Back in the day 20+ years ago my family decided to own a business class blade server, not a whole server, just one blade, to back up and store our family videos and photos that had been scanned. Due to the cost of the single blade even second hand my father didn’t have good opsec for backups. Lo and behold a year or so the blade failed and my father and I spent the better part of a week defragging and recovering photos. We lost gigabytes of photos and spent another week+ rescanning what was still scannable. So 20 years down the road I have my own sever in rai 5, a cold storage backup, and a cloud storage backup just in case.
this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
37 points (100.0% liked)
General Discussion
13750 readers
2 users here now
Welcome to Lemmy.World General!
This is a community for general discussion where you can get your bearings in the fediverse. Discuss topics & ask questions that don't seem to fit in any other community, or don't have an active community yet.
🪆 About Lemmy World
🧭 Finding Communities
Feel free to ask here or over in: !lemmy411@lemmy.ca!
Also keep an eye on:
- !newcommunities@lemmy.world
- !communitypromo@lemmy.ca
- !new_communities@mander.xyz
- !communityspotlight@lemmy.world
- !wowthislemmyexists@lemmy.ca!
For more involved tools to find communities to join: check out Lemmyverse!
💬 Additional Discussion Focused Communities:
- !actual_discussion@lemmy.ca - Note this is for more serious discussions.
- !casualconversation@lemm.ee - The opposite of the above, for more laidback chat!
- !letstalkaboutgames@feddit.uk - Into video games? Here's a place to discuss them!
- !movies@lemm.ee - Watched a movie and wanna talk to others about it? Here's a place to do so!
- !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world - Want to talk politics apart from political news? Here's a community for that!
Rules and Policies
Remember, Lemmy World rules also apply here.
0. See: Rules for Users.
- No bigotry: including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
- Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
- Be thoughtful and helpful: even with ‘silly’ questions. The world won’t be made better by dismissive comments to others on Lemmy.
- Link posts should include some context/opinion in the body text when the title is unaltered, or be titled to encourage discussion.
- Posts concerning other instances' activity/decisions are better suited to !fediverse@lemmy.world or !lemmydrama@lemmy.world communities.
- No Ads/Spamming.
- No NSFW content.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
What are you using for cold storage? I need to get on that for my family photo NAS
As another said M-discs are a great way to move data to a more permanent solution that is only writable. Alternatively making a copy of data you know won’t change very much or at all and have those files copied to a solid state drive. Those will last a lot longer on a shelf than hdd drives with discs that spin. Preferably you’d also want to make sure your cold storage is low humidity and temp controlled. If you can’t control both lean on controlling the temp and keep it regular, mid 50’s °F would probably work.
You can vacuum seal the drive to negate the humidity concerns.
I did not consider that. I’ll have to revisit my setup to see what I can do to include vacuum seal as an added step.
Not OP but I personally use Blu-ray M-DISCs (advertised as having multi-hundred year lifespans, they get data physically etched into them) for cold storage.
Just leaving this here in case people are interested!:
My problem is that I'm the kind of datahoarder who collects a whole bunch of random useless things that I never need ever again, so I don't know how to differentiate the trash from the important stuff
Hard drives are cheap.
Mechanical drives are cheap. Mechanical drives can fail.
Raid them.
Ok, and? How does this help OP?
Why delete thinga when you can buy more drives.
OP didn't say anything about deleting, though.