Long-Term Image File Storage Choices

Chaplain Mark · Feb 2, 2019

Which media would be more reliable for long-term storage of my photo, SD card, or external HDD?

Not even considering internet storage, at all, strictly in my own home.

Thanks in advance,

Janoch · Feb 2, 2019

I use an USB3 HD dock and have a handful of drives for external storage.

For convenience also use an internal dedicated backup drive... is mirrored regularly to one of the externals.

Photos (raw and projects) are copied to 3 drives... represents lots of hours! :-D

Discs will not be kept for more than 3 to 5 years, then they'll be replaced.

And I have no confidence in any kind of flash drives btw....

Austinian · Feb 2, 2019

Chaplain Mark said:
Which media would be more reliable for long-term storage of my photo, SD card, or external HDD?

Not even considering internet storage, at all, strictly in my own home.

Thanks in advance,

I keep a stack of ordinary internal SATA HDDs and rotate them. One set of HDDs is kept in a bank safe deposit box and changed every few months in case of a major disaster like fire.

My desktop has SATA power and data cables leading outside the case to connect the drives while backups are run. The laptops use a USB3 dock that holds the SATA drives.

Chaplain Mark · Feb 2, 2019

Janoch said:
I use an USB3 HD dock and have a handful of drives for external storage.

For convenience also use an internal dedicated backup drive... is mirrored regularly to one of the externals.

Photos (raw and projects) are copied to 3 drives... represents lots of hours! :-D

Discs will not be kept for more than 3 to 5 years, then they'll be replaced.

And I have no confidence in any kind of flash drives btw....

Does an SD card fall into the flash drive category?

Chaplain Mark · Feb 2, 2019

Austinian said:
Chaplain Mark said:

Which media would be more reliable for long-term storage of my photo, SD card, or external HDD?

Not even considering internet storage, at all, strictly in my own home.

Thanks in advance,

Click to expand...

I keep a stack of ordinary internal SATA HDDs and rotate them. One set of HDDs is kept in a bank safe deposit box and changed every few months in case of a major disaster like fire.

My desktop has SATA power and data cables leading outside the case to connect the drives while backups are run. The laptops use a USB3 dock that holds the SATA drives.

Do you feel an HDD is more reliable than an SD card?

Austinian · Feb 2, 2019

Chaplain Mark said:
Austinian said:

Chaplain Mark said:

Which media would be more reliable for long-term storage of my photo, SD card, or external HDD?

Not even considering internet storage, at all, strictly in my own home.

Thanks in advance,

Click to expand...

I keep a stack of ordinary internal SATA HDDs and rotate them. One set of HDDs is kept in a bank safe deposit box and changed every few months in case of a major disaster like fire.

My desktop has SATA power and data cables leading outside the case to connect the drives while backups are run. The laptops use a USB3 dock that holds the SATA drives.

Click to expand...

Do you feel an HDD is more reliable than an SD card?

I have no hard data on long-term SD card reliability; HDDs have a long track record, and even some fairly old drives (pre-terabyte era) of mine are still functioning.

When I've discarded HDDs it was almost always because they'd become too small to be useful rather than drive failure. (And of course I sabotage the drives before discarding them).

Patco · Feb 2, 2019

Chaplain Mark said:
Which media would be more reliable for long-term storage of my photo, SD card, or external HDD?

Unless you're needing to store terabytes of photos (like some on these forums), M-Disc seems to me to be the way to go for longevity.

PHXAZCRAIG · Feb 2, 2019

I've got different archives since back in the day. My sister once handed me our family tree data, on a floppy disk. I still have some drives in the garage, but when was the last time...?

Then there were the ZIP drives. Got nothing to reply them. Similar to the family videos I just uncovered, on VHS-C. Where do I find a drive? Someone I think I have the original camera, in case it still works.

Then I have stacks of old CD's, then DVD's. How long will rewritable disks last? And will we have optical drives to read them. I tried backing my photos up at the end of the year to Bluray, but I stopped that in 2008 I think. Too slow, too many discs needed. And who has bluray readers on their PC now?

Now we have USB. Probably the same sort of issue in the future. Whether or not the data remains readable, you have to have the equipment to read them. I remember reading something recently where NASA (or some such?) wanted to recover some old data from the 1960's, but it was on Ampex tape, and there was no tape drive handy. I think they got a retired engineer who kept one in storage to getting it running again to read the tapes.

Currently I have terabytes of data on a QNAP NAS, with RAID5. I recently pointed it out to my daughter and told her 'everything important is on there. when I die, grab that.' I plan on labeling the IP address, user ID and password on the bottom of the unit.

As long as I'm alive, I'll upgrade storage periodically and copy the data to it. I may have 10-20 years left. No idea what will happen to my pics in 50 years if the family wants to see them.

tkbslc · Feb 2, 2019

The best choice for long term storage is to test backup periodically and rotate hard drives every few years. That's all that cloud providers are doing anyway, just moving data to new drives every 5 years as they reach end of life, ad nauseum.

That said, I use Blu Ray as a sort of extra layer of protection. It would not be susceptible to some of the things that could cause a HDD to fail (power surge, ransomware, minor flooding, being dropped, etc) but I do not consider it to replace HDD as my primary backup. I keep both.

Large business often uses tape, but it is too expensive for home use. And you still have to rotate tapes, just slightly less often than HDD.

CAcreeks · Feb 2, 2019

Patco said:
Chaplain Mark said:

Which media would be more reliable for long-term storage of my photo, SD card, or external HDD?

Click to expand...

Unless you're needing to store terabytes of photos (like some on these forums), M-Disc seems to me to be the way to go for longevity.

Yes, we have a pile of these and a BluRay writer for them, and have made a few. Problem is they are not readable on the DVD player/writer in all our laptops and towers. Only my daughter has BluRay in her laptop, and she's on the other side of the country.

Supposedly M-Disk is good for 100 years or more.

I've owned USB sticks that became corrupted after a few years of storage, but my SD cards are frequently used and reformatted, so that hasn't happened. Here's a webpage estimating 5 years before the electrical charges start to degrade. SD cards are very tough when it comes to impact and inundation, but longevity is not their strong point.

https://superuser.com/questions/17350/whats-the-life-expectancy-of-an-sd-card

If you store on HDD, I guess NTFS is the best option. Even if Microsoft goes belly up, there are good implementations in the public domain.

PHXAZCRAIG · Feb 2, 2019

Large businesses have quit using tape in favor of disk-based backup systems. Tapes were too slow to get the backups done overnight with the advent of huge drives. Plus those tapes could get pretty flaky in a year or two, especially the 120m little DAT tapes. The oxide would literally flake off as the tape stretched with use.

kelpdiver · Feb 3, 2019

this topic has been hashed out repeated over the years- so a lot of history available in search. You, however, might be the first thinking about SD cards as an option.

My suspicion is that these are about the least viable option - as someone noted, they're not designed for long term static storage.

M-discs at the dvd capacity have that 100 year rating. It's much fuzzier if the Blurays have the same - all the 'official' certifications seem to only address the former. Personally, it's moot, I don't want to deal with numerous pieces of media. Too unwieldy to ever do validations. However, this media form will be available for decades. An external blu-ray reader costs less than $30. So long as people play movies, cds in any quantity, these will be viable. When the curtain is finally closing, it will be obvious, and plenty of time to transfer to whatever is new and best 30 years from now.

SATA spinning drives remain your best home option. And while they'll generally last well beyond the 5 year service life rating, that's when you should be rotating to newer for your archival needs.

Your bias against internet storage is likely unfounded. For a data set less than 4 or 5 TBs, and esp less than 1, nothing you do at home will be price competitive or as reliable. Encrypt if you must. If you stick to in house solutions, have one copy in a 60 min fire rated safe.

The QNAP (I do raid 10 over the shakier R5) can store tens of terabytes, and backup to nearly all of the cloud providers in the background when you're sleeping or at work. While making media available to all in the house. Excellent $300-500 device (plus the drives)

tkbslc · Feb 3, 2019

PHXAZCRAIG said:
Large businesses have quit using tape in favor of disk-based backup systems. Tapes were too slow to get the backups done overnight with the advent of huge drives. Plus those tapes could get pretty flaky in a year or two, especially the 120m little DAT tapes. The oxide would literally flake off as the tape stretched with use.

Chris Noble · Feb 3, 2019

Chaplain Mark said:
Which media would be more reliable for long-term storage of my photo, SD card, or external HDD?

Not even considering internet storage, at all, strictly in my own home.

Thanks in advance,

There is no archival digital media.

The only long-term (and more important, short-term!) solution is:

1) Two or more separate backups;

2) Two or more locations;

3) Refresh the backups regularly (yearly or so).

jfriend00 · Feb 3, 2019

Chaplain Mark said:
Which media would be more reliable for long-term storage of my photo, SD card, or external HDD?

What time frame is "long-term"? 1 yr, 5 yrs, 10 yrs, 20 yrs?

Chaplain Mark · Feb 3, 2019

jfriend00 said:
Chaplain Mark said:

Which media would be more reliable for long-term storage of my photo, SD card, or external HDD?

Click to expand...

What time frame is "long-term"? 1 yr, 5 yrs, 10 yrs, 20 yrs?

jfriend00 · Feb 3, 2019

Chaplain Mark said:
jfriend00 said:

Chaplain Mark said:

Which media would be more reliable for long-term storage of my photo, SD card, or external HDD?

Click to expand...

What time frame is "long-term"? 1 yr, 5 yrs, 10 yrs, 20 yrs?

Click to expand...

I would say 5 to 10 yrs would be my target, in between media refreshes/rotations.

I wouldn't rely on SD cards for long term storage at all, largely because that really isn't what they are designed for. From the little I've read, you could expect 5-20 years depending upon the exactly type of memory used and how much you had previously used the card.

I only "trust" a hard drive for 4-5 years. It's not so much about the magnetic 1s and 0s on the platter, but rather it's about all the mechanics/electronics that it takes to read the disk. While many last longer than 5 years, some do not and you just don't every want your main backup drive to be one that could fail when you need it the most. There are a variety of issues that can strike with age. Seals can dry out. Bearings can lose some lubrication, actuators can wear out, insulation on motor windings can deteriorate, capacitors can leak - just to name a few.

So, if you really want to be confident, then you'd replace your hard drive media every 5 years or so, copying the content from the old drive to the new drive. This is exactly what I do for my photo library. Fortunately for me, storage is growing faster than my library so each time I replace my drives, I get more space for less money.

Apparently you've sworn off online storage, but one thing you get when you pay for that is you get a group of professionals that is managing the aging of hard drives for you. They replace older drives with new ones and copy the data over to the new drives, all without you ever lifting a finger. They are also typically managing redundancy so they have more than one copy of your data in case of their own drive failure. If you worry about privacy, there are services (like BackBlaze) that ask you to create an encryption password locally and they only upload and backup encrypted data such that the BackBlaze service never has the key and can never unlock your data on their own.

My backup strategy actually consists of both internal and internet solutions. I have an internal backup drive (not external) that gets a nightly backup from my main data drive. Then, I have the BackBlaze backup service ($50/yr for unlimited backup storage) that maintains an online backup copy of everything. This gives me instant recovery of anything from my local backup drive or disaster recovery from Backblaze in case of fire, flood, theft, etc... I probably don't need the local backup drive, but replacing that drive every 5 years costs an average of about $25/yr and declining each time I do it and I find it worth it for the double backup peace of mind (I did lose 2 years of kid photos once with a drive failure).

--
John

ajscullard · Feb 3, 2019

Chris Noble said:
There is no archival digital media.

Absolutely correct

Chris Noble said:
The only long-term (and more important, short-term!) solution is:

1) Two or more separate backups;

2) Two or more locations;

3) Refresh the backups regularly (yearly or so).

4) If you are really thinking about archiving (20/50/100s of years), be prepared to move your backup from your current media to whatever new media becomes the "new standard". Archiving is a process, not a one-time deal.

I've been through migration from floppy disks to mag tape to CD/DVD's but the current favorite for price/performance is HDDs.

Janoch · Feb 3, 2019

Chaplain Mark said:
Janoch said:

I use an USB3 HD dock and have a handful of drives for external storage.

For convenience also use an internal dedicated backup drive... is mirrored regularly to one of the externals.

Photos (raw and projects) are copied to 3 drives... represents lots of hours! :-D

Discs will not be kept for more than 3 to 5 years, then they'll be replaced.

And I have no confidence in any kind of flash drives btw....

Click to expand...

Does an SD card fall into the flash drive category?

Yes. Worthless! :-D

Just remembered, I have a "small" disc with a bit of music on, a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 160Gb... that thing is close to being 15 years old and runs perfectly fine without any problems.

Slow, yes, but fine. :-D

Still has it's price tag on... $180.... last week I bought another Seagate 2Tb as I'm splitting my data drive into two with photo work now having it's own seperate disc. Paid the ridiculous price of $72 included postage...

jfriend00 · Feb 3, 2019

Janoch said:
Chaplain Mark said:

Janoch said:

I use an USB3 HD dock and have a handful of drives for external storage.

For convenience also use an internal dedicated backup drive... is mirrored regularly to one of the externals.

Photos (raw and projects) are copied to 3 drives... represents lots of hours! :-D

Discs will not be kept for more than 3 to 5 years, then they'll be replaced.

And I have no confidence in any kind of flash drives btw....

Click to expand...

Does an SD card fall into the flash drive category?

Click to expand...

Yes. Worthless! :-D

Just remembered, I have a "small" disc with a bit of music on, a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 160Gb... that thing is close to being 15 years old and runs perfectly fine without any problems.

Just because it still runs after 15 years doesn't mean you're playing with the best odds and that's a smart choice for backup.

Long-Term Image File Storage Choices

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