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Ask HN: How do you use to store your personal files long-term?

by fgblanch on 3/15/23, 2:00 AM with 5 comments

Hi HN community, I'm interested in knowing what are your preferred strategy or strategies for long-term storage of your personal files (from photos, other media, old payrolls, tax fillings, old side projects, college docs, backups...) I realized I have many of my personal long-term files sparsely distributed across many cloud services (which is not optimal economically) and in some external drives (which is not optimal for long-term data security). I wanted to ask you what are your strategies, which are your decision factors. For example, cloud vs local, security, accessibility, convenience...

Thanks,

  • by phendrenad2 on 3/15/23, 2:15 AM

    First I copy everything into one folder, and then I copy that to two hard drives. Every few years I buy two new drives, copy the old backup, add all of the new files from the last few years. Old drives are thrown away, because I don't trust hard drives for more than a few years. Also I use cloud services like onedrive and icloud, so the only way I'll ever need my backup drives is if one of those services dies.

  • by dv_dt on 3/15/23, 3:01 AM

    I send all data to my desktop system Documents folder, then restic encrypted backups go from the main system drives to hot storage drives in the same desktop, then offsite cloud backups of the restic repos.

  • by mdmglr on 3/15/23, 3:26 AM

    Backblaze B2 with rclone and encryption.

    It’s a loosing battle as a single person to be dealing with hard drives and self hosting a NAS. Companies who focus on this problem have the funding to do it better.