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mos_8502 :verified:

@mr_daemon I haven’t seen a .mpg file extension in many years.

24 comments
mr_daemon

@mos_8502 The media certainly was from that early era hahah

I was all excited to see what young me archived on their Win98 box back then. Will I find my old midi collection? Some old VB4 source code? Old websites I made?

Instead I got fucking shrek'd, and as a stupid mpeg layer 2 file. 10/10

mos_8502 :verified:

@mr_daemon Backups are hard. Your choice seems to be between unreliable optical media that’s cheap or insanely expensive LTO drives that you can actually rely on.

mr_daemon

@mos_8502 I did tape for a while, and while it does last forever when stored properly, the drive is what's gonna die before it's time to recover and that's a whole other can of worms.

I have some stuff forever trapped on DDS3 and DLT tapes as a result, because all the drives are dead

mos_8502 :verified:

@mr_daemon Yeah. I would have to buy two drives and store one in hopes that it survives.

Methylzero

@mos_8502 @mr_daemon Unfortunately if it has any rubber parts (belts, rollers, etc.) those are likely to perish unless they are sealed in an oxygen-free atmosphere, eg. a jar flushed with CO2 or N2 or Ar.
PS: It is a slow process, taking years to decades, but many rubbers will eventually crack and perish.

JP

@mos_8502 @mr_daemon I had a Zip drive chilling on a shelf for a while and it didn’t survive that

Daemon’s right, there’s some whole other problems to deal with on these things when long term

nsfw :donor:

@mr_daemon @mos_8502@studio8502.ca I still have my working QIC-40 drive and software but due to belt routing inside the tapes, I have my work cut out for me before I can restore my BBS backup from 1993.

Irenes (many)

@mr_daemon @mos_8502 we researched the other day whether we could use a tiny wine fridge as a climate control device for tapes...

we concluded that we cannot. the small ones are based on Peltiers not compressors, so any cooling is minimal, and regardless of size they don't seal the air and do nothing for humidity

Irenes (many)

@mr_daemon @mos_8502 it would very much be a solution for people who have too much money but not megacorp data center levels of money, anyway. not really ideal.

mos_8502 :verified:

@irenes @mr_daemon best idea I’ve come up with is using those fancy long lasting “M-Disc” BD-R discs in a Blu-Ray burner, and even that is more than I can presently afford.

mr_daemon

@mos_8502 @irenes Personally at this point i'm banking on ZFS's ability to not have silent corruption and my capacity to maintain the local raidz2 array as well as an off-site mirror of verifiable encrypted blocks.

Not everything is `perfectly image-able` however, so this isn't perfect, but it sure beats old media that's 2 solid months away from biodegrading.

At least I can check integrity of it at will, and have multiple copies

Site Reliability Enby🏳️‍⚧️🏁🔦📈🐺👗

@irenes Nitrogen or CO2 (via liquid nitrogen or dry ice) is probably the most accessible for the home user. Just need a way to store it with really good seals too.

Irenes (many)

@SiteRelEnby yeah.... well, CO2 is safer in that there's less asphyxiation risk, but neither thrills us. really humidity control is the big thing we think.

Site Reliability Enby🏳️‍⚧️🏁🔦📈🐺👗

@irenes Yeah, plus it's easier to work with in preservation as well, as it collects low while nitrogen will diffuse out. Plus you end up with some pieces of dry ice, which is fun. Just don't chuck it in *with* the dry ice as freezing will kill the rubber too.

Myself, my backup strategy tries to be media-independent. 3 main tiers, plus a few extra things for critical hot data.

- NAS, running ZFS. Standard (NAS grade) hard drives, 1 hot spare, monitored by me
- Hot cloud backup. somewhat shallow, obviously depends on a major cloud provider, but one who won't disappear overnight.
- Cold cloud backup: AWS, so will likely exist until the heat death of the universe. Would be incredibly expensive to restore (glacier deep archive) but could be done slowly over time as storage is so cheap.

At some point I'd like to add some incremental snapshots on optical media with error recovery data (probably bluray or m-disc) but have other things that need doing right now.

@irenes Yeah, plus it's easier to work with in preservation as well, as it collects low while nitrogen will diffuse out. Plus you end up with some pieces of dry ice, which is fun. Just don't chuck it in *with* the dry ice as freezing will kill the rubber too.

Myself, my backup strategy tries to be media-independent. 3 main tiers, plus a few extra things for critical hot data.

Irenes (many)

@SiteRelEnby yeah... a long time ago we stored backups in AWS glacier. it was at a period in our life before we achieved financial stability, and at one point we were unable to pay the bill for a few months.

we're sure the backups still physically exist (destroying them would cost money), but for practical purposes they are now permanently irretrievable.

Irenes (many) replied to Irenes

@SiteRelEnby so it really depends on your threat model

Irenes (many) replied to Irenes

@SiteRelEnby also the originals they were backups of were destroyed during that same period, for reasons that shared a cause with it, so it's "real" data loss for us.

Irenes (many) replied to Irenes

@SiteRelEnby also over the next few years we're intending to accumulate, like, web scrapes and things of similar size, and even just the transfer cost for that would be prohibitive, so that's why we've been looking into very-high-volume removable media for our cold storage.

Irenes (many) replied to Irenes

@SiteRelEnby but yeah tier 1 is definitely going to be a RAID connected by SAN to our servers that we're going to have at some point, heh :)

Michaela Sue

@irenes @mr_daemon @mos_8502 the worse thing with that sort of thing is the peltier really lends itself to very very tight temperature control and none of them have it, at all. Now, at the lab equipment price point, sure, you can get that there!

Irenes (many)

@beige_alert @mr_daemon @mos_8502 yeah absolutely. the products seem to be aimed at people with more money than scientific knowledge to evaluate whether it's doing anything useful ><

Irenes (many)

@beige_alert @mr_daemon @mos_8502 that's kind of a recurring theme that we see across a long list of product categories and a large span of time

products that claim to do something useful but if you understand the proposed mechanism, it's clear that they can't do that thing. if you don't, it sounds sufficiently science-ish that you might buy it...........

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