
Ask HN: Long term storage for personal files? - rahimnathwani
I have many files I don&#x27;t use often, but would like to keep forever.  They are mostly personal photos and videos, which cannot be replaced, and a small volume of personal records (old bank records and budgets).<p>In the past, I would burn photos to DVD-R after each trip.  Nowadays, I&#x27;m not doing this because:<p>- I don&#x27;t often use DVD-R, so no longer keep a drive on my desk<p>- I&#x27;m less confident that DVD-R disks will still be readable in 10+ years<p>- The size of storage has increased due to taking more photos, and each photo being larger<p>What do you do, to be confident you&#x27;ll have your files in 10 or 20 years?
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Normal_gaussian
Myself and each of my parents have a microserver with 8TB of storage. We have
~2TB after compression of family stuff that is duplicated across all three.
They think it is 6 TB so I use the spare space to duplicate each of our
private areas.

As they are both techy (photographer and electronic engineer) we will all
upgrade in a few years.

This is a relatively unique solution (triplicate and completely owned in
house) that has drawbacks (effort and electricity costs).

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rahimnathwani
Thanks.

This would protect against hardware failure, but I would be worried about
accidentally entering some commands to delete a bunch of stuff. If any
automatic syncing is append-only, this is less of a problem, but it still
seems to easy to delete everything during the next hardware upgrade, with a
few accidental commands.

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rashkov
I think you'll find a number of fans of the tarsnap service on here. There's
also Amazon glacier. Some folks have NAS devices set up. Ideally you should
replicate to another NAS somewhere offsite. Putting media into a safety
deposit box also works for some, but then finding a good long term media is a
tricky problem. Wish I could go into more detail but this is something I'm
wondering about too!

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rahimnathwani
I guess using a large hard drive at home, combined with tarsnap as backup,
could be enough. The chance of the hard drive failing and the tarsnap service
disappearing on the same day is extremely low, barring a crazy natural
disaster.

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GFK_of_xmaspast
For the records, print those out and stick them in a couple safety deposit
boxes.

