I saved the best of my VHS for a long time. I couldn’t get them for a while as I was moving around. The boxes were in a flood, but the tapes were at the top. Unfortunately, my yearbooks were at the bottom. Anyway, I finally got them out of my mom’s basement where she’d been holding them for me. This was a couple weeks ago.
I was excited to see all those old movies again, but unfortunately I noticed on second glance that the film inside the tapes were either spotted white or completely white. That was the day that I learned that VHS tapes could actually rot. Its a shame…
You need three copies of your data: the working copy, the nightly backup, and the offsite backup in case of natural disaster. I physically mailed a drive to my father in another state in case my building catches fire. You can also use a safe deposit box or give a drive to a friend who is geologically separated from your location.
Notice: recent info suggests that SSDs suffer bit-rot when not powered. Not enough confirmed info at this time for me to go into it further, but please rewrite important data from time to time.
Just stared backing up my 500+ vhs movies
Genuine question, do people actually care about backing up media that much? I don’t get it. Everything I actually care about personally I can fit on a thumbdrive and a box of notebooks.
I feel it. Most of the stuff I care about is random projects of mine, most of which are on github. The biggest downside of me losing my local files is honestly just significant, but not insurmountable inconvenience.
If you don’t want to keep it that’s fine, but if you have any recordings of commercial media (like say VHS tape recordings of broadcast TV) it would be of major help and contribution if you at least go through what you have and see if any of it is !lostmedia@lemmy.world
https://lostmediawiki.com/Home
You’d be surprised at the things people are looking for, from old TV ads to TV channel interstitials and Bumpers to TV show episodes that aired once and was pulled, lost and never shown again
Tbf that’s the matter of taste/preference. I’m have the completely opposite view to yours - I’m really attached to old vids, drawings, texts (that I made myself when I was younger). So I store and backup everything, even things most people would think of as unserious/unnecessary. It feels like a part of myself, a part of my story, you know, so I would be very upset if I lost it. And I can understand if someone have attachment to old films, books etc. I would say archiving old stuff is kind of a hobby in itself.
Although that being said, I can see advantages of your style - mainly less spending money on harddrives and time of setting them up and backing up stuff :)
Don’t get me wrong - I am super sentimental, and can really get lost going down memory lane. I spend probably most of my mental life living in the past. But yeah, I guess the stuff I do preserve (99% text) just doesn’t take up much room at all.
I consider most data on my devices as replaceable, I would only back any of it up if the effort to replace it was much harder than the effort to back it up.
Also, Start with backing up all the stuff you never backed up in the first place
I have 5-1/4" floppies from the mid 80’s that still work.
Media store is a 12TB and an 8TB that dump into a 20TB that sits cold all but once a month.
My more immediate data that I need day to day is in a synced Documents folder across four different devices. I don’t back it up, per se, I just make it impossible to lose.
So glad that I don’t have much important data, a very simple bash script backs up stuff that kinda matters (do I need that 8 year old minecraft save?) and it totals about 30GB currently.
The actually important bit is a 57kB Keepass database. Plus 50MB of compressed/encrypted data of questionable importance - literally never decrypted them other than to test it was readable, but I have been told these documents are “important” so whatever. They are there and the originals burned because I don’t want to keep a shitload of paperwork around that looks worthless to me. Got a small folder for stuff that probably should be kept like birth certificates, when that folder gets full I sort and the least important stuff is recorded digitally and physical copies destroyed.
I totally won’t seed or pirate anything
someone still has to be the source. and there are a lot of companies out there that don’t care about preserving their stuff.
yes and when that source is there, everyone who downloads it gets it for free and that’s bad!
then the new people who have it can help others get it for free and that’s also bad!
proton VPN, mullvad VPN, iVPN…and even shitty Torguard’s proxy service can be helpful…not the VPN though, their VPN is fast, but it leaks and even when they’re shown that it leaks they’ll tell you it isn’t happening just because you used a tester they didn’t know about…which is why you shouldn’t use those…they allow you to safely download things without paying…that would be bad!
don’t connect through proxies based in countries where it’s legal to do that either! that would be even worse to do!
Currently ripping all episodes of The Twilight Zone from the box set.
flash storage too! idk the specifics but I think flash storage has a lifespan of around 15 years
in practice; go backup old flash drives and game cartridges (ex: DS and 3DS cards)
What’s a good medium to back up to, assuming I don’t want to pay for a RAID setup?
To be fair, RAID is not backup for itself but if they have their stuff on a computer and then sync it to a NAS RAID then that’s backup.
Yeah, the idea is that you should have another copy that is disconnected from the main one, if you have that then you do have a backup.
The best way is to just backup to multiple locations and actively manage it. RAID at the backup destination is nice because it means that if a disk fails, you don’t immediately lose everything there. But if you have multiple places where that data lives then it’s not the end of the world to just re-create the backup.
If you want to get into true archival solutions(way more expensive than setting up a RAID) then you’re looking at things like M-Disc and LTO tape
I went M-Disc. Need a special burner and disks cost me $30NZD each or about $18USD for 100GB.
They are write once (I fucked up two early on) but they should last 100+ years. I burnt about 1TB, and made two copies (one for offsite storage). It was not cheap.
Here to plug SpinRite for the health of your backups
AFAIK this doesn’t apply to “pocked” CDs/dvds made from a manufacturer. If you burned writable/rewritable it can rot.
Some manufactured DVDs can go bad too.
I think it’s always possible.
This link should come bundled with this meme:
https://b3n.org/automatic-ripping-machine/
It can be installed on pretty much any old device with a disc drive.
While you are repurposing this device you can also hook it up to your tv and use it as a normal dvd drive. However if you do happen to play DVDs from your local library make sure to delete the automatically ripped files afterwards because keeping those might be illegal.
