I just need to preserve some old data that I have on my computers, so I was wondering what would be the best way to archive stuff long term.
Blu-ray disks ? Multiple HDDs ? What do you guys suggest ?
I just need to preserve some old data that I have on my computers, so I was wondering what would be the best way to archive stuff long term.
Blu-ray disks ? Multiple HDDs ? What do you guys suggest ?
Honestly? If it's not that much data just throw an additional copy up on Google Drive.
I appreciate your honest answer. I want to completely own my data, so I would not go the Cloud route. After all the Cloud is basically someone else's computer.
The data remains yours if you encrypt it. Someone else's computer saves you all the time and effort of maintaining and monitoring hardware.
You want to use the actual services meant for this. S3 or glacier or something, not just consumer cloud storage like Google drive or Dropbox.
there are many ways to encrypt locally and store the encrypted data remotely; either a container (like veracrypt), or individual files with a file-based encryption schemes (such as cryptomator) or one of numerous backup or sync utilities with built-in encryption.
That's quite fair, personal preference is an important factor.
But if it's encrypted does it matter?
Ask all those that had shit on Megaupload in 2012.
Encrypted or not. Still lost.
Yeah. It should not be your only backup, but it can be one of them.
Lol imagine ever having considered megaupload as your backup solution.
Yes, that may be an option… except that google can irreversibly lock you out of your account, or they can delete your files if their content scanning think it goes against some of their terms, but also simply there are people who don't want to lose their privacy to google.
It's more likely that a Google data center exists in 100 years than your house. If you have a personal aversion to it then I can understand - but, realistically, it's more likely that an offsite copy on Google Drive exists in 2123 than a random piece of furniture you own - and furniture is pretty damage resistant.
Please read my comment again. My concerns are not about google drive shutting down. These have happened to real people.
Yes, but it's more likely that Google will have killed a particular service like Drive. Cf. Google Reader, Hangouts, Data Saver extension, Buzz, etc.
google graveyard
Blasphemy in the hallowed halls of FOSS.
Cool, but an actually useful answer.
Good for a 3,2,1 backup method but bad for archival. We don't know if google will even exist in whatever number of years OP wants to archieve for or if the data will be deleted/modified by google themeselves due to some crap policy like their 2 year inactive account one for example. Just too many factors that will be out of OP's control