What is the best offline archival medium?

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ZealousidealFlow8387@reddit

Word of warning: MDisc outside of 25GB is a rort, the manufacturer for these disc's are not millendata. I'd go with Sony 128gb and paired with dvdisaster on github for ECC (20% space reserved for Reed-Solomon codes)

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nkriz@reddit

Tape drives are being suggested over and over for a reason. Though I'm surprised that no one has mentioned shelf life so far. Tapes can last 50+ years if stored properly. Optical disks are 20 or less. Nothing else compares for long term storage. You should also keep in mind site to site backups. If you have a second building at least three miles away, set up a VPN tunnel. There's all kinds of different ways to take that offline until a replication window.

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Forgery@reddit

Yeah, but do you think you'll be able to find an LTO compatible drive in 50 years? Most companies stop supporting hardware after 5 or so years.

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jknvk@reddit

> Yeah, but do you think you'll be able to find an LTO compatible drive in 50 years? Most companies stop supporting hardware after 5 or so years. The thought process here is to migrate that data when you upgrade to the next gen. If it's not worth the couple minutes (and new tape) investment to queue up a tape and verify its output/write it to another tape, it's probably not worth holding on to in the first place.

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nkriz@reddit

There are companies that specialize in recovering data from older generations of LTO tapes. And they charge a fortune. But they exist.

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Forgery@reddit

Was curious, so I looked it up....currently LTO can only read from 2 generations before (so an LTO 7 drive cannot read an LTO 4 tape from 2007). https://www.lto.org/lto-generation-compatibility/

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pdp10@reddit

> Tapes can last 50+ years if stored properly. Optical disks are 20 or less. HTL Blu-rays are good for at least 50 years. They use inorganic dye, and Blu-ray has a polycarbonate layer on top, so they shouldn't ever corrode the metal layer like CD-ROM can if stored in terrible conditions. I've had plenty of bad floppies and tapes, from reels, to single-reel cartridge, to dual-reel cartridge. I never trusted single-reel cartridge after one particularly bad battle with a TK50 that turned out to be broken. A recent survey of 90mm/3.5" floppy had about 20% with bad sectors.

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TechFiend72@reddit

If you have good bandwidth, Wasabi is probably a good place for backups. Not tiered storage but backups. Nowhere on the cloud is safe for tiered storage. I've had LTO drives and tapes be toast. I have had stupid software not read a tape it read last month. Tape is not all that and a bag of fries. WORM media is solid long-term storage but it is low capacity compared to today's practically free storage. The best thing I have found is to have 3 places data is stored: LOCAL, LOCAL NAS locked down to avoid ransomware, and then WASABI or equivalent.

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Forgery@reddit

Also price...would be hard to get an LTO library with tapes ($40 each) for the same price (12 TB for 12 Months would be $864). Agree on tapes...there's nothing worse than knowing the one copy of a file you need is only tape.

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TechFiend72@reddit

Tape was great when bandwidth was super expensive. Now that bandwidth is cheap and storage is cheap, different situation. Agree about LTO kits being expensive. Plus you have to have backup software that can handle tape libraries.

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jknvk@reddit

LTO tape has never failed me in my decades of experience. Plenty of secondhand quipment can be had cheap on eBay.

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chum-guzzling-shark@reddit

how many times have you had to restore from it

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lost_in_life_34@reddit

when I used LTO years ago I never had a bad tape. few bad drives in a few years and a few destroyed tapes that could have been recovered if we wanted to, but never a bad tape just because it went bad  and i have had a bunch of hard drives go bad. one time i had two drives in a RAID 5 array go bad within a few days. one died and I replaced it and within a few hours of it rebuilding another drive died.

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Forgery@reddit

My experience was the opposite. Waiting for hours for a restore on an LTO job only to have it fail because of a bad tape. I would guess that a big part of the equation is how frequently you reuse the same tapes.

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lost_in_life_34@reddit

LTO-4 was fairly fast but you also had to design it the right way for I/O and network speed like any backup solution. I used it with netbackup and never used the striping feature.  if it took you hours for a restore then you either had a lot of small files in different directories, you had issues with the robot where it would change the tapes out for whatever reason or something else.  I used LTO-4 for DB backups for a few MB to terabytes and it was pretty good

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chum-guzzling-shark@reddit

I've had a lot of HDDs go bad over the years but I've only ever had to recover from tape once. I always have a quicker way to restore in a disaster and save tape as a last resort

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Local_admin_user@reddit

I've had to recover from it dozens of times, 80-100Gb a shot, only ever had one failure and that was a problem with the drive, not the tape itself. I'd honestly say the weakness with LTOs tends not to be the media just the drives being poor quality at times (or maybe just our desire to always but HP ones)

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segagamer@reddit

I'm not too familiar with tapes but when I recently searched on eBay the Drives are a good £1k plus unless you go for the drives that only support 2TB tapes or something.

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Speeddymon@reddit

Came here to say this.

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pdp10@reddit

HTL Blu-ray (like M-disc, but not exclusive to M-disc) is a great archival medium with no moving parts, water resistance, and government-tested estimated lifetime of at least 50 years. However, capacity is 100/50/25GB, so it's not a simple case of copying over a 12TB volume and calling it a day. Sony makes a magazine-based Blu-ray archiver in their "Pro" line, but you need to be prepared for Sony Pro prices. It mainly saves inconvenience, unskilled labor, and skilled labor. (Anyone remember floppy magazines?) If you can work up an archival workflow to periodically, manually, archive off 25-400GB of data, then HTL Blu-ray is a good candidate, especially if you need durable, long-term archives. If you want to run automatic backups every day then Blu-ray is totally unsuitable. If you can't break up data into logical 25-100GB chunks, then you need to add an archiving-format layer like [PAQ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAQ) instead of just laying data down on the Blu-ray UDF filesystem.

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Eiferius@reddit

I think, for offline storage in small quantities, M-Dusk DVD or Blue-Ray are the best choice. Pretty much anything can read them, they are very cheap and hold for a long time. Tapes are also really good, but tape machines are very expensive and i dont know if it's a food idea to get cheap hand-me-downs. They have the big advantage of very large capacity.

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ZAFJB@reddit

* Don't use a physical spinning hard disk drive ever. * Be wary of SSDs. Who knows if cheap ones will last. * Be wary of anything that requires a cable to be plugged in and out to move the media. * Remember that off line is not the same as off site. What happens if you site burns to the ground? All of this will probably point you to LTO tape.

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ZAFJB@reddit

LTO tape.

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JeroenPot@reddit

Azure Storage Account, Archive Tier. It's offline, and dirt cheap.

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harrywwc@reddit

t.b.h. - for "digital off-line" archival, mag-tape is probably the winner hands down - with a few caveats, one being, at least once a year spinning the tape all the way forward and then back to reduce the chance of cross layer movement of bits. You also need to have a (working) tape drive to read the data back. it will also be 'slow' (compared to other digital media). but the winner "hands down" would be paper :) stored properly, the data will be retrievable many decades down the track. of course, it will be a bugger to get back into a digital format, although, with OCR progressing as well as it has in recent times... ;) just some ideas from the left of field :)

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NotYourNanny@reddit

> but the winner "hands down" would be paper :) stored properly, the data will be retrievable many decades down the track. Provided it is archival paper, and not the acid crap most of it is today.

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joefleisch@reddit

Also do not use a laser printer and stack the paper flat. Use vertical file folders. The plastic print tends to stick to the page above if stored poorly. For long term survey documents the requirements are archival grade acid free paper, velum, or Mylar using India ink. I have not found a reasonable priced printer that prints India ink. I recall pen plotters could print India ink with the correct pens. I have not seen one in person in over 25 years.

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zian@reddit

The Library of Congress and ALA suggest that normal printer toner is sufficient according to https://www.ala.org/alcts/resources/preserv/presvphotocop and https://www.loc.gov/preservation/care/photocpy.html. https://www.loc.gov/preservation/care/paper.HTML also had some information.

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NVPcMan@reddit

Why stop at paper? Chisel the data into stone tablets. :)

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ryan8613@reddit

Find a WORM (Write Once, Read Many) storage provider. Amazon Glacier Vault has WORM capabilities. Many backup solutions support it now. It basically ensures there is no loss of backup data with a ridiculously high SLA around it (typically better than you can get with tape due to statistical hardware failures).

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topinanbour-rex@reddit

For very long time storage, stone engraving.

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AMoreExcitingName@reddit

How often does the data change? How often does it need to be backed up? How long are those backups allowed to take? For how long must those backups be kept?

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fenugurod@reddit (OP)

They don't change, it's mostly photos. Because they don't change I would like to keep the snapshots forever.

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SuperQue@reddit

A single 20T drive and restic.

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AMoreExcitingName@reddit

If it's just like home photos, buy an external drive or 2 and use that. BUT, this requires manual processes, some people are just bad at regular backups. I strongly suggest something completely automated, aka cloud.

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Creepy-Abrocoma8110@reddit

Ultrium tape

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Gwailou@reddit

12 TB? Uh, buy a Seagate exo 16/18/20 TB drive, put it in another truenas machine, mirror the data using rsync? Will cost you 400 USD, and some spare change for a system to put the disk in, but that can be literally any computer given how simple task this it.

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SuperQue@reddit

Google cloud storage archive tier would cost you $15/month. It's hard to beat.

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