Currently ripping all episodes of The Twilight Zone from the box set.
What’s a good medium to back up to, assuming I don’t want to pay for a RAID setup?
The best way is to just backup to multiple locations and actively manage it. RAID at the backup destination is nice because it means that if a disk fails, you don’t immediately lose everything there. But if you have multiple places where that data lives then it’s not the end of the world to just re-create the backup.
If you want to get into true archival solutions(way more expensive than setting up a RAID) then you’re looking at things like M-Disc and LTO tape
I went M-Disc. Need a special burner and disks cost me $30NZD each or about $18USD for 100GB.
They are write once (I fucked up two early on) but they should last 100+ years. I burnt about 1TB, and made two copies (one for offsite storage). It was not cheap.
You can set up a pretty robust backup system for pretty cheap if you already have the drives, and the knowledge to set it up yourself. I have two always on devices, an NAS that is my central location for important files, which syncs to a backup device with two hard drives that are synced at different intervals. If a drive fails, it gets replaced, and I haven’t lost the core of my backups, I might lose some incremental backups, but it’s more important to me that I have 3 copies available on different drives. 2 are in one location, the third in a separate location and my syncs are each an interation behind, so if there’s a huge screw up, it’ll take three sync cycles before the main copies are lost (not including the incremental backups I also keep).
This setup allows you to replace drives as they fail so you can constantly update with technologies and don’t need to worry about what’s the best medium.
flash storage too! idk the specifics but I think flash storage has a lifespan of around 15 years
in practice; go backup old flash drives and game cartridges (ex: DS and 3DS cards)
This link should come bundled with this meme:
https://b3n.org/automatic-ripping-machine/
It can be installed on pretty much any old device with a disc drive.
While you are repurposing this device you can also hook it up to your tv and use it as a normal dvd drive. However if you do happen to play DVDs from your local library make sure to delete the automatically ripped files afterwards because keeping those might be illegal.
AFAIK this doesn’t apply to “pocked” CDs/dvds made from a manufacturer. If you burned writable/rewritable it can rot.
Some manufactured DVDs can go bad too.
I think it’s always possible.
Genuine question, do people actually care about backing up media that much? I don’t get it. Everything I actually care about personally I can fit on a thumbdrive and a box of notebooks.
If you don’t want to keep it that’s fine, but if you have any recordings of commercial media (like say VHS tape recordings of broadcast TV) it would be of major help and contribution if you at least go through what you have and see if any of it is !lostmedia@lemmy.world
https://lostmediawiki.com/Home
You’d be surprised at the things people are looking for, from old TV ads to TV channel interstitials and Bumpers to TV show episodes that aired once and was pulled, lost and never shown again
Tbf that’s the matter of taste/preference. I’m have the completely opposite view to yours - I’m really attached to old vids, drawings, texts (that I made myself when I was younger). So I store and backup everything, even things most people would think of as unserious/unnecessary. It feels like a part of myself, a part of my story, you know, so I would be very upset if I lost it. And I can understand if someone have attachment to old films, books etc. I would say archiving old stuff is kind of a hobby in itself.
Although that being said, I can see advantages of your style - mainly less spending money on harddrives and time of setting them up and backing up stuff :)
Don’t get me wrong - I am super sentimental, and can really get lost going down memory lane. I spend probably most of my mental life living in the past. But yeah, I guess the stuff I do preserve (99% text) just doesn’t take up much room at all.
I consider most data on my devices as replaceable, I would only back any of it up if the effort to replace it was much harder than the effort to back it up.
I feel it. Most of the stuff I care about is random projects of mine, most of which are on github. The biggest downside of me losing my local files is honestly just significant, but not insurmountable inconvenience.
Here to plug SpinRite for the health of your backups
Just stared backing up my 500+ vhs movies
You need three copies of your data: the working copy, the nightly backup, and the offsite backup in case of natural disaster. I physically mailed a drive to my father in another state in case my building catches fire. You can also use a safe deposit box or give a drive to a friend who is geologically separated from your location.
Notice: recent info suggests that SSDs suffer bit-rot when not powered. Not enough confirmed info at this time for me to go into it further, but please rewrite important data from time to time.
What if all I have in life is worthless or easily duplicated?
Someone recently told me about a RAID configuration that can mitigate bit rot but it was a long conversation and I forgot a lot of what they said. I’m currently in the planning stages of setting up my first NAS so if anybody could point me in the right direction that would be pretty sweet.
ZFS has bit rot protection.
I am currently buying hardware for building my first NAS.
For inspiration, this is what I am building:
Case: White Jonsbo N4
CPU: Ryzen 4600G
RAM: Corsair Vengence 32GB DDR4 3600mhz
Boot drive: Crucial T500 500GB nvme drive.
Storage drives: Seagate Ironwolf Pro NT (I have not yet decided of what capacity I will use). PSU: Corsair SF750 (overkill, I know)A piece of advice with ZFS, get the largest drives you can afford.
Expanding ZFS is painful and it’s wayyyyy easier to just start big then to grow big.
ZFS is also a RAM hog, max out your ram cause that.
If you want to add meta data caches, do it when you first build the array.
The L2-arc cache and SLOG don’t do what you think they will. Make sure you really understand them before you throw them on. They’re easy to take off though.
Last but certainly not least, ZFS is a money sink. It was made for enterprise solutions, meaning it benefits from more money being thrown at it than say XFS. Figure out what’s good enough and live with it.
That is a fair point, earlier I considered OpenMediaVault with a softraid and an LVM on top if it, but I take a lot of photos and have already seen bitrot in them, so I’d rather have some insurance for that.
I will in general avoid expanding filesystems, and simply decide that when I need more space to start building a new NAS, copy the data to it and repurpose the old NAS with larger drives or as a test machine.
Though this depends on how financially stable I am, I tend to buy parts over time…
What I’ve done is set up an UnRAID server with an XFS pool for my media pool and a ZFS pool for my photos, family videos and documents. The biggest advantage I see with UnRAID is that it’s designed from the ground up for buying parts over time. When my media pool gets full, buy a bigger disk, slam it in, let it rebuild. When my documents (ZFS) pool is full I move it to my media array, break the ZFS pool and rebuild it bigger.
As opposed to say a TrueNAS scale deployment with pure ZFS, where I would highly suggest that you spend the money upfront and buy the system your going to want tomorrow, not today.
Sure UnRAID’s ZFS is not as mature as almost every other NAS OS out there but it’s good enough. Plus I have my pictures and stuff in a proper 3-2-1 backup so I’m not too worried about bitrot.
What the hell is RAID and NAS ? I have a bad ass DvD collection to the tune of 3k films ( no pineapple express bull shit ) that I’ve been wanting to back up. I don’t know shit about computers but have a 2014 MacBook pro with a disk drive that has never been online just used to watch movies when the power is out and to load my cd collection to mp3 players.
Help me out here !!!
A RAID is essentially a way to have multiple “hard drives” connected in a way that looks as if it’s one drive so you can have a ton of storage.
A NAS is a sort of like a remote storage device. Not quite a PC, but more than just a storage drive.
Not sure how you’d go about doing any of that with a MacBook.
Adding to that, depending on your RAID configuration you can have one or more drives fail and not lose any data.
Also you can install things like Plex media server or Immich and set up basically your own equivalent of Netflix server or google photos and look at your media from pretty much anywhere.
I have 5-1/4" floppies from the mid 80’s that still work.
They will last a hundred years guaranteed, they said…
So glad that I don’t have much important data, a very simple bash script backs up stuff that kinda matters (do I need that 8 year old minecraft save?) and it totals about 30GB currently.
The actually important bit is a 57kB Keepass database. Plus 50MB of compressed/encrypted data of questionable importance - literally never decrypted them other than to test it was readable, but I have been told these documents are “important” so whatever. They are there and the originals burned because I don’t want to keep a shitload of paperwork around that looks worthless to me. Got a small folder for stuff that probably should be kept like birth certificates, when that folder gets full I sort and the least important stuff is recorded digitally and physical copies destroyed.
Also, Start with backing up all the stuff you never backed up in the first place
Media store is a 12TB and an 8TB that dump into a 20TB that sits cold all but once a month.
My more immediate data that I need day to day is in a synced Documents folder across four different devices. I don’t back it up, per se, I just make it impossible to lose.
