Long-term storage

[Comp1337]

actually replacing porn collections is fun! there's nothing like spending a couple of days looking for porn when you have a ton of space.

I get a new harddrive for that
But yeah, it owns when you hit a vein of good pron

[Caydr]

The data involved does not contain nudity, nor can I imagine it being considered especially erotic to anyone on the face of the earth.

You accumulate a lot of general stuff when you've used computers for as long as I have. A lot of one-of-a-kind things you can't get anymore via torrent, mule, http, ftp, irc, or otherwise. Besides that, there's a lot of TV and a few DVD backups of things I legitimately own. Many of the TV shows are no longer available by any means, and the liklihood of me getting lucky and them getting re-seeded is pretty low after all this time. Besides which, I'd be downloading for two months straight just to get the stuff that's readily available.

I have "3" hard disks (6 actually) of 465 gb apiece and between them there's 134.22 gigs free. OS, games, development tools, models, textures, music, etc, takes up about 100 gb and is on a seperate partition with nothing else. You really accumulate a lot of stuff... I haven't "lost" files catastrophically a single time in the 10 years I've owned a computer, because as you say, I make backups. Actually I've never had a major computer crash, period, since I know how to make ones that don't suck. And they're not from Dell.

But in this situation, there is a lot to back up. I would prefer not to pay $170 x3 plus tax and shipping for another 3 external 500 gb drives That's almost a quarter of my free money each month, and I'm saving up for a car, a house, and a family.

The big problem is, I've only seem to have two choices. One, I replace my 4 main hard drives with new ones and use the old 4 for storage, or two, I buy a new set of RAIDs for storage. In either case I'm at risk though, because the 4 I've had are a year old and the possibility of failure is growing, and if I buy new ones I won't trust them to be reliable for at least 6 months. So I thought I'd post here and see if anyone else has been in this sort of situation, but I guess not. Thanks for posting anyway.

[SwiftSpear]

So you only trust hard drives for 6 months after 6 months of usage have already passed? You're gonna spend alot of money on harddrives if that's the case.

Just back up on DVDs, They won't last forever, but they will last long enough that you can replace them 10 years down the line with magnetic tape or whatever obscene medium you can afford then. You can probably buy a spindle of 100 for 40 bucks if you find it on sale somewhere.

[edit] It's retarded to mass back up a terabyte of data for a home computer any way you look at it. Just back up the stuff you legitimately need to keep. Old torrents and stuff are fine, but there's no way 100% of your data is irreplaceable and worth keeping. You don't deserve to whine about the expense of external harddrives if you aren't willing to put time in to sort through old shit and ignore what you don't need.

[Aeon_Illuminate]

Magnetic storage always will leave wear and tear. Solid state drives are relatively new and cost a lot. Plus glass most likely stay don't intact long as CD or DVD. Your best bet is CD or DVD which have been around quite some time now and since laser reader doesn't touch the disc, it would last very long time. Keeping it in dark moderate temperature is way to keep them last longer. Some companies claim their disc last 200 to 1000 years which I doubt.

[imbaczek]

Blu-ray burner + a nice dry cool dark basement... or 3 HDDs. Don't use them after doing the backup.

[REVENGE]

Use Gmail drive. Puts a virtual fs over a Gmail account, then gives you access via Windows Explorer or whatever popular linux file manager you use, since it mounts as a drive. Then, if you want redundancy, backup using Windows Live SkyDrive.

You could also write it down.

[Archangel of Death]

Yes, write it down, hex by hex.

I wonder how much data you could store per 8x11 page at the minimum distinguishably printable font of an average printer.

[nemppu]

Better yet, carve onto stone tablets, those things last for ages y'know

[SwiftSpear]

Magnetic storage always will leave wear and tear. Solid state drives are relatively new and cost a lot. Plus glass most likely stay don't intact long as CD or DVD. Your best bet is CD or DVD which have been around quite some time now and since laser reader doesn't touch the disc, it would last very long time. Keeping it in dark moderate temperature is way to keep them last longer. Some companies claim their disc last 200 to 1000 years which I doubt.

Most CDs and DVDs will rot in around 20 years. The fact that they are made with different materials causes slight warping which makes them unstable on spinup. While spinning doesn't acctually damage disks, it does cause them alot of stress, so if they aren't in good condition they will break.

If companies are advertising long lifespan disks though, I would imagine those would be safe, or at least much safer.