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.
CDs and DVDs have decent life spans unless you store them in a damp or warm environment, most likely better than flash storage. If they are old make a fresh copy and store it properly
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.
Be careful about trusting flash drives. I’ve had several crap the bed. My understanding is the data is still there but the internal controller has fallen over.
I agree with others that say make multiple copies in multiples places on different media types.
Have them, or at least some of them, printed. Actual photos last generations.
Actual photos last generations.
Old school photos did. New school? It depends I guess? And even oldschool ones degrade, ESPECIALLY in high light environments. Most these days are just getting printed in ink on shiny paper with a high res printer. I’ve had some of those blow out over a few months. I think in that sense digital is more permanent.
It would have to be only some. The storage density of printed photos is terrible.
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So thinking this through, your best bet long term is going to be a multiple cloud back up system. Its probably more than you would want to pay, but they’re already digitized. Its not crazy to just take advantage of what these kinds of systems are good for, which is distributing backups across multiple servers.
But having local backups is also important. Thinking this through, one cost effective option would be to first back up the CDR to hard drive, for whatever machine you have. Then, burn multiple copies of the data to CDR. Make 10 copies. Send five to family members. Take the other five and shove them in the same place you archive your other stuff. One CD can absolutely rot/ fail. But its unlikely that all of them would fail. If you store them properly, in reasonable house hold temperatures, and you aren’t constantly reading or writing to the disk, they should just kinda sit there and be fine.
If you have a burner, if you want the least technical cheapest approach, thats what I’d recommend.
3-2-1 is the way.
I have over 300GB of photos, digital, scanned, etc. I have a working master copy of them on my computer, plus two alternating local copies on local network backups, plus quarterly rotating offsite backups to a safe deposit box. This protects against bit rot, data corruption, accidental deletion and short term incremental data loss.
In all the years I’ve used this setup (around 25 now), I’ve only ever lost one chunk of photos, which I didn’t realize had got erased until after I’d already rotated the quarterly backups twice. Thankfully I’d also shared edited versions of that set with a friend, so while I was never able to recover the raw files, I at least got the edited copies back.
Make a copy, or two. Write today’s date on it.
Keep the copies for 10 years. Most CDs last for 10 years or more, but not all. Therefore, after 5 years already make a new copy. And so on.
Your dad fought in WWII 81 years ago? Also didn’t you say you were an ex-coder (in addition to a nurse and now a soldier) but don’t know what the cloud is?
You are talking to a serial fabulist who apparently believes they are providing entertainment.
Yes he did fight in WW2 he was a Navy Man, he died in 2006. Him and a bunch of mates delivered stolen paintings to Truman. I think it was from the Hapsburgs. But I may be misspelling that. Yes my brother is an ex-coder. He did IT for Wal-Mart, JBHUNT, and others. My sister is a traveling nurse who is an RN who was recently diagnosed with early onset alzheimer’s. Yes I know what a cloud does like a storage device but the in and out no. And after the Fappening I like to remain willfully ignorant of it. Any other questions or accusations? Oh I don’t think I ever said I am a soldier in the question or desc.
So that puts you in your 70s with a father who’d be over 100 years old today, and you and your elderly siblings are all on Lemmy but share one single account for some inexplicable reason?
In addition to claiming to be writing a movie script, you also claimed in one of your previous comments to be “stationed where you have a T3 connection” which is where I got the “soldier” part from but I can understand how it can be hard to keep all the separate stories straight.
Uh no. It was WW2 not WW1. Born in 1983. I never said I am writing a script I said a synopsis or I forgot to put it or whatever. That is my sister she is in New York. She goes all over the world. We says stationed because she is literally working other people’s stations. And it said in the title IF i wrote a script.
