Oppenheimer and the resurgence of Blu-ray and DVDs: How to stop your films and music from disappearing::In an era where many films and albums are stored in the cloud, “streaming anxiety” is making people buy more DVDs, records – and even cassette tapes.
To build on this: DO NOT USE AN SSD to store your data long-term! Solid-state storage has a very short, finite life-span. What you want to do is buy an even number of hard drives, plug them in long enough to copy your data to, and then unplug them and store them in a climate-controlled area. bout once a year, copy the data to a different hard drive, rinse, and repeat. Left untouched long enough, a hard drive will experience data rot. Used constantly, a hard drive will wear out. Used very sporadically, you preserve the data and the mechanical parts of the hard drive.
Honestly I’d rather just not watch Oppenheimer.
Even better, have a NAS with a raid array and data scrubbing for your primary storage, and periodically make backups to off-site storage (an off-site NAS or external hard drive are good options that don’t rely on commercial cloud services).
Yea, I wouldn’t rely on HD on a shelf. Source: I’ve had hundreds of hard drives over the years. Some that are 1 year old and dead, after sitting on a shelf. Some are 20 years old and still work (kind of a test at this point to see how long they’ll still spin up).
There’s a reason 3-3-3 backup is the guideline. From my own experience, you need data on no less than 3 different storages, not including the production data.
I’ve had situations where 2 of my Backups didn’t work for some reason, either media failed, or data wasn’t backed up though it was supposed to be, etc. That 3rd has saved me many times.
I’m pretty sure that I’ve got a failing E: drive in my home computer; I’m not even sure how long I’ve had it. Def. time to back everything up again. Pity I don’t have a NAS at home…
How about SD cards?
SD cards are far worse than hard drives or SSDs for long term storage. They are useful for temporary mobile data storage and transit, but anything you want to keep long term should be transferred off relatively quickly.