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Comment by p0w3n3d | Hacker News Reader

Connected, but quite different to this subject, is how to long term store photos (cloud does not count). HDD still seem to be the best solution, but not sure how often should I rewrite them

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M-DISC. It's more expensive by size but for (private I'm assuming) pictures it doesn't make a difference.

TBH i've never heard about it before. And I even have a drive that records it! Thank you!!!!

However what I've been thinking before you wrote about M-DISC - was making a set of HDD that I'd dump my photos and videos and rewrite each year for example, i.e. copy from one drive to another. This copying 4TB of data should be enough to store them for a few years.

I'm mostly concerned with family photos and videos, and maybe music, but I tend to buy CDs of the most important music for me. I'd say that other data would be expendible...

You’ll want to protect yourself against bit rot too. Don’t go copying bad files every year.

bit rot... What about good filesystems? Like ZFS which has checksums. Or maybe a zip with additional recovery data... I wonder if there is a ready-made solution that allows this to not require me scripting (and losing those scripts later or failing to run them because Bash was upgraded from 4 to 5 and Python from 3 to 4)

At least if you don't encrypt and those are jpeg it doesn't matter. I lost two discs at once with theWD debacle a few years back and couldn't recover anything as I encrypted the disk. Another drive that got bad, I easily recovered 90% of the files using foremost.

So no encryption on the local backup for me, only the emails dump by encrypting the zip that contains them. It's not perfect but that's the compromise I (think I) have to make. (The remote one is encrypted though)

Could also add par files for additional layer of safety. Plus ofc use zfs or similar with checksums

Print out the ones you like and put them in an album or on the wall. Think how many photos you have that are like that in a family and still around, when all the rest are gone on dead phones or computers somewhere.

You can't get a perfect digital copy of a printed out photo. You're subjecting yourself to generational losses for no good reason.

If you're a fan of paper, you could base64 encode the digital photo and print that out onto paper with a small font, or store the digital data in several QR codes. You can include a small preview too. But a couple hard drives or microSD cards will hold many millions of times as many photos in less physical space.

Doing paper backups is hard I could not store much data on paper when I last tried with QR codes. You need to to multiple QR codes since they are only 2KB each. There are some threads about it on HN, but I have never seen anyone do megabytes per paper

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29792556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31149427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24669425 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=paper+backup Cuneiform tables do it in clay.

PaperBack claims 0.5MB per page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39883531

It's likely not possible to do much better. I never said that was the most practical method.

Photo prints will yellow over time, a lot. You have to choose paper and storage environment carefully if you want them to last.

Hard drives are probably better than paper as long as the power grid is powered and there are still computers with the right kinds of ports to read them.

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