What have you done to archive your media?

October 28, 2006 1:00 PM

I've browsed the archives but not really come up with anything satisfying. What should I do for archiving media?

I've got about ten gigs of photographs from my wedding that my wife would like to put in a safe-deposit box. What have people done in this situation? Is there any truly archival physical media storage for data? Magnetic and home-made optical both seem pretty unreliable in the big picture. Should we really just make 2 high-quality prints on archival paper of the 100 photos we like the most? I have redundant copies of the files, but they're in the same geographical location. I guess I can upload them as well, and only touch that copy to replace a failure of local copies?

posted by mzurer to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Quite a few threads on this topic here at AskMe. I'll just say this - you're best bet is exactly what you said - redundancy.

- Favorites online in .jpg

- DVD (safe deposit box)

- Hard drives are cheap. Staples has a 300gb external drive for $139 this week. Perfect for keeping in a safe deposit box.

- Many more ideas - just a few thoughts.

Good luck!

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posted by Gerard Sorme at 2:37 PM on October 28, 2006

Mitsui/MAM-A makes gold archival CDs that should be good for 300 years, and DVDs good for 100 years. Combine those with duplicates and par2 files and you should be set.
posted by adipocere at 2:57 PM on October 28, 2006

I use Amazon S3, via Jungle Disk. Multiple data centers on multiple continents, at fifteen cents a gigabyte per month.
posted by dmd at 5:34 PM on October 28, 2006

(That is to say, I use that for all my data. If you're just interested in photos - why not just use Flickr? $25/year, just as secure -- again, multiple data centers on multiple continents mirroring yoru data -- and way more featureful.)
posted by dmd at 5:36 PM on October 28, 2006

Magnetic and home-made optical both seem pretty unreliable in the big picture.

You're completely correct. Printed photos will last 100+ years, but they'll gradually degrade. Ideally, you want to preserve the digital information, so that no aging process occurs whatsoever. What you should do is store them in a couple formats, maybe burned to a couple DVDs (duplicated) and copied to an old 80gb hard drive you have laying around. Every 5 years, retrieve the safe deposit box, and make new DVDs (or whatever the current alternative of this format is). Every 10 years, make a new HDD copy. Of course, put any new media you've created into the collection, too. (With the hard drive, make sure you duplicate it before it becomes impossible to find a computer capable of interfacing it, i.e. IDE or SATA.)

You can drive yourself nuts with this stuff, however. Or you could just make prints and seal them in a non-corrosive container.
posted by knave at 8:12 PM on October 28, 2006

By the way, resist the temptation to store your DVD-Rs in a waterproof container.
posted by Caviar at 10:14 PM on October 28, 2006

Give copies of your photos to all your friends, let them know it's for the sake of redundancy, and offer to keep some of theirs safe in return.
posted by hoverboards don't work on water at 5:59 AM on October 29, 2006

In my opinion, looking for a silver bullet is the problem.

Keep the files active on a mirrored hard disk, along with your other important data. Periodically back that up to DVD, or whatever format is current. Having the wedding photos in with your email means that you are using 3 DVDs instead of one, every time you do a backup. So what? If the data is important to you, the extra $1 + 1 hour of your time per backup session should be worth it. When you get a chance, hand old DVD backup sets to friends and relatives for off site storage.. When you upgrade your system, you will obviously want to bring your old data onto the new system anyway, so your wedding pictures will just come along with everything else.

This keeps your data current on an ongoing basis. No worries about new technologies, because the data is always in the technology you are currently using.

Now there are a couple of other issues.. Do you encrypt your personal data backups? If you are giving the discs to friends this might be a good idea.. On the other hand, what happens to the pictures when your passwords die with you? If you want pictures in a shoe box so that your grand children can discover them one Christmas morning thirty years from now, make prints and put them in a shoe box!



Finally, here is a question that discusses making CD/DVD backups as reliable as possible: Is recorded media such as CD-R completely permanent? If you don't want the nasty details, the basic point is, make parity data sets for your discs, and even entire parity discs for disc sets. If you are putting time into making backup sets, it doesn't hurt to make them a little more robust.

Which points directly to the advice I often forget to take myself.. Test your backup system! If you haven't tested it, an error in your process could mean that all the effort you put into making backups is a complete waste of time. If you are doing RAID on hard drives, try unplugging a drive and see if you can actually reconstruct. If you are using DVDs + parity, try reading from a backup from five years ago - if it is perfect, try corrupting a few bytes just to see if the parity data can fix it.
posted by Chuckles at 1:14 PM on October 29, 2006