UKH

For backing up (none cloud etc), what do folks use?  I’ve got an external hard drive, but had one break on me once so thinking of other options. 

My important stuff goes on a NAS and an external USB drive, then cloud, which i know you don't want but i do!

Three, two, one is the future.

Have your photos on three separate storage devices.

Have two of those devices as different kinds of storage such as usb pen drive, hhd, SSD, tape, floppy disk, nvme drive, CD, DVD, something else.

Have one storage device away from your home such as a friend's house.

Do this and you won't have to worry too much about losing your photos.

Back up or Archiving

Bottom line nothing is guaranteed to last very long, the company I work for specifies that records stored on CD/DVD have to be renewed every ten years.

It looks like a rolling update of your data storage is required long term, on multiple devices. I've lost data (pictures) stored on floppy discs due to software incompatibility and lost stuff on DVD's due to the discs being stored poorly, fortunately all stored on alternative media.

https://www.arcserve.com/blog/data-storage-lifespans-how-long-will-media-re...

Multiple devices as per other posts is good, but you must keep separate records of what you stored, where and when, otherwise your careful efforts will be for nothing.

Consider security and GDPR if required.

Keep the system as simple as possible, consistent with your other needs.

I have a RAID 5 device and for the most recent an SSD which is blindingly fast to back up. Using a script I push everything over to the SSD once a day at least. Then a couple of huge, but cheap and slow disks which I copy over to less frequently. For non-private stuff dropbox or Apple's iCloud or Box can be useful if you have the broadband upload speed that can cope. 

Just use the cloud and have done. They take all the risk. Do all the backups and look after the security. 

If only... Suppose your laptop (or whatever) gets hit by ransomware, if that cloud storage or other online media (like NAS) is accessible to your laptop/Macbook/PC/etc you'll lose your data. Whatever you backup to, an offline copy is needed. I'd suggest an always accessible automatically backing up copy in cloud and periodic offline backups.

Cloud providers look after their security but that doesn't guarantee your data is secure.

I use an external SSD as my main drive/store for photos (laptop drive too small) and an external large HDD as a backup. The HDD is offline except for the time of backups. I’ll be adding a second HDD backup drive soon - I’ve been updating my setup.

In addition I have some though not all photos backup to the cloud.

So cloud providers don't do backups ...

Thanks all. Going to get a large SSD.  Once I’ve backed up to this (already backed up on a hard drive with moving parts which I’m wary of), I can hen do a massive ‘deletion’ and then save some to a cloud system. I’ve got a huge number of duff photos , probably 10’s of thousands. The sort of photo that you thought was good, but a few years down the line you realise is naff (exclusively wildlife photos when I’ve took multiple long range record shots). 

To (slightly) divert the thread, I'd be interested as to what SSDs people recommend, as I have some very large files (music stuff) that I need to keep 3 way backed up and I never seem to have enough space?

In very round numbers the going rate seems to be around £100 per Tb (warning: there are some much cheaper options on Amazon at the moment, I tried one in the expectation it wouldn't work, and sure enough it didn't, though if it did there was the nagging worry that it was programmed to send all my data back to Beijing...). I like the Samsung ones, but interested in other views?

Apparently SSD's are temperature sensitive and don't like being powered down for long periods. As already said, use more than one and different types for long term storage.

A quick google showed this-

https://www.partitionwizard.com/clone-disk/is-ssd-good-for-long-term-storag...

Why so intent on SSD. For long term storage in large volumes HDD is better (I got a couple of 8TB drives not long ago for circa £150 each) 

External raid connected via USB3, in raid mode 10 (mirrored and striped). It’s turned off except when backing up. I just use HDD in the raid enclosure. 

Keep an eye on HotUKDeals

USB drive is enough for me that and cloud. You can get pretty huge usb drives now a days

I look after more than a petabyte of data for my work, much of which is extremely valuable and/or sensitive. It’s now all up in the cloud, as are our hourly media backups, core IT backups and absolutely everything else we rely on.  Set the security protocols and permissions right on your bucket(s) and you haven’t a thing to worry about. 

Even GCHQ and MI6 write their data to S3. If you think your view of the security around cloud security is less robust than yours I’d love some of what you’re smoking.

If your do a lot of up/down and want predictable and easy to decipher pricing I’d recommend Wasabi S3. If you’re more techy than that, go full AWS S3 and set life cycling rules to push the stuff you rarely need to access down to ever more deeper tiers.

Full disclosure, as it stands we’re still backing up to LTO on site, but this is more down to the unreliability of my work to pay their invoices on time rather than any mistrust of cloud services. Hoping to stop this in circa 6 months.

Understood the security side. If I pwn your company to damage data the very first naughtiness I'll do is stop alerts then request all your glacier is dropped. I'll make public all the embarrassing S3 buckets next and cutoff your access then encrypt and or delete everything else.

The point is you still need offline so ransom ware (just as one example) can't trash everything, tools like glacier are quazi-offline as they are online but delayed. Even that isn't dependable for the most important stuff.

Core operational data for getting back up post IT-Armageddon, seems very topical as it's finally trickled down as a requirement from critical nat infra to the big companies (about time!) has reminded people of the oldskool thinking. Unless it's totally offline and somewhere secure and different, you might lose it!

There's a lot of work in this at the moment 💰, a hot topic

Eh the big company I worked for was doing this with our IT back in the 80s.  It’s nothing new for big companies.

I can see 2 flaws in this reasoning.

Number one is that it is my data and I am the one that will suffer if it is lost. The risk is most definitely mine regardless of how and where I chosse to store it.

Number two is that our flakey broadband connection is the weakest link in a cloud based system, what use is a backup that may be inaccessable when we need it?

 

Exactly! A good question to ask yourself is "If they lose my data, how much will they suffer compared to me?" With most cloud services the answer is "Not much": They'll lose your business and some reputation, but unless you're big enough not to need them it'll be a small blip for them: "Oh, sorry. We'll give you a 10% discount on your next year's subscription." There really is very little 'risk' for them - it's still all yours (and you now have very little visibility or control).

I use a combination of a server running UNRAID, an external SSD and copying from UNRAID to pCloud and Google Drive (not Google Photos).

I suggest that you look at rsync and/or rclone to help backup only new or changed files to your permanent storage.

I have got a lot of GPro footage in 4K. I copy this from the GoPro SD card to an SSD. New data gets uploaded to my UNRAID server and from there to GoogleDrive and pCloud with a script that runs nightly.

2x Synology 1515s (raid arrays at 10Tb each) .. duplicate important data across both

a few 6Tb normal hard drives for topical backups (some important ones stored at parents)

We have a slow connection so post or drive hard drive down to parents who have a fast connection to upload to cloud (S3) for important stuff. 

I also have 2Tb and 1Tb really fast SSd which I use for my working copy of info (as fast as internal hard drive on M1 mac). 

I guess you don’t have a bank account then? 

That's something that's worth remembering... keep a physical backup somewhere off-site. Just in case...

Of course I do. I wasn't saying that you shouldn't use cloud services (I do), just that the idea the "they take all the risk" is a bit naive and blinkered. We all take all sorts of risks - the sensible way of managing them is to be open-eye about what those risk are (probability & consequences), how you can mitigate them what the alternatives are.

And 'backup' is a good case in that there is no best single solution for all people. There are a variety of methods - most of which have some issue - and generally you should be looking at a mix of methods designed to mitigate against each others' failure modes.

Please. We both know that there is a 0% that you would have the slightest clue about how you would achieve this.  

I think you’ve fundamentally misunderstood what AWS glacier is. It’s neither online or offline, it’s both, across multiple media types, in multiple locations. 

The reason that there’s a delay when you request something back from deep tiers is that whatever that file is stored on (most likely data tape for deepest tiers) is offline. It’s a tape, in a library, sitting idle, not even in tape drive.

Not even the best hacker in the world can infect that with a virus.
 

As others have said, this has been a core tenet of infosec for decades. 

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