Ask HN: What is the best media for long term archival storage? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What is the best media for long term archival storage?

#51

Post by __d » Fri, May 26, 2023, 1:30 AM UTC

dehrmann wrote: post #30

mepian wrote: post #5

I've heard good old magnetic tapes (LTO nowadays) are the medium of choice for long-term storage within large organizations.

What's the oldest tape a drive still in production can read?

In extremis, you need to archive the means of reading the data as well.

This is more true the less standard your media is: 1600bps tape using Unix tar format is much easier to read today than some 1990's commercial backup program on some proprietary, hardware compression implementation using some oddball tape-in-cartridge media.

You still have issues with, eg. melted rubber on tape rollers, leaking capacitors, etc, etc, but that's a more tractable problem than finding the right weirdo media reader 50 (or 100, or whatever) years after it was obsolete.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best media for long term archival storage?

#52

Post by __d » Fri, May 26, 2023, 1:46 AM UTC

I've been through 8mm Exabyte tape, 4mm DAT tape, Sony AIT tape, and a couple of generations of LTO. I kept a pair of drives for each format, all using SCSI, and had suitable SCSI adaptors to drive them, and formated the recorded data using standard Open Source software with no compression or encryption. Every year, I'd read each tape, just to re-tension it, and try to avoid print-through, etc.

It was a massive effort. So, I no longer do that.

I now just keep everything on my NAS. The volumes are mirrored. I have a removable HDD onto which I snapshot the entire NAS volume every night. I swap that drive out every month and send it off-site (and replace it with the one previously off-site). So I have live, local snapshot (up to 24 hours out-of-date), and off-site snapshot (up to 1 month out of date).

Everything I care about is rsync-ed daily to the NAS: home directories, photos, music, Time Machine laptop backups, machine configs, IMAP sync, CalDAV sync, CardDAV, Git repo clones, etc.

Every few years, I double the size of the NAS volume.

There's no monthly cost, and there's no concern about degradation of the media. The storage format is always current, as are the OS and tools required to read it. The only effort is the monthly off-site drive swap.

It won't outlive me, unless my heirs decide to continue to maintain it, but ... at that point I no longer care.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best media for long term archival storage?

#53

Post by aborsy » Fri, May 26, 2023, 6:08 PM UTC

xupybd wrote: post #25

elamje wrote: post #23

I’ve been considering this for over 5 years. So far, cutting edge commercial is https://www.piql.com/ , the Norwegian company that did the GitHub Arctic code vault. Their tapes have instructions on how to decode the data inscribed on the tape itself. Truly cutting edge (non-commercial) is Microsoft’s Project Silica optical storage as well as DNA storage. I’ve been thinking about building something in this space since…

One thing I would pay for is a way to engrave my SSH keys into thin steel plates as a QR code. I have a safe with my critical keys in it but that is only fire proof for 3 hours. If things got really hot those are gone. In theory it shouldn't be an issue as I have them backed up other places but it would give me peace of mind to have them on a fire proof media.

The way that works in crypto is that, you generate a private key (such as an SSH or GPG key) from a mnemonic passphrase and punch/engrave those words on a metal plate.