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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

#21

Post by enriquto »

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…

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.

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

#22

Post by yourfate »

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?

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

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

#23

Post by KozmoNau7 »

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 store my important documents, music collection etc. locally on my PC, regularly synced to a NAS, automatically synced to pCloud, and every week I sync to an external hard drive that I keep in my locker at work.

Maybe it's overkill, but it really isn't much work to bring the disk home, fire off an rsync script and bring it to work again the next morning. And external hard drives are ridiculously cheap.

For photos, my phone uploads them to Google Photos automatically. I've been considering moving that to pCloud as well.

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

#24

Post by KozmoNau7 »

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…

I have a CD-R of "alternatively obtained software" from December 1995, which I keep around mostly out of curiosity. It's got some forgettable old games and MIDI sequencing software on it, nothing interesting at all.

But I'm wondering when it'll actually start deteriorating and ultimately fail. So far it seems to still be OK.

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

#25

Post by pmlnr »

lrem wrote: post #18
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.

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

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

#26

Post by westpfelia »

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…

So this isnt a way to actively use a 5.25" floppy for storage... but if you have data on one you want to save this is an option:

http://www.cbmstuff.com/proddetail.php?prod=SCP

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

#27

Post by lrem »

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…

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 machine HDDs and a remote raid copy of head.

Unpublished code: home directory + a private git server.

Published code: as unpublished + GitHub (which I assume to be indestructible too).

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

#28

Post by WalterBright »

westpfelia wrote: post #26
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…

So this isnt a way to actively use a 5.25" floppy for storage... but if you have data on one you want to save this is an option: http://www.cbmstuff.com/proddetail.php?prod=SCP

Thanks for the tip! But it doesn't seem to present the floppy data as a file system :-(

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

#29

Post by tzakrajs »

masklinn wrote: post #13
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.

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

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

#30

Post by walrus01 »

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…

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

https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?mpre=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eb...

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

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