I've got two 1TB backup / archive external drives that I use for all my photos. Usually fire them up once a year or so to load the year's photos on both. Just found out that one is toast. Not quite sure how, they were both stored in the same climate controlled space right next to each other, are the same model and almost same manufacture date, etc. Glad I had two, would be very sad to lose all my photos.
Figured it was time to up my archive game and spent some time learning about the options. The high effort stuff like Blu-Ray, LTO, etc seem like overkill and a pita to get going, so I'm mostly deciding between HDD / SSD / 3rd party storage.
3rd party via something like Amazon Glacier is probably what I should do, but that seems like a lot of effort, requires a good internet connection (which I don't always have), and I'm always reluctant to trust a 3rd party with data, even if it's just photos of random fish or whatever.
So most of my time has been reading about HDD (traditional hard drives) vs SSD (solid state drives), and how they differ for this kind of use case.
The use case being: about once a year or every other year, copying all the photos and vids I've taken since the last backup to a storage device and leaving that device unpowered in a climate controlled area until next time.
Was initially planning on just using SSDs due to lack of moving parts, greater resilience to environmental stressors, etc. Then I started learning how they store data and how bit rot works via electron loss for the data gates if they are unpowered for extended periods of time, and now I'm not so sure what to do. Have found conflicting info on this, most of which seems to agree that unpowered SSDs are fine for at least 2 years, and possibly as long as 10 years, though it is best practice to re-write the data at least every two years. 2 years is about as long as I'd go without using one so that should be fine. HDDs need to be powered on at least once every 2 years as well for bearing lubrication.
Thinking at this point to just get two 2TB HDDs and maybe two 512GB SSDs, and going that route with 4 different physical backups, one or two of which gets stored in a safety deposit box.
Not sure exactly how much data I have because I'm now paranoid of turning on the working drive without being ready to instantly back it up, but I'm guessing I'm somewhere in the 200GB range for my photos, and no more than 250GB range for total stuff I care about getting backed up, so the 512GB SSDs should certainly be adequate. The 2TB HDDs definitely will be.
Looks like manufacturer choice is mostly either WD or Seagate. The 2TB HDDs are running about $60-70, and the 512GB SSDs about $100. So about $330 total cost for a 4x unit approach, which seems quite reasonable.
secret fish:
Last edited by chopstick; 01-21-2019 at 05:53 PM.
Reason: secret fish