Long term back up

[EchoingWhisper]

What type of digital back up is the most reliable but not too expensive?

[Ads]

[andrewleephoto]

Are you talking about external hard drives or portable sd card back up machines?

[EchoingWhisper]

Anything that could back up your digital photos.

[bruce282]

We need more info. How much data, 10gb, 100gb, 1tb? What kind of PC Windows or Mac. What is not too expensive to you?

You can copy to DVD ~ 4gb at once, DVD are not considered stable for long term (many years) storage, most folk on here that make their living with their images use internal and external drives with some kind of rotation system and off site storage.


Bruce

[480sparky]

From what I know, I don't think there's ANY single, long-term storage solution. CDs & DVDs deteriorate. Hard drives are mechanical and prone to failure.

My strategy is Replication. Everything on my internal & working external hard drives is backed up on 5 other external drives. One drive is on my desk, two are in a fireproof/waterproof safe, one at a trusted neighbor and the fifth is 4 states away.

[analog.universe]

Redundant hard drives.

Look into RAID arrays... they can be set up to keep multiple copies of the same data on several physical disks, completely transparent to the operating system. You work and save as usual, and the backups are automatic. When one disk fails, you simply replace it with a fresh one. The cheapest systems use regular hard drive controllers and are software driven. The more expensive systems offer more options and better performance by embedding the RAID function into the controller hardware. If you want long term.. you can dump your disks to tape every once in a while, and store the tapes somewhere else. Tape systems are generally expensive and slow but the media is then separate from the read mechanism, meaning you don't need to depend on some 10 year old hard disk you stashed still being able to spin up. You can put a really old tape into a reliably functioning machine. Tape is also a less dense (bits/unit surface area) medium than a hard disk, meaning the data will stand up to stronger interference for a longer period of time before becoming corrupted.

[spacefuzz]

You can use solid state drives ($$$$) if you want a permanent storage solution. From how I understand them the way they encode the data is very hard to corrupt and does not degrade over time (yay no moving parts). Just dint store them by a strong magnetic field.