Archiving tips & tricks

 

1. Don’t digitally store your files (document, photos, and videos) in a proprietary format.

Use open sourced ones.

 

2. Regardless of the quality, type, temperature of storage, it’s inevitable that ferromagnetic depolarization kills hard disc drives (HDDs) and SDDs; it kills them slowly, but surely; it does so in a process similar to how magnets lose their magnetism overtime.

The thing that ferromagnetic depolarization doesn’t kill is optical storage, aka CDs.

 

3. Archive data that you:

(i) created;

(ii) spent a lot of time on;

(iii) get anxious over thinking about the possibility of losing it

 

4. Your first choice of optical storage should be M-discs; if there aren’t any, take Vebratim’s Blue ray BD-R 25GB×6 discs.

If you are going to archive on blue-ray, use commercial blue-ray discs burners instead of consumer blue-ray discs burners for more reliable results.

Archival optical discs are in a middle point of durability & affordability to anyone wanting to archive their data.

Blue-ray writer/burner drive to burn/write data on a blue-ray disc.

 

5. Remember the “3-2-1” rule whenever archiving data:

3 copies of data, on 2 types of media storage (optical, flash, paper, etc), with 1 copy off-site for disaster recovery..

Also remember “2 is 1, and 1 is none”; always assume your last comy is on the verge of having some kind of critical failure and being lost to time.