Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dryanau 1032 days ago
What's the best medium to store on? I see USB thumb drives with 512GB capacity these days. Easy to write a couple and keep in the cupboard. Or is hard disk better? External USB?
4 comments

Still might be discs. Not the common consumer discs we've all gotten in the the past, but there are archival-grade DVDs and Blu Rays out there that are supposed to last hundreds of years and not degrade.

Been debating getting a few and burning some of my more important stuff on a few of these:

https://www.mdisc.com/

Whatever you use, add PAR (parity) files.

Personally I would lean towards SSDs mainly because an HDD failure can mean a broken mechanism and a nightmare recovery process while an SSD typically fails by becoming read-only. (Good-brand) thumb drives are also a solid option especially if you make multiple drives containing the same data and store some off-site.

The ‘best’ is probably some sort of heterogenous RAID/ZFS mirror setup which can survive the death of disks and potentially evolve over decades. Then you want at least two versions in different sites that are kept in sync in case of a disaster or a RAID controller going bonkers.
Depends on how long you will want to last and how much performance you want. Personally I would likely go with external HDDs. Least risk of bit rot.