A take (mine) on the backup/archiving problem is that any medium that is used for this purpose will eventually be rendered obsolete and possibly unusable without going to extreme measures. My solution is to use whatever (economical) hard disk device has the most capacity and store stuff there along with some metadata where possible for about 6 years and then upgrade to something new. In this case, because hard disk capacity is still growing, replacing 1 TB disks with 4 Tb in a triple mirror raid. I use a synology 4 disk bay with 4 tb disks that is configured as 4 mirrors. In 6 years or so i’ll upgrade to something like that that’s newer with bigger drives like 8 - 12 TB (might be bigger, but depends upon cost) . This is the best solution, both affordable and redundant that i currently can come up with. I think computers will continue to use disks( and thus be supported) for the rest of my lifetime so I’m reasonably happy.
Sent from my iPhone > On Jan 17, 2023, at 08:57, Chris via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > The bottom line is you have to dispense with the fantasy that any media > will reliably keep data for really any length of time. You must habe > resundancy. You could go the optical route, but even witj redundancy I don't > recommend it. If it's a small amount of data, maybe it's not such a bad idea, > you can have 3 or more copies. But backing up a lot of stuff will be very > laborious. And likely won't save money as compared to magnetic disks. > > I'm done with the sargasso sea of cables. I bought 2 3tb 2.5" usb drives (and > all my data may be bigger then 4tb). I'm scaling down everything.