Currently ripping all episodes of The Twilight Zone from the box set.
What's a good medium to back up to, assuming I don't want to pay for a RAID setup?
The best way is to just backup to multiple locations and actively manage it. RAID at the backup destination is nice because it means that if a disk fails, you don't immediately lose everything there. But if you have multiple places where that data lives then it's not the end of the world to just re-create the backup.
If you want to get into true archival solutions(way more expensive than setting up a RAID) then you're looking at things like M-Disc and LTO tape
I went M-Disc. Need a special burner and disks cost me $30NZD each or about $18USD for 100GB.
They are write once (I fucked up two early on) but they should last 100+ years. I burnt about 1TB, and made two copies (one for offsite storage). It was not cheap.
You can set up a pretty robust backup system for pretty cheap if you already have the drives, and the knowledge to set it up yourself. I have two always on devices, an NAS that is my central location for important files, which syncs to a backup device with two hard drives that are synced at different intervals. If a drive fails, it gets replaced, and I haven't lost the core of my backups, I might lose some incremental backups, but it's more important to me that I have 3 copies available on different drives. 2 are in one location, the third in a separate location and my syncs are each an interation behind, so if there's a huge screw up, it'll take three sync cycles before the main copies are lost (not including the incremental backups I also keep).
This setup allows you to replace drives as they fail so you can constantly update with technologies and don't need to worry about what's the best medium.
This link should come bundled with this meme:
https://b3n.org/automatic-ripping-machine/
It can be installed on pretty much any old device with a disc drive.
While you are repurposing this device you can also hook it up to your tv and use it as a normal dvd drive. However if you do happen to play DVDs from your local library make sure to delete the automatically ripped files afterwards because keeping those might be illegal.
AFAIK this doesn’t apply to “pocked” CDs/dvds made from a manufacturer. If you burned writable/rewritable it can rot.
Some manufactured DVDs can go bad too.
I think it's always possible.
flash storage too! idk the specifics but I think flash storage has a lifespan of around 15 years
in practice; go backup old flash drives and game cartridges (ex: DS and 3DS cards)
Genuine question, do people actually care about backing up media that much? I don't get it. Everything I actually care about personally I can fit on a thumbdrive and a box of notebooks.
If you don't want to keep it that's fine, but if you have any recordings of commercial media (like say VHS tape recordings of broadcast TV) it would be of major help and contribution if you at least go through what you have and see if any of it is !lostmedia@lemmy.world
https://lostmediawiki.com/Home
You'd be surprised at the things people are looking for, from old TV ads to TV channel interstitials and Bumpers to TV show episodes that aired once and was pulled, lost and never shown again
Tbf that's the matter of taste/preference. I'm have the completely opposite view to yours - I'm really attached to old vids, drawings, texts (that I made myself when I was younger). So I store and backup everything, even things most people would think of as unserious/unnecessary. It feels like a part of myself, a part of my story, you know, so I would be very upset if I lost it. And I can understand if someone have attachment to old films, books etc. I would say archiving old stuff is kind of a hobby in itself.
Although that being said, I can see advantages of your style - mainly less spending money on harddrives and time of setting them up and backing up stuff :)
Don't get me wrong - I am super sentimental, and can really get lost going down memory lane. I spend probably most of my mental life living in the past. But yeah, I guess the stuff I do preserve (99% text) just doesn't take up much room at all.
I feel it. Most of the stuff I care about is random projects of mine, most of which are on github. The biggest downside of me losing my local files is honestly just significant, but not insurmountable inconvenience.
Just stared backing up my 500+ vhs movies
I saved the best of my VHS for a long time. I couldn't get them for a while as I was moving around. The boxes were in a flood, but the tapes were at the top. Unfortunately, my yearbooks were at the bottom. Anyway, I finally got them out of my mom's basement where she'd been holding them for me. This was a couple weeks ago.
I was excited to see all those old movies again, but unfortunately I noticed on second glance that the film inside the tapes were either spotted white or completely white. That was the day that I learned that VHS tapes could actually rot. Its a shame...
You need three copies of your data: the working copy, the nightly backup, and the offsite backup in case of natural disaster. I physically mailed a drive to my father in another state in case my building catches fire. You can also use a safe deposit box or give a drive to a friend who is geologically separated from your location.
Notice: recent info suggests that SSDs suffer bit-rot when not powered. Not enough confirmed info at this time for me to go into it further, but please rewrite important data from time to time.
Here to plug SpinRite for the health of your backups
They will last a hundred years guaranteed, they said…
Someone recently told me about a RAID configuration that can mitigate bit rot but it was a long conversation and I forgot a lot of what they said. I'm currently in the planning stages of setting up my first NAS so if anybody could point me in the right direction that would be pretty sweet.
What the hell is RAID and NAS ? I have a bad ass DvD collection to the tune of 3k films ( no pineapple express bull shit ) that I've been wanting to back up. I don't know shit about computers but have a 2014 MacBook pro with a disk drive that has never been online just used to watch movies when the power is out and to load my cd collection to mp3 players.
Help me out here !!!
A RAID is essentially a way to have multiple "hard drives" connected in a way that looks as if it's one drive so you can have a ton of storage.
A NAS is a sort of like a remote storage device. Not quite a PC, but more than just a storage drive.
Not sure how you'd go about doing any of that with a MacBook.
NAS stands for "Network Attached Storage", basically a computer whose sole purpose is storing and serving files in your home.
RAID stands for "Reduntant Array of Inexpensive Disks", and is broadly a way to merge multiple disks into one.
RAID 0 means that files are evenly distributed on all disks, which improves IO speed and extends a file system (≈ a partition) 's capacity, but it's useless against disk failure;
RAID 1(mirroring) means that all disks have the same data as a sort of real-time backup, and as long as one disk remains functional, all the other disks can fail without the data becoming inaccessible;
other RAID levels use clever math to offer a mix of the first two, spreading files among disks (like RAID 0) but still tolerating failures of a small number of disks (like RAID 1 but way less redundant).Wikipedia has a less abridged explaination on its RAID page.
I have 5-1/4" floppies from the mid 80's that still work.
Also, Start with backing up all the stuff you never backed up in the first place
So glad that I don't have much important data, a very simple bash script backs up stuff that kinda matters (do I need that 8 year old minecraft save?) and it totals about 30GB currently.
The actually important bit is a 57kB Keepass database. Plus 50MB of compressed/encrypted data of questionable importance - literally never decrypted them other than to test it was readable, but I have been told these documents are "important" so whatever. They are there and the originals burned because I don't want to keep a shitload of paperwork around that looks worthless to me. Got a small folder for stuff that probably should be kept like birth certificates, when that folder gets full I sort and the least important stuff is recorded digitally and physical copies destroyed.
