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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

#41

Post by willtim »

lloydde wrote: post #7
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.

Do you mind sharing your monthly S3 bill and it’s rate of change?

It's around 10 dollars, but then I have less than 1 TB. I recently starting backing up my RAW files remotely, so this number is set to increase significantly (!) I am very interested in S3 alternatives. I haven't looked at the Amazon Glacier options either, but I suspect the retrieval times make it awkward to query/verify backups.

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

#42

Post by mrguyorama »

tzakrajs wrote: post #29
masklinn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Glacier is wonderful. I am able to store basically everything I want and it costs me less than $1/mo

The cost in glacier is if you ever need to retrieve data

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

#43

Post by mrguyorama »

pmlnr wrote: post #25
lrem wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While hard drive lasts, the trouble of disk based storage lies in the filesystem. I'd recommend running ZFS for long term storage.

When do you predict Windows will no longer read FAT32? My first real computer was Windows 95b and that formatted FAT32 disks, and even my current 7 installation reads and writes FAT32 on flash drives

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

#44

Post by dewey »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #35
enriquto wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once a year, before christmas, you chose about a hundred of the best photos, print them in a beautiful album, send copies to your grandmothers, and delete the rest.

I've had a policy of keeping one photo a day and discarding the rest for some time now. It's quite freeing to not have to worry about keeping a huge digital archive.

In times where storage space is cheap is there really a difference between keeping one picture safe or keeping 100 safe? If you can keep one safe, you can keep 1000s safe with the same kind of process.

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

#45

Post by dewey »

yourfate wrote: post #22
lloydde wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mind sharing your monthly S3 bill and it’s rate of change?

I can recommend wasabi.com, they are a lot less expensive but also offer a full S3 api.

But do you want to trust a company you never heard of (in my case) over one that every big company relies on with your backups to safe a couple of bucks / month?

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

#46

Post by WalterBright »

tialaramex wrote: post #32
WalterBright wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hard…

The philosophy of just copying data makes sense, but your justification not so much. > Drive interfaces change over time, and I have drives where there is no way to hook them up to a newer computer 20+ year old PC drives will have IDE interfaces, which you can of course get a USB adaptor for very cheaply and I have several laying about. Really old PCs or non-PC hardware (e.g. the Amstrad CPC 6128 in the 1980s had an…

I have several 5.25 drives laying around. The connectors still fit on them to the motherboard, but the BIOS no longer recognizes them, though the BIOS will recognize 3.5 floppy drives.

I can't find any device that connects the drive with the computer that doesn't require writing a device driver.

It's not a crazy disk format, it's DOS format.

As for hard disk drive interfaces, I have a couple off the shelf USB interfaces to IDE drives. The connectors fit, but they don't recognize the older drives.

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

#47

Post by WalterBright »

walrus01 wrote: post #30
WalterBright wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hard…

> 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. It's really not that hard, assuming some older PC format. Motherboards up to the 486DX4/120 generation had onboard controllers for the cable to interface to a standard AT type, half height 5.25" drive. I had one in my PC at the time. They read 360KB disks fine too. From that sort o…

> From that sort of computer, which can run DOS 6.22, it's not too hard to use it to transfer the data to a modern machine.

Well, yes, if you have an old computer with 3.5 and 5.25 drives, you can transfer to a 3.5 and read that on a modern computer. The trouble is, my old computers all failed due to capacitor problems.

I can buy a 3.5 floppy usb drive, plug it into any computer, and it works. Not so for 5.25.

> If you mean good luck trying to read a 5.25" disk due to magnetic degradation on the media,that's another problem.

I haven't had much issue with that. About 20 years ago, I transferred my thousand or so floppies one by one to CD ROMs, and later to hard disks. Only a couple were unreadable. I've since found a handful of others, but no way to read them any more.

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

#48

Post by WalterBright »

WalterBright wrote: post #19
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 hard…

In the early 80's, I had a PDP-11 with an 8" floppy drive. When I bought an IBM PC, I used Kermit to transfer my files to the PC over the serial cable. Fast forward 30 years, and I had put my PDP-11 Empire game up on github. Someone emailed me that it was missing a file. I was dead in the water, having gotten rid of the 11 long ago.

I recalled my roommate in college might have one. Called him up, he said he was about to discard it, I called him just in time! He said it was unlikely to work (been a long time since it was powered up), and unlikely to be able to read those ancient floppies, but was willing to try.

I had kept the floppies in the attic, and mailed them to him.

They all read perfectly! He sent me all the files on them, and bit images of the disks.

Thank you Shal, and thanks DEC for making machines and floppies that still worked.

https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-11

I wish I'd kept my 11.

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

#49

Post by pmlnr »

mrguyorama wrote: post #43
pmlnr wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While hard drive lasts, the trouble of disk based storage lies in the filesystem. I'd recommend running ZFS for long term storage.

When do you predict Windows will no longer read FAT32? My first real computer was Windows 95b and that formatted FAT32 disks, and even my current 7 installation reads and writes FAT32 on flash drives

I was referring to bit flips and data corruption. Mirrored zfs can correct these, the rest of the filesystems can't.

Flash drives are terrible mediums for backups unless you power them every month. When they loae charge they lose bits permanently.

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

#50

Post by lrem »

y4mi wrote: post #33
lrem wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Processed photos and videos: Google Photos and YouTube. As an insider I know that I can't afford to match the availability of those and having the live display copy indestructible is soooo convenient. Downside: I don't think YouTube will give you back verbatim input material. Photos will, but it can be expensive. Raw media material after processing: single local HDD and a remote raid. Home directory: two local time m…

I agree that it's hard to beat the availability of Google consumer services... But that is not backup. A backup serves as a fallback if for any reason the primary source has become unavailable. In Google's case such an even can and does occur when your account gets banned because of some random event which you had hardly anything to do with or because your user was compromised. A backup let's you recover from that an…

As I wrote: Google services are the display copy. Conveniently it's overwhelmingly likely to survive for years upon years without any effort. But it can disappear, for reasons you mentioned, in which case I can recover the input media from the options in the second paragraph.
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