I have over 250GBs of music and other random files that my dear sister collected for me over the years, I want those files to be secure and usable.
I don't have any trust for magnetic disk as many of them from different brands have failed me over the years, I was thinking in storing them in a USB drive or even a SD card as they have no movable parts and seem more durable to me.
What do you think would be better? I'm talking 5-10 years of use.
Where to store important files securely?
Blake Myers
Levi Rodriguez
encrypted RAID array with redundancy + backups
Jacob Scott
i have ide hdds that are older than you are that still work OP
Christian Hughes
Why are you storing 250GBs of pornography of your sister?
David Adams
AES 256 encryption with 48+ character long passwords in multiple cloud services
Jack Martin
>that sandisk card
I got hit with a wave of nostalgia even though it hasn't been very long since those were normal. Thanks user.
Robert Cook
Get a shit hdd and put it there.
Then back that up to a usb flash drive and keep it safe.
You could also use an ssd.
Jonathan Sullivan
All types of media can and will fail. Instead of trying to pick the one single kind with the best longevity, pick several kinds and have backups on all of them, so that you don't really care if one happens to fail early.
Mason Rogers
If you absolutely want your shit to be archived for decades, get a used tape drive (newer ones will set you back about five thousand dollars) and archive all your files to sit in a hopefully non-humid storage room. SD cards and USB Drives need to be plugged in from time to time to avoid data loss.
But like said, redundancy is more important than form factor.
Alexander Wright
First things first, store all images as png and all music as flac. These are lossless formats that take up more space but will ensure the files retain their original quality forever. Then you'll want to buy half a dozen or so mechanical disks. Redundancy is what will save your files long term. Flash storage that's not powered on will suffer from data degradation in a year or two, so flash drives and SD cards and SSDs are off the table. Use normal mechanical hard drives, as those will retain their data for 5-10 years when powered off. For real long term backups you should invest in magnetic tapes. Those things last like 20-50 years. The drives are expensive (like $2000) but the tapes hold like 6TB each and they're $20 for a pack of them.