Comment on If I wanted to bury a hard drive for archival purposes (e.g. Country becoming Dictatorship), how to keep the contents from being damaged and where is the safest place to bury it?

some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

Don’t bury it. And don’t count on ten years. Thirty years guarantees the media won’t be physically compatible with future devices. How would you read a floppy disk from 1995 today? You’d be able to find a USB floppy drive, probably, online. Good luck having the disk be in a format that a modern OS understands. You’d need specialty software for that.

Get two spinning disk drives from major brands like Western Digital or Toshiba (not Seagate, for sure). Get different brands to reduce risk of failure from a manufacturing issue (as in, two from the same batch are likely to have the same failure if there was a production issue).

Send one somewhere abroad where it can be stored in a safe deposit box (hopefully, you know someone who lives in a free-er country). Plan to exchange it with a freshly written drive every three years. Go back and forth like this, completely rewriting the data each time to minimize the chances of bit-rot (look up this term to understand why you’re rewriting and exchanging the drives).

This will also address files formats that evolve and eventually become incompatible with future software (thinking proprietary things, not plain text, jpegs, or standardized media files). I did something similar having a family member store music that I recorded (my own, not ripped CDs) in a different state in case of natural disaster at home.

All of this can be done pretty cheap. $200 bucks should cover both drives and at least a couple of years of physical storage at a bank. International shipping will probably be the biggest cost, especially over time.

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