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Comment by fsckboy | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the lengths people go to undoubtedly discover they can't read what they've saved because they failed to read the future. Just read the present.

SSDs are big enough now that one can hold everything I want. If you want to go bigger for your downloaded movie collection you're never going to watch, whatever your scale, ok you have that many 14TB hard disks.

two years from now, the newer model SSDs and hard disks are going to be much bigger. I'm about to jump to 4TB. Buy them. Copy your stuff to them. The old ones? there's your offsite back up. No bit rot because you're going to do it again, soon.

lather, rinse, repeat.

interfaces and formats change? you won't even notice. Too expensive? Don't use the latest most expensive size, use the last model each time. Yes it's slightly smaller, you said you wanted to save money.

really long term storage: keep doing it, takes a few hours each year. need something fancier, visit it every month.

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Hmm... Iirc SSDs need to be powered up regularly. So storing them for years time might work, but also given the rise of qlc SSDs I wouldn't trust them for longer-term offline storage.

I didn't mention it but it's a good practice to test backups to make sure that they are still backups. Choose the time interval you are comfortable with and visit your offsite backups, make sure they match your current storage.

I do not recommend "longer term", I suggested swapping your old drive for a new one every two years, that's the length of the term. I do every year, because that's how often I buy stuff, but I didn't want others to say "too expensive"

Can confirm. SSD are volatile storage. It's pretty much the worst option for long term backups.

I believe the spec only demands persistence if they're powered on at least once every 90 days, the same applies to USB sticks btw.

The data isn't lost after 90days, but bit rot occurs at a highly accelerated frequency. So you might not notice or care if there is a gray pixel in your image you've stored on your USB stick, but that's what it means to use volatile storage.

This. I’ve lost more data to ssd’s than any other medium. After my experiences, I backup all machines using ssd drives.

Basically all digital storage mediums suffer from mid- to long-term longevity issues:

* Magnetic media such as HDD and tape will eventually lose magnetization.

* Ink-based optical media such as CD-R and DVD-R will eventually suffer chemical degradation.

* NAND media such as SSD and flash will eventually lose electrical charge.

* All digital data and media will eventually lose methods of access.

The only way to guarantee digital data long-term is to re-archive on a consistent and frequent basis so that the passage of time doesn't render the data inaccessible or illegible.

Digital data simply isn't durable unlike analog data.

I agree with everything you said up to the last sentence.

> Digital data simply isn't durable unlike analog data.

What I would say is, the most popular digital storage hardware like HDD/SSD are significantly less durable than historically proven analog media like paper and stone.

From a theoretic point of view, digital data is vastly more durable than analog data. Think of what the word means - digital means digits, from a finite alphabet, stringed in a sequence; analog means continuous values on a continuous medium. Written language is digital. Transcriptions of ancient texts survive to the current day and can be copied and recopied indefinitely into the future. Black-and-white barcodes created today can be copied losslessly as many times as we want.

One of the problems with digital data is that there's too much of it. If a photo is 1 MB, can we realistically print ~8 million black/white dots arranged in a grid on a piece of paper that we can quickly and reliably read back? It's hard. That's why analog solutions are so appealing, because viewing an analog photograph doesn't require special technology, and the loss of thousands of dots is completely inconsequential.

Analog media can indeed be very volatile. Look at photos stored on film - will the chemicals degrade? Will the colors change? Will the film get scratched and dusty? And unlike digital, you cannot make a perfect copy of film. You can't duplicate every atom and position them exactly. This goes for all other analog media as well. You cannot duplicate the atoms of ink and paper. You cannot duplicate a magnetic tape. You cannot duplicate a marble sculpture.

> Can confirm. SSD are volatile storage. It's pretty much the worst option for long term backups.

you're making a fair point that should be noted, but you're ignoring what I said which I also think is a fair point that should be noted.

I did not say SSDs are good long term backups. I said (you should read the original but to reduce it) SSDs are reliable in the short term and unbelievably convenient and serially using them in the short term let's you use them for as long as you wish in the long term.

SSDs are not the worst option, you're wrong.

The only effective way to preserve is to transcribe.

Think of it - how many ancient texts survived because we found papyrus in a jar in some cave? The Ancient Greek works and other things were mostly preserved by monks and others making copies over time.

I consulted with an archive a few years ago. They had acquired from records to be preserved from another entity - delivered on circa 1997 DAT tapes. That was challenging to recover circa 2017, in 2030 it will be very difficult and expensive. Ditto for MDisc.

As the saying goes, the information wasn't lost when the Library of Alexandria burned down; it was lost because no one had bothered to make a copy before the fire.

Or just save yourself the trouble and pay for cloud storage - avoid spending your time on maintenance, data checks and off-site storage (in case your house burns down etc.). The value proposition is there unless you value your time very low, really have major security concerns or have extreme amounts of data.

Notably this article is from 2008, which is when Dropbox was first founded.

Umm... NO. 1. Datacentre has limited responsibility - if your data is lost, refund is the best you can wish for. Frankly, they don't care beyond that. And even if they did, there's usually nothing they can do.

2. Disk-as-a-service - you pay, you get, you stop, you lose. Everything.

3. Oops, your cloud provider blocked your account. For the great justice, for porn, because their stupid government decided that your stupid government is their new enemy, or because it's just Google.

4. You don't have Internet anymore. Earthquake caused by either a volcano or drunk neighbors disrupted your only line. And they're too busy to fix it.

5. You've lost your key. Gaymower.

6. (there may be more)

7. You're about to die and you want your children to inherit this collection of precious data.

This.

We don’t like to think about this, but when my dad passed we were eventually able to find some of his writing and other things that were important to him and us, that we didn’t really know about.

His google drive kept his digital stuff safe, but stopped doing so after the credit card shut down.

There is forever.com, they promise to keep data for 100 years at least. I paid $160 for 10GB of storage. They even promise to transcode your videos for you as file formats become obsolete.

> they promise to keep data for 100 years at least

Or they go bankrupt, whichever comes first.

Statistically speaking I know which I'd bet on.

Their business model is specifically not to go bankrupt, so there is hope ...

With interest rates on the rise, and the price of GB consistently deflating, I think economics is on their side. I'm willing to take a 100-year bet).

> I paid $160 for 10GB of storage

That's fine but you're in a thread where I started by saying terabytes.

Of course, you can buy a terabyte from them, just would cost more.

Cloud storage is an important option, among several others. It complements, but does not replace, other forms of backing up stuff that you really don't want to lose.

(It goes without saying that you have to have more than one place to store your backups.)

What if you are the cloud storage? Is it like turtles all the way down?

Cloud storage is useful for personal backup, but it's tricky on the millennium timescale of the article since no company will survive very long.

If you kept duplicate copies at the top N cloud providers at any given time, then you could probably go for 1000 years if N>=3. But this would require an active effort to keep your data alive as companies came and went. A true archival copy can be ignored and still be readable.

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