Finding a Backup Solution
~immy
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Recently I realised that my data is in far too few places. Worse
than that, I realised that I've lost far too much data through
being careless like this. I realised that if I still want the data
that I have now in the future I need to put some sort of system in
place. Particularly, I'd like to be able to look back on the things
I've made and done now in a few decades time. Also, as a content
creator I feel it important to have an archive of my work since I
can't trust platforms to keep it.

I'd also like to keep an archive of sorts to try and play a small
part in helping to combat lost media and link rot.

So what am I to do? Well, the industry standards for keeping
backups is 3-2-1: Keep three copies of a file, two on two different
storage mediums (i.e. a harddrive and CD) and one off-site (i.e.
cloud storage or a hard drive stored at another location). For the
sake of my precious data I plan to follow this industry standard.

For the first copy of my data I intend to have a 'live' copy, in
other words a version of the file that I'm actively working on. For
the second copy of my data I'm looking into setting up a NAS with
an old Mac Mini I found on eBay for a tenner, I plan to install
Linux or FreeBSD on it, connect two hard drives and either run them
in RAID 1 or rsync data between them at set intervals. It won't be
a fast or even good system but it'll work and hopefully be reliable
given the redundancy of two drives. For the third copy of data I
plan to regularly backup my most important data to my Nextcloud,
that way if something happens to my house my data is safe.

Finally, I want to invest in some cold storage, perhaps another
external hard drive. I find M-Discs to be particularly interesting,
they're reasonably inexpensive and can supposedly last for
centuries. While I'm under no illusions that these discs won't
actually last for as long as advertised I have no doubt that
they'll outlast me. Although I don't currently have even the modest
hardware required to use these discs.

Finally, I find myself interested in LTO tapes. The actual tapes
are relatively inexpensive and have supposedly very impressive
longevity. The main difficulty wth these tapes is that the actual
tape readers are extremely expensive and difficult to connect to.
I'd like to buy a inexpensive used tape reader at some point and
see what I can get setup as a long term goal though.

So yeah, that's an overly long post about my plans to actually
backup data ;P