datahoarder
Who are we?
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). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread
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SSDs lose charge over time. Within a year, bitflips might occur. I recommend going with an HDD with a shockproof case.
This ineo t2580 looks good but I can't seem to find the maximum capacity. Try not to use HDDs over 12TB and you should be fine.
If you avoid QLC drives, keep it at a reasonable temperature, and don't use a drive that's had a large number of write cycles, it will be fine for a year.
I would definitely read everything on the disk yearly so the controller can detect any weak blocks and rewrite them though. A good way to read everything would be to take a checksum. You can then compare that to the previous checksum to make sure the files haven't changed too.
Mechanical drives have issues with long term storage as well. When hard drives get older, sometimes they will just refuse to spin up after sitting for a long time.
Sounds reasonable. Maybe even use SLC, some enterprise grade SSDs still offer that.
True. I would recommend to replace them after 5 years or if they're frequently in use, after 35000 hours, whichever comes first.
SLC drives would hold data for a very long time, but they are pretty much only available for industrial use now and come with an industrial price tag. Even MLC is going away, it's no longer available in consumer grade drives and getting harder to find in enterprise grade drives.
That is true. I was shocked to see that mostly Optane SSDs with SLC are available nowadays (which are 'too fast' for archiving) and nobody else makes SLC anymore. A few years ago you could still find some.
Source: https://geizhals.eu/?cat=hdssd&xf=16325_1
Thanks, I was thinking about a 1tb my passport from western digital.
I live in a third world country so my options are a bit limited.
I’m not worried about her dropping the drive, I just don’t want to ask her to lug around a 3.5” drive.
Are mechanical drive resistant to bit flips?
No, but they don't lose charge over time, so bitflips are less likely if they lay around for a long time. However they are less resistant to mechanical failures, so it's kind of a trade-off.
If you use a sane backup software it should be able to just overwrite all the data making bitflips hardly relevant.