Safest storage medium?

[MrChips]

Hi.

I’ve tried different backup options: USB sticks, USB flash sticks and hardrives but I’ve jet to find a backup option that can store videos and photos for many years.
What would be the safest storage medium to use?

Thanks for answering.

 

[480sparky]

Multiple mediums, all stored in different locations.

 

[Light Guru]

I’ve tried different backup options: USB sticks, USB flash sticks and hardrives but I’ve jet to find a backup option that can store videos and photos for many years.
What would be the safest storage medium to use?

Thanks for answering.

There is no solution that is guaranteed to last for years.

Multiple mediums, all stored in different locations.

Exactly Multiple backups, in multiple locations.

 

[480sparky]

There is no solution that is guaranteed to last for years. ........

Whoever invents a digital storage method that is truly reliable will be able to buy Bill Gates many times over.

 

[KmH]

Hi.

Safest storage medium?

For archival longevity? Film negatives.

Perhaps you can better define 'safest'.

 

[SCraig]

... Those disks of my professional wedding and portrait work, cost me hundreds and hundreds of dollars and all fit into a $75 2GB hard drive.

Presumably you mean a 2TB (terrabyte) hard drive.

 

[runnah]

Cloud based storage solutions.

 

[Derrel]

Bonus points for those who know where this came from. The best protection is on flash drives or camera memory cards, "hermetically sealed in a mayonnaise jar kept under Funk & Wagnall's front porch."

(As an aside, I trust CD-ROM media, not DVD, more so than hard drives. More, smaller amounts of data, rather than tens of thousands of files stored on one drive that could fail at any time.)

 

[480sparky]

Bonus points for those who know where this came from. The best protection is on flash drives or camera memory cards, "hermetically sealed in a mayonnaise jar kept under Funk & Wagnall's front porch."

(As an aside, I trust CD-ROM media, not DVD, more so than hard drives. More, smaller amounts of data, rather than tens of thousands of files stored on one drive that could fail at any time.)

Johnny Carson. And it was a No. 2 jar.

I'll take a D4, please.

 

[Derrel]

I could have sworn I heard "mayonnaise jar" on multiple occasions. Man...I sure miss that show Sparky.

 

[jwbryson1]

G-Technology 4TB G-SPEED Q External Hard Drive Array 0G01792 B&H

 

[runnah]

Amazon S3 provides a highly durable storage infrastructure designed for mission-critical and primary data storage. Objects are redundantly stored on multiple devices across multiple facilities in an Amazon S3 Region. To help ensure data durability, Amazon S3 PUT and PUT Object copy operations synchronously store your data across multiple facilities before returning SUCCESS. Once stored, Amazon S3 maintains the durability of your objects by quickly detecting and repairing any lost redundancy.
Amazon S3 also regularly verifies the integrity of data stored using checksums. If Amazon S3 detects data corruption, it is repaired using redundant data. In addition, Amazon S3 calculates checksums on all network traffic to detect corruption of data packets when storing or retrieving data.
Amazon S3's standard storage is:

• Backed with the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement
  
• Designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year
  
• Designed to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities

 

[SCraig]

(As an aside, I trust CD-ROM media, not DVD, more so than hard drives. More, smaller amounts of data, rather than tens of thousands of files stored on one drive that could fail at any time.)

It's reaching the point where CD-ROM media just isn't feasible though. I could only get about 36 RAW files from my D7000 on a 650mb CD and for those with higher-resolution cameras it would be even worse. The D800 guys would only get about 18 images on a CD.

 

[amolitor]

What I do is arrange to have no data that I care very much about.

 

[Derrel]

If I shoot 700 frames of landscape shots in a full 12-hour day, there are probably only six that make the cut as portfolio-grade images. That means I could get three days' worth of images (RAW) onto one CD-ROM image.