Offline media storage

Light proof metal boxes:

Place for 1000 CDs / DVDs / Blurays and M-Discs From: M-DISC's design is intended to provide archival media longevity.[3][4] M-Disc claims that properly stored M-DISC DVD recordings will last up to 1000 years  Wikipedia

A good drawer will store many of my 4 TB Toshiba USB drives.

For high level EM pulses use metal drawers?

The advantage of drawers is that things cannot easily fall like from shelves.

Anyways even 20 year old CDs I burned still playback, the secret: darkness exposure time multiplied by light intensity like in photography.

The big challenge is to make sure you have playback means I bought an USB floppy drive for the old floppies. USB DVD and Blueray players ? I think those exist too And then USB will become old...

Maybe carve in stone in old underground caves. If aliens land here they will conclude life once existed here...

I mean when trump is allowed to go on making war, goes nuclear.

I've been copying optical media onto magnetic disks as a matter of convenience (I can mount any of 1000+ optical disks just by spinning up one magnetic disk) and as a safeguard against "recordables" getting bitrot.

[So far, I have kept the original media under the bed as a backup of the backup. But, I imagine I will discard them, soon.]

I don't have much faith in thumb drives. Especially higher densities/capacities. Even old SLC have "developed problems" so I don't rely on them (though I have been buying "lots" of "recovery media" (8GB) to use in place of optical media as relying on those drive mechanisms is also becoming tenuous.

I figure a 3.5" disk fitted into a 1"x3.5" slot will only fall out if the shelf unit falls over. There, the design issue will be ensuring the "shelf" is not tall and slender but more "squat" to keep the center of mass low.

But, storing lots of drives "cold" almost feels sinful.

I have kept my writeable media in black tyvex-like sleeves in boxes salvaged from the USPS (one of their "fixed price" boxes is exactly as wide as sleeved optical media). You need an ordered list, though, to locate a specific medium (and have to take care to replace it in the spot from which it came!)

I still have an *8* inch, NIB (floppy) drive (with electromechanical lock on the door! I used this with a large disk cache on a Z80 machine to prevent the media from being removed until the cache was explicitly flushed to the medium). But, I think the magnetic media of interest has long since been transcribed so the drive is redundant.

My EPROM programmer requires 3.5" floppies to operate so I keep a laptop with 3.5" drive on hand for that.

Without a doubt, *the* long-term interface is a NIC. It's as close to ubiquitous as you can get, has a long history with no foreseeable end in sight (in terms of hardware and protocols)

I think SATA/SAS drives will have available kit for a while (even if salvaged; it's an electronic interface so nothing mechanical on which to rely). And, damn near any box with at least one SATA/SAS interface will almost certainly have a NIC so getting to the data from another box doesn't rely on having a "special" interface on that box!

I'm more worried about the rapidly increasing capacities; I won't use anything bigger than ~8T as it just takes too long to transfer all of the content to another box (8T/200MB/s=11hrs). I've been piling up 14T drives as I can't think of anything to put *on* them (that I would be willing to wait to recover!)

Yes, some oif fthse thub drives failed on me But those Tisiba 4TB are good old spinng magnetics

have 4 in use now, no probelems, 2 on 24/7 one for many years? Thing spins down if no data exchange.

Yes I have q text file 'dvd list,

This is an example of an entry (box was almost full hosts 100 discs)

998 Tue Oct 8 12:43:07 CEST 2019 BD-R25GB Mediarange 4x inkjet printable LG BH10LS38 PLEASE STOP ANY RTL_SDR write data errors observed when that is running! Make sure you habve enough disk space. dd if=/dev/zero bs=100000000 count=242 > bluray.iso mke2fs bluray.iso mount -o loop=/dev/loop0 bluray.iso /mnt/loop cp ... /mnt/loop/ du /mnt/loop #umount /dev/loop0 umount /mnt/loop cd /mnt/sda1/video/satellite growisofs -speed=4 -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvd=bluray.iso dvdimagecmp -a bluray.iso -b /dev/dvd # df /dev/loop0 23261268 21022524 1057104 96% /mnt/loop # l/mnt/loop/ total 20977548

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 19095 May 7 23:33 xinutop_manual.txt

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4385000000 Jul 1 18:01 freibeuter_des_todes_german.ts amovie

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 58 Jul 11 10:40 xinutop-nav-x86-2.4.img.md5

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 682624000 Jul 11 10:44 xinutop-nav-x86-2.4.img

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4294705152 Sep 8 01:51 stones_havana_NPO_3-20190907213907-.mts amovie

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 627385344 Sep 8 02:28 stones_havana_NPO_3-20190907213907-.mts1 amovie

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3949971456 Sep 8 05:59 stones_havana_NPO_3-20190907235958-.mts amovie

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1993500000 Sep 24 16:53 the_great_wall_2016.ts amovie

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2354400000 Oct 3 17:05 last_man_standing_1996.ts amovie

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3172370000 Oct 8 12:39 a_cure_for_wellness_2016__german.ts amovie When you make DVS or other backups, make sure you do not include personal stuff in it That is whey I make a file system as above and clear the entry like this dd if=/dev/zero bs=100000000 count=242 > bluray.iso mke2fs bluray.iso mount -o loop=/dev/loop0 bluray.iso /mnt/loop

Unfortunately my 8 inch drive that I used for my Z80 sysytem is no more. Some stuff I did backup though

Ah! only need a serial port ;-)

I leave most of my spindles "off", only powering up the device that contains them when I need to access something stored on them.

My workstations each have 4 drives but even those don't run 24/7 -- spinning down when I walk away from the machine.

I rescue SAS (and some SATA) "enterprise" drives -- 33 4TB drives last month, each with four or five power-on-hours (i.e., essentially "new")

I don't backup to optical media -- too small for anything but an incremental backup (and I *hate* those!)

My DVDs are usually archives of completed projects -- all the datasheets, tools, sources, schematics, invoices, receipts, etc. I don't keep much "paper" so need some way of remembering what was involved.

I've taken to just keeping entire VMs so I can resume work with a particular project *in* the environment that was in place when I last worked on it. I can quickly duplicate a VMDK and then play around without worrying about corrupting the archive of the project.

When I discard media, I have a tool that I built (for a nonprofit) that scrubs the disk clean -- including HBA, DSO, etc. If it "discovers" that some number of sectors have been remapped (I never use a disk with remapped sectors so anything remapped MIGHT contain remnants of prior content), then the disk gets physically destroyed (drilled or shredded).

[I've encountered too many discarded machines that have NOT been scrubbed and wonder what their prior owners were thinking - or NOT thinking -- when they tossed it out with personal information.]

I had trouble backing up the 8" media from the ZDS's (hard sectored floppies). But, resorted to transfer via XMODEM.

But, in recent years, rely on network boot protocols for most of the devices I design (putting just a tiny bit in a boot rom to bring the network on-line).