What Are People Doing for Backups
thehawk
Surveyor
One of the things I do in my Actual Reality existence is process engineering. As part of that, I help (sometimes by strong-arming, sometimes not) people come up with their Business Continuity Plan - what to do when things go bad, from infrastructure failures, to natural disasters, ransomware, person winning the lottery, or some other thing of vital importance suffers a sudden catastrophic massive existence failure.
Since Jim left us, the wondering has been wandering around in my head here and there when I'm not doing anything else. There are a lot of you people that do some amazing work, and it would be whole handfuls of suck if one day it was just gone. Obviously, anything uploaded to the galleries here are going to survive your passing, but what about the other stuff? If you're just posting the image files here, what about the original files?
Again, starting with Jim's stuff that Monsen said is gone because of issues with the hosting migration years ago and whatever. Which got me to thinking primarily about the Community Atlas, being hosted on Monsen's site? There will come a day (hopefully far far in the future) when there is no Monsen (for me, I tell people in my professional life there will come a day when there will be no more thehawk - whether hit by a bus or winning the lottery or whatever kind of something).
This line of thinking reached a confluence with another project I am working on, getting some projects set up in GitLab and write up the process for keeping files sync'd. GitLab, even the free version can do a whole heck of a lot, but it doesn't have to. There are some limits on what the free offering allows, space and user wise speaking. The private projects are more limiting than the public projects, at least in terms in users. I haven't looked too much into the public version, so I don't know what sort of locking down you can do. Although I am thinking about putting my old website into one just to see how that works.
Anyway.
Short story long. What are people doing for their backups for posterity?
Since Jim left us, the wondering has been wandering around in my head here and there when I'm not doing anything else. There are a lot of you people that do some amazing work, and it would be whole handfuls of suck if one day it was just gone. Obviously, anything uploaded to the galleries here are going to survive your passing, but what about the other stuff? If you're just posting the image files here, what about the original files?
Again, starting with Jim's stuff that Monsen said is gone because of issues with the hosting migration years ago and whatever. Which got me to thinking primarily about the Community Atlas, being hosted on Monsen's site? There will come a day (hopefully far far in the future) when there is no Monsen (for me, I tell people in my professional life there will come a day when there will be no more thehawk - whether hit by a bus or winning the lottery or whatever kind of something).
This line of thinking reached a confluence with another project I am working on, getting some projects set up in GitLab and write up the process for keeping files sync'd. GitLab, even the free version can do a whole heck of a lot, but it doesn't have to. There are some limits on what the free offering allows, space and user wise speaking. The private projects are more limiting than the public projects, at least in terms in users. I haven't looked too much into the public version, so I don't know what sort of locking down you can do. Although I am thinking about putting my old website into one just to see how that works.
Anyway.
Short story long. What are people doing for their backups for posterity?
Comments
Backups? Hot disk copy, removable drive copy, and a cloud copy. That's 4 total copies including the live data. If up to 3 of those fail (and I check), then I can make another copy. It's almost unthinkable that all 4 would fail at the same time.
For posterity? The removable drive is not encrypted. It's on a shelf in my office. My family has access to our shared cloud backups, too. They'll be able to get my stuff. They don't care right now, but I also back up their files the same way.
4 discs in 2 PCs, and OneDrive.
"backups for posterity?"
Virtually everything ever created by humans has disappeared. I know that nothing I've done will outlast me by long unless I put it in physical form that doesn't rely on a digital system and even then it's unlikely to outlive my children. I have lots of media that's totally inaccessible because it would require more cost to try to read it than what I'm likely to recover from it. Even CDs have a finite life and I have some 30 year old CDs that are probably unreadable.
For my close to working space, I have USB drives of various physical systems (both magnetic disk and Flash). Once a year or so I buy a new one and stuff everything from my main system onto it then it rotates through the media firesafe and back out onto the shelf after a few years. For things I don't worry much about I let Microsoft index it all and sell it to whoever will buy it as long as they keep an online copy handy (they call that service "OneDrive"). My wife prefers to let Google index and sell her information ("Google Drive") so she does that, too.
I am by nature a packrat and all of those hard drives that are accumulating are mostly unindexed and will be viewed as noise by my descendants. Most likely it will be thrown away without anybody looking at it (I know that I have files that I haven't looked at in over 20 years and I don't expect anyone to ever see them if I don't show them). Yep, happy thoughts.
jslayton Even CDs have a finite life and I have some 30 year old CDs that are probably unreadable.
I am pretty sure lifespans of physical media are longer, but I get what you are saying. I have CD's that are 25+ years old, that still read, but the file formats are obsolete. So no usuable data in essence.
To answer the question:
I do back all my stuff up to dual layer blue rays, as well as on multiple devices and physical drives. I have one huge project at the moment that is 11.5 gigs and 1200 files of artwork, I am ultra paranoid to lose it. I duplicate it often to three spots.
(I know that I have files that I haven't looked at in over 20 years and I don't expect anyone to ever see them if I don't show them). Yep, happy thoughts.
I feel the same way. I am not even mid-50's and I think about mortality to much, and what my family will do with my stuff. Mostly trash lol.
For my personal backups, I have a backup server at home so everything is backed up to a separate drive system from where the original files are on an hourly basis. It also keeps the versions so I can go back in time up to 10 years if I have stuff like corrupt files that used to be fine and such. I also have 3 additional servers placed various places in Norway that also holds an encrypted version of my backups in case of disaster. I also keep some stuff on cloud services.
Of course, no one but me knows and understands this system, so it is unlikely anyone would be able to access it after my demise, it is intended for me as a personal backup. Even if given access, with all my files, and people not knowing what to look for, or what programs I used to create stuff, it is unlikely to be of any use anyway.
As for stuff like the atlas.. Well, the web page may go down, but the atlas itself have been downloaded thousands of times. Anyone with the zip effectively have the main thing. Images can be exported anew if anyone want a new website.
Having worked in archives a lot back in the 1990s, there were discussions starting even then about preserving electronic files, but no lasting solutions (and the means to store such have changed radically since then too, of course). Unlike hardcopy materials, which can be preserved over relatively long timescales (decades to centuries) with relative ease, electronic media are extremely ephemeral, given the general unreliability of the storage systems currently available, aside from accessibility issues (outdated programs, older media).
Like most folks who've replied so far, I have various versions of files stored on hard drives, flash drives, etc., as working materials, but accept these are not infallible, and will be unlikely to long survive me.
Maybe we should inscribe everything on clay tablets. They seem to last the longest.
That would be an option, although the ones that have survived best have commonly been accidentally baked when the buildings they were in caught fire! That would certainly get rid of most paper and electronic materials as well, of course - so maybe the ancient Sumerians really had electronic computers we don't know about too 😉!
Carved on stone might work as well.
Keep taking the tablets...
This is what I think of, cereal:
OK, sorry for being off-topic there.
To me, the goal of an archive is not to store things forever. I just want to make things available to the next generation. A VHS video tape is not broadly useful now, but they can be converted to digital video files. My own wedding videos on VHS got converted to DVDs a while back. Later, I converted them to MP4 files. Even though the original medium is either useless or destroyed, the content lives on for a little longer with each step. Just like old books that have been scanned into TIFF files and then later run through OCR to make an e-book, sometimes it takes multiple steps over the years. I try to take things in small steps.
This thread shows that maybe there is a great use case for converting CC3 maps into CC4. Just thinking out loud...
KertDawg This thread shows that maybe there is a great use case for converting CC3 maps into CC4. Just thinking out loud...
If you have more than a hundred maps I feel sorry for anyone who would undertake this process.
I converted all the Forgotten Realm Interactive Atlas maps from CC2 to CC2, It was a massive undertaking and they were not massively complex maps.
Maybe writing on diapers for backup storage would be the answer. For I have heard they don't decompose for a hundred years....being in a landfill.