Some of them were from my dad back in ww2 and stuff. Currently got a external cd/dvd drive that I am going to return. I have external hard drives crap out on me and USB’s do the same. I plan I keeping the disc and also putting them on USB but was wondering if there is something more concrete? With that said I do not know how to use the cloud and honestly don’t trust it.
I decided to cancel OneDrive and run my own cloud storage, and I have almost 1TB of family photos and videos going back generations. I was utterly terrified that I’d do something and lose them.
What I did was just go overboard on backups. I back up to a backup drive on the server (which is in my house). I use borg backup for incremental backups so I can go back to previous versions if needed. I have daily for 2 works then monthly which go back years so I can go back to any of these times if needed.
Next I sync that borg repository to Backblaze using rclone. So now if my house burns down I don’t lose everything. Thats 3 copies (original + backup + cloud) on two mediums (hdd + object storage), with one offsite (cloud), so that’s the 3 2 1 backup strategy.
Ok but what happens if I accidentally delete it all. It’s within my capability. So I wanted to have an air gapped disk. But if someone finds it decades later, any ssd, hdd, or cd is gonna be degraded. So I burnt everything to M-Disc, which should last 100+ years.
What if the house burns down and I’m inside it, who is going to know how to decrypt a borg repository, or even how to download it from Backblaze? So I burned two copies of everything to M-Disc, all unencrypted, and store one copy at my mother’s house.
And for good measure, I also printed 100 photos from each year and put them in a big black storage container, so if none of that works there’s still a chance.
Every year I print another 100 photos and burn another M-Disc with changes (using rsync to identify the changes).
I’m very paranoid about losing these photos, because I have done it before.