Long-term external storage for a guy with little computer knowledge

[Scream Aim Fire]

I've been looking to store a large amount of old pictures and documents on an external storage device; I picked up a few flash drives, but I'm unsure how reliable they'll be in the long term. Problem is, I'm not entirely sure what kind of storage device I should be on the lookout for; not the most computer/tech-savvy, so I appreciate some pointers.

Was basically just looking for something casual, good for putting a (admittedly rather large) chunk of old documents and pictures on it and keeping it for a while, nothing really major, honestly. I've been keeping files on my laptop so far, but I'm looking for a long-term external alternative in case this old thing goes kaput; ideally, I'll still be able to store what I've got even if/when this computer breaks.

Any suggestions on what to go for?

 

[Grim_Autismo]

You can get a real hard drive and a powered USB external hard drive enclosure, just make sure you buy two of the same enclosures at the same time! Some enclosures will format the drives weird and you won't be able to read it without that enclosure as a security measure without some fuckery, so have a backup in case that enclosure dies on you. Been there, done that. Not fun!

 

[MrTroll]

This really depends on whether you're storing something truly important, like your porn stash, or something that's just kind of nice to keep around but not essential, like a family album. For the porn stash I'd recommend at minimum a RAID6 setup in a climate-controlled environment. Your kid's baby pictures? Just stick them on a cheapo flash drive and toss it in a drawer somewhere.

 

[Calandrino]

This really depends on whether you're storing something truly important, like your porn stash, or something that's just kind of nice to keep around but not essential, like a family album.

What if it's both though? You'll need some serious encryption/security.

 

[Preacher ✝]

Any suggestions on what to go for?

I have an extensive archive of acquired media and I keep it on a pair of 20TB Hard Drives (one as a back up) using a toaster style USB interface. That might be a bit excessive for your needs but you can get smaller drives.

Additionally I have a 1TB drive I ripped out of an old laptop and put in a USB interface housing. I think that might be more than sufficient for your needs and its very compact and reliable.

One thing to remember, the first rule of Hard Drives is that they will fail, so you should always have a redundancy. When I first embarked on my archiving project one of my more tech savvy friends tried to convince me to set up a RAID system but that was too complicated for me. I found it much easier to simply have multiple hard drives that I back up manually. Granted the toaster I use for the big archive has a built in copying system and I did use it for the initial back up when it was like ~8tb at once but ever since then I've done it manually to preserve drive health since the automated process will just rewrite the entire drive again.

These are the drives I use. Yes they're expensive at 20TB but smaller ones are cheaper.


And this is the toaster mount I got for them:


If you don't care about the cloning function or being able to access both drives at the same time then something like this might be more convenient and secure than a toaster:

 

[code123]

How much data and how long are you wanting it to last? If you are truly wanting offline storage for 10+years I would use archival grade Blue rays. Usually rated for around 50 years when stored properly.

Hard drives are based on magnetism and even if the physical motors and bearings survive the magnetism will fade over time but it's a lot easier to deal with 1 20tb hdd then a big stack of blurays if you need to save that much data

Either way I would make multiple copies to help mitigate any risks.

Archival grade tape is another option but I'm sure that is out of your budget.

 

[Shroom King]

Pictures and documents? Store them on your phone (and copies on the older phones that you have in a junk drawer in your house).
Ask your boss for a USB stick. A lot of companies hand these out to people just for advertising.
In my 10+ years after switching to digital photography, I have 23 GB of pictures, and my digital documents is 3 GB. In my situation 2 or 3 32 GB usb sticks or SD cards would suffice.

 

[LadyOfWisdom]

Old fashioned burn to a disc would be my recommendation. Test after completion and maybe make 2 copies, it’s cheap as chips. And then even if you somehow end up damaging one copy, you’re still good.

 

[555777555]

CD or DVD.

Hard drives fail. Flash loses charge over time.
Optical media lasts virtually forever.

 

[Peristaltic Pump]

Cave paintings have been proven to be capable of lasting thousands of years.

 

[Dutch Courage]

CD or DVD.

Hard drives fail. Flash loses charge over time.
Optical media lasts virtually forever.

I would need 12,766 DVDs to hold the same amount of data I have on three WD 20TB external drives. Which means I would need a whole separate studio apartment to house the DVDs.

In 30 years of using external drives, I have never had a single one fail (among dozens I have owned). They are on 24/7, and I don't especially take good care of them. They get covered in dust and cat hair, and I've spilled Coca Cola on them, but they keep on ticking. I still have data I first saved in the 1990s.

If one ever does fail, I can extract the data from it anyway with a toaster.

For huge amounts of data, I have no qualms about recommending external drives.

 

[Neodanthril]

One of the fundamental things is to remember that no hard drive, or thing for that matter, is eternal. You want to have backups on multiple drives and in multiple places, preferably separate buildings in case of fire.
That sounds tedious and it is but it's better than losing all your pictures of Grandma because the one hard drive you were backing everything up to failed or your house burned down and all seven of your backup drives were under your mattress and are now piles of goo. The way I handle this is with two local hard drives, one of which is in a fire resistant safe, and a cloud drive. It would be a real pain in the neck to back all those up simultaneously, so I only back up the one in the safe every few months. The cloud drive is something I can do overnight

Oh and you also want to eventually use a program like crystaldisk to check the health of the hard drives so you know when it is time to replace them

 

[Vecr]

I suggest an enterprise CMR (not SMR) hard drive. Yeah, it could lose magnetism or get physically stuck, but flash drives and SSDs work via capacitors. Capacitors that lose charge.

 

[Squawking Macaw]

I would need 12,766 DVDs to hold the same amount of data I have on three WD 20TB external drives. Which means I would need a whole separate studio apartment to house the DVDs.

In 30 years of using external drives, I have never had a single one fail (among dozens I have owned). They are on 24/7, and I don't especially take good care of them. They get covered in dust and cat hair, and I've spilled Coca Cola on them, but they keep on ticking. I still have data I first saved in the 1990s.

If one ever does fail, I can extract the data from it anyway with a toaster.

For huge amounts of data, I have no qualms about recommending external drives.

I'm jealous, my hard drives never last long even when I take immaculate care of them. I bought a 4TB external drive a year ago and the damn thing is already having contact issues and occasionally refuses to be removed safely because 'it's currently in use' (when it very clearly isn't).

 

[Kosher Dill]

I'm heartened to see the strong ratio of Actual Good Advice : Security LARP in this thread.
I second the recommendation for either plain old HDDs or good-quality burned discs - and the anti-recommendation for flash media.

In 30 years of using external drives, I have never had a single one fail (among dozens I have owned).

I dunno, the '90s-'00s were a dark time, at least in the consumer space. But things are much, much better now.

If you don't care about the cloning function or being able to access both drives at the same time then something like this might be more convenient and secure than a toaster:

This thing is cool, I want one.

Cave paintings have been proven to be capable of lasting thousands of years.

Until anyone came and looked at them, anyway. Tourism is actually causing major preservation problems due to the changes in lighting, temperature, and atmosphere (all that steamy tourist breath condensing on the walls)
I'd love to visit the cave paintings of France sometime but I'd feel vaguely bad about doing so.

 

[lIllllIiiiiLLLLiiiiIIIIll]

Monitoring this thread for both the info and the bantz. Good stuff.

I'm an external HDD or SSD guy personally. I try to actually boot each one up and look at what I have occasionally just to refresh my own memory as well as confirm data is still intact and as-intended.

Not a long-term storage solution per se in that you do have to occasionally boot and review your archives, but I might also argue that locking up something important and never checking on it is the real source of most disasters anyway. Stuff gets fucked up in ways you'd never think of, when you don't just check on it occasionally.

 

[Pee Cola]

For a home user, a pair of brand name external HDDs or SSDs is usually good enough. Buy two of the same capacity, but either different brands or at different times, to eliminate the risk of getting two drives from the same production run (bad batches of drives do escape from time to time).

Use something like SyncBack to synchronise files across both drives.

That way, if one fails, you still have the other drive to fall back on. In this event, buy a new drive or have the old dead drive replaced under warranty (if applicable) and go again. I had to do this a few years back with a Seagate HDD that shat the bed, thankfully the same files were mirrored on an older WD HDD which I then mirrored onto the warranty replacement Seagate sent me (which has been working fine ever since).

This has been my backup routine for over a decade, and it works great for my use case.

If you want to get really anal or if the data is extremely important, you can use the 3-2-1 backup method i.e. 3 backups across 2 different types of media, with 1 stored offsite.

 

[Banana Hammock]

I would need 12,766 DVDs to hold the same amount of data I have on three WD 20TB external drives. Which means I would need a whole separate studio apartment to house the DVDs.

In 30 years of using external drives, I have never had a single one fail (among dozens I have owned). They are on 24/7, and I don't especially take good care of them. They get covered in dust and cat hair, and I've spilled Coca Cola on them, but they keep on ticking. I still have data I first saved in the 1990s.

If one ever does fail, I can extract the data from it anyway with a toaster.

For huge amounts of data, I have no qualms about recommending external drives.

I've been looking to store a large amount of old pictures and documents [...] not the most computer/tech-savvy

Something tells me he doesn't have 60TB worth of pictures and documents. Just a suspicion I have.

 

[jeff7989]

Sounds like you want to be spoon-fed. Check the link, it's for normies like you. Not a bad solution to get started,

https://www.qnap.com/en-us/solution/what-is-nas

With some time for research you could build yourself a monster NAS or a DAS for relatively cheap.
I had bad luck with home burned CDs bit-rotting, maybe my luck. No such problems with pressed media.
Edit.
Something like this if you are willing to go DIY route, but you'd have to figure out software RAID on your own.

 

[Brabbit Narp]

My setup isn't anything fancy, but it's getting the job done till I can secure the funds for something more permanent.

I usually try to keep one external backup per hard drive, depending upon how big the drive is and how affordable the externals are at a given time. Right now I am running Samsung's T7 Shield series of drives, something that's fairly durable, albeit expensive the further you go up in capacity. They are resistant to suffering minor mishandling, such as being dropped or getting some water on them, but they are SSDs, which requires you to nanny them every so often with a charge.

The plus side is I can chuck them in a backpack and bug out in case something goes to hell out home, so I'll still have my stuff safely tucked away inside. As for how you back them up, there are programs out there that can encrypt them each time, but I have heard horror stories about how some would be backups remain inaccessible for one reason or another due to encryption. In that case, I would recommend getting a simple USB drive to store your essentials like your banking info, and encrypt that accordingly. The rest you can probably leave alone without encryption, assuming you aren't worried that some rando will look up those risque stuff you may or may not put on them.

While I have not played around with them, it seems the likes of ZuluCrypt and VeraCrypt are the way to go as far as data encryption is concerned. I've been tepidly interested myself, but ZuluCrypt's instructions are... Opaque to say the least. But they seem solid as far as their reputation is concerned.

If you want a refresher on the basics, ExplainingComputers has a good series for the layman to get started.

Just search for ExplainingComputers backup, and you'll get a decent set of videos to start with for your backup needs.