In the 21st century, storing information storage a major challenge. It is difficult to properly preserve personal data and memories, especially given the privacy and ethical concerns surrounding potential solutions. Although I am not an expert with enough time to devote to these issues, I am still quite interested in them and will share some thoughts here. I still carry the anxiety of two traumatic data losses, which makes everything more difficult, but more important.
Needs
- Durability: I want to be able to effortlessly access all of my data now as 30 years from now.
- Reliability: my storage system has to be absolutely fail-proof (of course, no system is. I need to achieve the best reliability I can afford). I cannot lose any of my data again.
- Scalability: the amount of pictures collected and stored by everyone in the world is growing at a tremendously fast pace, my pictures are no exception. I would prefer not to end up stuck in a resources consuming framework which is great with 2TB of pictures, but makes 10TB of pictures unmanageable.
- Affordability: I should not spend too much on this. In the end, shooting pictures is not my job.
- Sustainability: the solution should have the minimum impact possible on the environment, already plagued by the heavy consumption of resources the tech industry causes.
- Accessibility: if possible, I would like to be able to access all of my pictures from anywhere anytime.
- Portability: the system I choose must be as bare-bones and simple as possible, so that, if in the future I want to switch to a better one, I can do it as seamlessly as possible.
- “Replicability”: why should my system work for me only? It would be ideal, by documenting everything, to make my final solution “replicable”, hence available to anyone as a source of inspiration. I am writing these words for this reason.
Doubts
- Can I rely on Migrating from Flickr to Piwigo alone to host all of my JPGs, even my private ones? No
- is it reliable? How much do I risk of losing my data? Not too much. Not more reliable than any server around the world.
- is it secure? Are my private pictures somehow server-side encrypted? No encryption. Not the best option to backup pictures
- Does it make sense to use my Cubbit‘s 4TB for long-term picture storage? It does, as long as some features will be included
- Should I use portable Hard Disks, as the ones I already have, or internal hard disks to plug to Linuxplosion? None of the two, if the Cubbit solution works
Laptop backup
I do not use any traditional “backup”. All I need are tdm and Sam.
