Archival Storage

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Personal Backup Practices and Effort

  • Many describe DIY setups: multiple HDDs (internal/external), SSDs for “live” data, occasional manual spin-up for copying, and at least one offsite drive (friend/relative) for catastrophe recovery.
  • Others rely on tools like restic/borg/Arq/rclone/Home Assistant automations to reduce mental load: daily/weekly backups, notifications only on failure.
  • Some find the work overwhelming and respond by radically pruning data (e.g., 90% deletion), keeping only configs, projects, and irreplaceable media.

Cloud vs Local (and Ransomware Concerns)

  • Cloud is seen as near-essential for personal/SMB by some; others argue a NAS + second offsite NAS can be comparable if automated.
  • Trade-offs discussed: Backblaze vs S3 Deep Archive/Glacier/B2; for tens of TB, different services dominate on price.
  • Strong emphasis on encrypting everything and sometimes using multiple cloud providers to hedge risk and provider churn.
  • Ransomware: concerns that backup credentials on live systems let attackers delete cloud backups; object lock/WORM and careful permission design are viewed as crucial but easy to misconfigure.

Tape, Optical, and “True” Archival Media

  • LTO tape: praised as designed-for-archive, with low bit error rates and long life if stored correctly, but criticized for high drive cost, IBM-controlled ecosystem, robotic/library complexity, and environmental sensitivity (temperature/humidity).
  • Real-world reports: large VFX and archive operations successfully restore from LTO for decades, but tape workflows need active management and migration to newer generations.
  • M-DISC and Blu-ray: some individuals use them for long-term personal archives; pushback notes limited capacity, doubtful 1000‑year claims, and that only specific M-DISC DVD variants were rigorously rated. Suitable for a few critical folders, not multi‑TB hoards.

Bitrot, Filesystems, and Verification

  • Several participants checksum or scrub data periodically (snapraid, cshatag, ZFS/Btrfs) and report rare but real silent corruptions that redundancy lets them repair.
  • SSD retention when unpowered is debated; consensus is you must actually read data periodically, not just power drives, but firmware behaviors are opaque.
  • 3‑2‑1 (and extended 3‑2‑1‑1‑0) strategies are common reference points, though rarely followed perfectly.

What’s Worth Archiving & the “Digital Dark Age”

  • Strong thread of “living vs archival” data: once media is shelved and forgotten, recovery odds drop socially, not just technically.
  • Several argue most personal digital content is not worth heroic preservation; others worry we’re heading toward a “bit rot era” with little surviving cultural output compared to paper-based history.
  • Multiple comments lament the lack of easy, integrated, consumer-grade archival systems (filesystems with checksums + automatic multi-location backups), blaming market incentives and OS vendors’ reliance on proprietary cloud.