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Newly recovered Ground Zero photos show why you should back up your CD-Rs now

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Re: Newly recovered Ground Zero photos show why you should back up your CD-Rs now

#11

Post by masklinn »

dvd-guy wrote: post #3

Anecdotal evidence, but I've recently gone through my ancient CD collection (in so doing, I found Ubuntu 6.04 installers, AOL dial-up CDs and other relics) and archived them with GNU DDrescue. It had no problem reading all bar a handful of CDs from the mid-to-late 90s and early 00's - the failure rate was much lower than I expected. The failures were mostly completely visually identifiable too - the layers had starte…

> It had no problem reading all bar a handful of CDs from the mid-to-late 90s and early 00's - the failure rate was much lower than I expected.The failures were mostly completely visually identifiable too - the layers had started to separate.

It was mostly cheap CD-R from that period, and frankly you needn't wait 20 years for them to fall apart, they'd start failing under 5. Quality CD-R from good brands survived just fine.

Re: Newly recovered Ground Zero photos show why you should back up your CD-Rs now

#12

Post by voltagex_ »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #10
willtim wrote: post #2

A huge shame. I backup my optical media to S3, but I also use M-DISC "mineral discs" which hopefully will last much longer. Sadly they were not available back then.

I used to use S3 but quickly realized how expensive it is and switched to Hetzner. The more data you need to store and transfer, the more pronounced the difference is.

What's Hetzner's redundancy like?

Re: Newly recovered Ground Zero photos show why you should back up your CD-Rs now

#13

Post by masklinn »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #10
willtim wrote: post #2

A huge shame. I backup my optical media to S3, but I also use M-DISC "mineral discs" which hopefully will last much longer. Sadly they were not available back then.

I used to use S3 but quickly realized how expensive it is and switched to Hetzner. The more data you need to store and transfer, the more pronounced the difference is.

Long-term archival / storage is not the use case for S3, that'd be more Glacier or B2's thing.

The storage itself is competitive with Hetzner's storage solutions (nextcloud or storage box), though you'd pay for traffic on top of that.

Re: Newly recovered Ground Zero photos show why you should back up your CD-Rs now

#15

Post by shellmayr »

I wonder about this: how do people archive their information, especially photo and video data. I use an array of mirrored HDDs in different locations with everything on it, plus parts of it on a cloud hosting service. It isn't very convenient though and it seems there should be a better solution. How do people in here do it? Most solutions (for me) fall short on quick retrieval and possibility to visually browse photos.

Re: Newly recovered Ground Zero photos show why you should back up your CD-Rs now

#16

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

voltagex_ wrote: post #12
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to use S3 but quickly realized how expensive it is and switched to Hetzner. The more data you need to store and transfer, the more pronounced the difference is.

What's Hetzner's redundancy like?

I rent a 40 TB box with Hetzner set up as a 2x20TB RAID1 paying €78. I can be sure I won't pay more than that each month. With S3, I can be sure I'd pay at least $560 each month for 20 TB plus the traffic - and this made frequent synchronization pretty unattractive to me. So far their service was very reliable, with hard drives failing a couple of years, but they were replacing them very quickly (half an hour or so) so for me the availability of Hetzner is quite close to what I had with S3 - but I sleep better at night.

Re: Newly recovered Ground Zero photos show why you should back up your CD-Rs now

#17

Post by Tepix »

I use MDISC media for photos. I wonder what everyone's experiences are, especially for the 25GB and 100GB Blu-Ray variants - have you seen them fail? It'd be great if MDISC are indeed as great as they claim to be and I don't have to worry about copying the stuff over to some other media for 50 years or so.

PS: Yes, I have an external optical drive with USB 3.0 (and a USB A and USB C cable) to go with the media to be able to read them later

Re: Newly recovered Ground Zero photos show why you should back up your CD-Rs now

#18

Post by lrem »

Tepix wrote: post #17

I use MDISC media for photos. I wonder what everyone's experiences are, especially for the 25GB and 100GB Blu-Ray variants - have you seen them fail? It'd be great if MDISC are indeed as great as they claim to be and I don't have to worry about copying the stuff over to some other media for 50 years or so. PS: Yes, I have an external optical drive with USB 3.0 (and a USB A and USB C cable) to go with the media to be…

My USB Blu-ray drive failed after two years and new ones cost about four times more than they used to. I shrugged it off and added one more hard drive of redundancy instead.

Re: Newly recovered Ground Zero photos show why you should back up your CD-Rs now

#19

Post by WalterBright »

shellmayr wrote: post #15

I wonder about this: how do people archive their information, especially photo and video data. I use an array of mirrored HDDs in different locations with everything on it, plus parts of it on a cloud hosting service. It isn't very convenient though and it seems there should be a better solution. How do people in here do it? Most solutions (for me) fall short on quick retrieval and possibility to visually browse phot…

I buy new hard drives every year and copy all the data to them.

Edit: It's not just the longevity of the drive (though after 20 years they often don't work at all). Drive interfaces change over time, and I have drives where there is no way to hook them up to a newer computer, and my old computers failed due to capacitor problems.

For example, good luck trying to read a 5.25" floppy. You'll need to build your own hardware and write your own device driver to do it.

Just keep copying it all forward every year. Multi-terabyte hard drives are cheap.

Re: Newly recovered Ground Zero photos show why you should back up your CD-Rs now

#20

Post by dharmab »

shellmayr wrote: post #15

I wonder about this: how do people archive their information, especially photo and video data. I use an array of mirrored HDDs in different locations with everything on it, plus parts of it on a cloud hosting service. It isn't very convenient though and it seems there should be a better solution. How do people in here do it? Most solutions (for me) fall short on quick retrieval and possibility to visually browse phot…

A few of my co-workers have cross-site backups arranged with siblings or parents. Each house runs a few local servers and mirrors the backups to the other house.

This relies on having a trusted party outside of your natural disasters zone, but it's pretty cost effective if both parties wanted to run home servers anyway (e.g. Plex, homelab)

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