You can spend a lot of time collecting items in your family archive, recording your family history, and labeling photographs, but none of your efforts will be worth anything in the end, if all of your data disappears. We were reminded of this recently, when we read about our local PBS station losing access to over 50TB of archival footage and other documents. If an organization as big and sophisticated as Nine PBS can lose access to their archive, through no fault of their own, what does that mean for the rest of us? We are not trying to become a technology blog here, but we thought it might be illustrative to talk about how we protect our own family archive.
First, all of our artifacts have been photographed, scanned, or digitized in some other way, and they are stored on a server that we own and control. This is important because tech companies go out of business every day, and that is a basket you don’t want all of your eggs in. That is not to say that we don’t use cloud storage where it makes sense. We generally follow the so-called 3-2-1 rule when it comes to making backups of our data. This means keeping three copies of our data on two different media types, with at least one copy stored off-site. By the way, we do not recommend using flash memory devices (such as thumb drives or SSDs) for long term storage of critical data.
When we upgraded our server a few years ago, we kept the old one and we now use it as the second backup for most of our data, and we have the option to eventually move it off-site. For the rest, we in fact use Amazon’s Glacier service because it’s convenient (as the software came pre-installed on our server) and relatively inexpensive, although the monthly cost rises as our data needs grow.
At some point we may revisit this decision, but for now the expense is reasonable. Because it is important to consider what peace of mind is worth to you. Imagine a future scenario, after some catastrophic data loss, and ask your future self, what would you pay to have your data back? The first time your irreplaceable data is lost and then recovered, the price you have been paying all along suddenly seems like a great investment, no matter how high it might be.
When it comes to most of our off-site data, we chose to use M-Discs. If you are not familiar with M-Discs, they are an optical storage medium identical to DVDs. However, the recordable DVDs that you can buy at Office Depot or at Costco contain a type of organic dye that will typically deteriorate after 20-25 years, whereas M-discs are formulated from a material that is designed to last for up to 1,000 years. So they are an attractive option if you are looking for longer-term storage, and they are small, so it is easy to transport and store them at an off-site location. We label each disc with a unique inventory code and maintain a spreadsheet (which also gets backed up) with descriptions of the contents of each disc. A printed copy of this spreadsheet is kept with physical discs at a family member’s house. If we were to suffer a fire or some other disaster, we could rebuild our entire archive from these discs.
One last note: once you have established your backup regime, it is critical that you test your backups on a regular basis (we have chosen to do this every six months). Your test strategy should simulate the loss of some segment of your data – for instance a failed hard drive – and then determine how well (and how quickly) you can recover the lost data and get back to normal operations. Don’t disregard this testing! You don’t want to discover that you overlooked something important in your backup system the first time you have a real loss of data.
We hope this information has been helpful, and if you have any further questions about our backup strategy, please leave us a comment below.
