Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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3-2-1 strategy with HDDs only? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hello,

my total dataset is now 2TB and it grows about 1TB/year.

Is this a sound backup strategy:

- buy 3 hdds today, rotate backups between them, so I have at least 2 previous versions of a file

- replace them every X years, say every 3 years, so the chances of catastrophically losing all data are very very low

I have been looking at tapes also but the drives are quite expensive, and my dataset size probably does not justify them - or does it?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

There's no need to toss the drives at three years. Run drive diagnostics on them using a tool (GSmartControl, WinDLG, Hard Disk Sentinel, etc). Ideally every six months full scan, at least once per year.

Drives easily can last ten years without issue, and the odds of all drives failing simultaneously is near-zero.

Really you should keep at least one, ideally two, drives at different locations. And add an encrypted cloud backup to the mix.