Selfhosted

59923 readers

510 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam.
Posts here are to be centered around self-hosting. Please ensure it is clear in your post how it relates to self-hosting.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or git here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title.
No trolling.

Resources:

selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
awesome-selfhosted software
awesome-sysadmin resources
Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

curbstickle@anarchist.nexus

curbstickle_lw@lemmy.world

125

What do people use for a shelf-stable backup (lemmy.nz)

submitted 1 year ago by Dave@lemmy.nz to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

126 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I have backups on a backup hard drive and also synced to B2, but I am thinking about backing up to some format to put in the cupboard.

The issue I see is that if I don't have a catastrophic failure and instead just accidentally delete some files one day while organising and don't realise, at some point the oldest backup state is removed and the files are gone.

The other thing is if I get hit by a bus and no one can work out how to decrypt a backup or whatever.

So I'm thinking of a plain old unencrypted copy of photos etc that anyone could find and use. Bonus points if I can just do a new CD or whatever each year with additions.

I have about 700GB of photos and videos which is the main content I'm concerned about. Do people use DVDs for this or is there something bigger? I am adding 60GB or more each year, would be nice to do one annual addition or something like that.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The format is the tape in the drive, or the disk or whatever.

Tape existed 50 years ago: nothing modern and in production can read those tapes.

The problem is, given a big enough time window, the literal drives to read it will simply no longer exist, and you won't be able to access even non-rotted media because of that.

As for data integrity, there's a lot of options: you can make a md5 sum of each file, and then do it again and see if anything is different.

The only caveat here is you have to make sure whatever you're using to make the checksums gets stored somewhere that's not JUST on the drive because if the drive DOES corrupt itself, and your only record of the "good" hashes is on the drive, well, you can't necessarily trust those hashes either.

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ah good thinking. I am thinking a spare drive that I update once a year with new content and replace every few years with a new drive is a good idea.

[–] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That could probably work.

Were it me, I'd build a script that would re-hash and compare all the data to the previous hash as the first step of adding more files, and if the data comes out consistent, I'd copy the files over, hash everything again, save the hash results elsewhere and then repeat as needed.

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah I think I should do something like this. I really want to make sure the files are not getting corrupted in storage without me knowing.