I have backups on a backup hard drive and also synced to B2, but I am thinking about backing up to some format to put in the cupboard.
The issue I see is that if I don’t have a catastrophic failure and instead just accidentally delete some files one day while organising and don’t realise, at some point the oldest backup state is removed and the files are gone.
The other thing is if I get hit by a bus and no one can work out how to decrypt a backup or whatever.
So I’m thinking of a plain old unencrypted copy of photos etc that anyone could find and use. Bonus points if I can just do a new CD or whatever each year with additions.
I have about 700GB of photos and videos which is the main content I’m concerned about. Do people use DVDs for this or is there something bigger? I am adding 60GB or more each year, would be nice to do one annual addition or something like that.
Checksums. A good filesystem will do this for you, but you can do it yourself if you want.
If you sync a drive with rsync or something periodically, it’ll replace files with different checksums, fixing any corruption as you go. Then smart tests should tell you if there’s any corruption the drive is aware of. I’m sure automated backup tools have options for this.
I specifically don’t want to be touching previous files on the drive, it should be addition only. So I may need to write a script to do the checks, or compare against a mirror drive. I can do this with the right filesystem, but I’m worried that if I use a filesystem not readable by Windows then it may not be layman-proof enough.