event of rapid dispersal of nuclear radiation.