OK… I’ve got my complete collection of Public Domain or Banned Racist istaphobe movies and radio shows like Charlie Chan, Abbot and Costello, Our Gang Comedies, Song of the South, Benny Hill etc. that are becoming increasingly hard to find unaltered on line.
I want to save them in the cheapest most stable form.
I was hoping for Blue Ray to catch on because those disks can hold a lot. Blue Ray was released, it’s coming, it’s almost here… It stalled… Currently they are taking up my most of 2TB portable hard drive. I don’t use the hard drive that often and am worried the drive will not work. I also have family photos and things on it too.
DVD’s impractical but seem reliable. I have self burned DVD’s here for almost 19 years with no failure.
Blue Ray if as reliable as DVD’s I’d do it if I could find the disks and drives.
Buy an other hard drive. Should I buy two? Should I keep to copies and buy new drives every five to ten years?
USB FLASH… I have not had to buy new storage media for a few years and just took a look. The price for Flash Drives have sure come down. 1TB is 30 Dollars.
Don’t say cloud. Do you really think this cloud storage infrastruction is going to remain low cost and secure.
Probably several of my shows are under copywrite protection whether I bought the original disks or not. My personal text messages were blocked during the political season due to links to a new story that was totally disinformation but now came out to be true.
That is a really creepy feeling to see personal message being blocked due to content.
OK, what’s the best, cheapest and most reliable.
Feel free to sort the various solutions in order of cost or reliability . Please tell me if I should be redundant. Thanks .
I have media on a 4TB external hard drive (currently just over 2TB on it). That’s backed up along with my iMac computer, using time machine. I’ve got three 6TB hard drives for time machine: One always on my desk, the other two rotate between my desk and my office at work, so I’ve got off-site backup.
Plus I clone the media hard drive to another 4TB hard drive (using SuperDuper) every couple of weeks.
I guess I’m saying buy more hard drives.
And if the content matters to you, yes, of course you should be redundant. Probably twice over.
Actually, Blu Rays would be terrible for long term storage. Discs are susceptible to rot. At 25 GB they are not particularly big anymore.
Yeah. They are going to be at the end of their lives in the next 10 years. If you want long term data storage, you need to back up and maintain those backups.
Get a NAS for a copy that you want to access at any time.
Have backups on external drives that you can keep in archives.
And I know you said no ‘cloud’ but hear me out. This isn’t your typical cloud like Google Drive or Microsoft Onedrive
Companies like Microsoft and Amazon have deep archivals of their storage and they are great for disaster recovery. They are cheap because the data is stored in a vault. It isn’t for sharing with friends or viewing, but for disaster recovery and long term archivals. It’s $1 Per TB Per month to store. It can help in case your backups at home fail.
Also,
USB Flash Drives are the most unreliable forms of NAND you can buy.
Thanks, but I want to stick to physical media. I don’t have all that much and I would like to pass some things to my kids. I discovered a treasure trove of record albums and books and other things that belong to my dad and other family members. Some of it I became so interested in I my pursued them as my own hobbies. You cannot pass down cloud Data.
And even if you could they would probably forget about it and not be able toopen up a box and discover It years later like I did.
Truly physical means analog. For video, I think that means VHS?
CD, DVD, and hard drives are all ways to store digital data physically. I think hard drives are your best bet, as discs all have deterioration issues. So do hard drives, but hard drives are easy to replicate for redundancy.
I have burnt DVDs sitting loose in the bottom of a draw back in the UK that I burnt about 12 years ago when I was back in the UK last they were fine. Scratched up like mad but no rot. If they are fine after that long in that kind of environment then in the right conditions I have no doubt they’d last longer than OP needs them to. Basically OP needs high quality DVD-R not DVD-RW if he wants them to last the longest.
Ultimately though he should just go for a good HDD
I get that. I still have CDs from when I burned Playstation games.
But once you hit 20 years, you’re in the danger zone. They may or may not rot anytime between 20 and 50 years. Even for high quality discs.
Even that is a bad idea. He’s talking about passing these down. These aren’t designed to be heirlooms. A hard drive alone for extra long term data storage is bad because data still rots on it and there is no error correction for when bits flip due to not only regular factors such as handling and corrosion, but even changes in temperature and cosmic radiation. Bit flips can damage data and a lone hard drive does not have the error correction needed to fix that.
Data needs to be accessed and moved and maintained and backed up.
Currently they are taking up my most of 2TB portable hard drive. I don’t use the hard drive that often and am worried the drive will not work. I also have family photos and things on it too.