
What medium should be used for long term, high volume, data storage (archival)? - jmstfv
https://superuser.com/questions/374609/what-medium-should-be-used-for-long-term-high-volume-data-storage-archival
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wahern
Best medium is paper, but that's difficult to do for high volume. OTOH,
maintaining archives is much more work than generating the copies, so it pays
to keep volume as low as possible.

I keep paper copies of really important stuff, in addition to archiving them
on other media. Most other files go onto M-Disc Blu-Ray discs. Even though I'm
skeptical that M-Disc is worth the premium, I'm gambling that it's at least as
reliable as regular Blu-Ray. I also encrypt and upload tar balls to rsync.net,
but key management is anxiety-inducing[1] and I've been doing that less and
less. (I've been doing this since before tarsnap existed. I'd probably use
tarsnap if I was starting from scratch.) I also use Time Machine, but manually
every few months, and that's only one desktop, which happens to two hard
drives.

Once Git took hold 10+ years ago I began maintaining some folders as Git
repositories. In addition to properly versioning stuff, it's much easier to
move data around using git push and git clone. Some close friends and I have
been running our own co-located physical servers for close to 20 years, so I'm
comfortable pushing unencrypted data onto such a remote server, whereas I
would never think of pushing unencrypted data to a service or VM, no matter if
they claimed to encrypt it.[1]

Whenever I upgrade a personal computer or personal server I usually save the
hard drive in storage, but I'm not sure it's worth the effort.

I don't archive multimedia, except for family photos. The maintenance burden
of archiving movies and music isn't worth it, though I never enjoyed
collecting multimedia as much as others.

That's my process, which largely developed organically rather than
deliberately. Everybody has their own process but it's always useful hearing
about the details.

[1] Remember, key management is always the achilles heel, both short-term and
long-term. Focusing on details, like AES-128 v AES-256, is often
counterproductive in terms of navigating the solution space. Likewise, whether
PBKDF2 or Argon2 is used for generating a key is irrelevant to me as
generating a key from a memorized password is, IMO, a losing proposition from
the start.

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moonbug22
Glacier or similar service.

