my mother in law wants to know what kind of external drive she should get to store ancestry documents long-term.

boy, an archivist is the last person you want to ask that.

her: "should I buy a USB stick or an external drive?"

me: ALL STORAGE IS CONSTANTLY DECAYING AND CANNOT BE TRUSTED

@foone hm. etching things into sapphire is probably as far as we can get towards "storage that isn't decaying"...

@whitequark can I get a USB sapphire etcher that my mother-in-law can use, though? :)

@foone

Isn't the most available current answer do a modest print run of a book with the data of interested on good quality paper and distribute it to several locations?

There's some etch it into glass or cermaic storage options that are being promised, but I'm not sure us normal people can touch them yet.

@foone What about tablets (clay)?

@foone

I'd just point them at "M Disc" Blue-rays and say they should make a 2nd copy on a regular HDD and move it to something else in 10 to 15 years...

https://www.amazon.de/Verbatim-Blu-ray-Disc-Schreibgeschwindigkeit-Blu-ray-Disks-Audiodateien/dp/B01E0CUU1C

@foone

I was recently going through old data and leaving stuff laying unpowered for almost 10 years destroys quite a lot of data. CDs/DVDs included (esp. from Warner Bros apparently)

@foone give me a bit

@whitequark wow, the glasgow can do anything!

@whitequark bad idea:

glasgow to bubble memory applet

@foone Tell her she needs to decomp it and print it out in binary.

@foone I was once present for a time capsule opening from 100 years prior. Unfortunately, the subsequent hundred-year time capsule was to include a flash drive. I didn't have the energy to tell them.

@foone I've literally considered it

@whitequark @foone even assuming it was perfectly reliable, it's not going to be fast...

I think I'm just going to tell her to get an external spinning-rust drive. They've got decent powered-off stability, and realistically she's going to have the files stored on both her computer and the external drive.

(and the internal drive in the computer failing is what scares her)

I could tell her to use an online backup service but for legal reasons I cannot recommend any of those anymore

@foone recommend 2 of them + RAID.

@theorangetheme yeah, that's... that's absolutely not going to work.

@foone RAID?

@foone Or get her a tape drive and some LTO tapes. Then throwing them a bit too hard isn't an issue either.

And from previous work experience even average users are quite able to work with LTO tapes (maybe even bette as they're probably already used to video tapes and such anyway...)

she's too far away for my to admin a RAID NAS or similar and honestly I don't really want to.

@foone

Well you could just tell them to get a DAS (Directly Attached Storage) with RAID-1 then?

You know one of these "attaches via USB and does a RAID-1 internally" thingies where you just slot two HDDs into? I think WD also sold some of them (would have to check though).

@foone

for long-term archival: print ink on acid-free paper, single sided

In digital form: I've had good results with one-time-writable CD-ROM, lasting 30+ years

@foone You mean she doesn't have access to a laser to engrave a diamond with and a deep underground cave network in the arctic circle?

@foone Archival BluRay media is a thing. I have often wondered if you could take 12 disks and do a double parity stack. (any two disks could end up unreadable and you could still recover the data). That would be software raid and would take a while to write out. Given the huge size of disks these days I'd consider just writing 12 50GiB images with RAID6 of a .5TB dataset. Recovery would be the reverse, read in the 12 disks and then recover.

@foone Probably the right thing to do here is to miss the opportunity to recommend a tape library - yes.

@foone archival grade BD-r disks, 25GB/disk, store sealed with desiccant for estimated ~100 year lifetime, they run about $1-$2 per disk. (you can get 100GB ones but they're like $10/disk)

@foone I'm not sure if Internet Archive is a good long-term choice for public documents, but it will probably last longer than anything I can personally maintain.

https://archive.org/

@foone yup I think external spinning rust drive is the right answer of you don't want her to constantly recopy optical media as a hedge against bit rot

it turns out she mainly wanted to copy files off her computer because her computer was "too slow" (it's an old laptop running windows, of course it's slow. Also, she owned it back when she smoked, I'd be surprised if the fans still spin) and the files she wants to move are "just in case ancestry dot com goes down".

mom, unless they nuke utah, ancestry dot com is not going to lose your records

@foone the chances of utah being nuked are not zero. there is a possibility but if it does happen i don't think that she has a copy of the manifest of the ship her great great grandfather arrived on will matter that much

@ukscone yeah exactly. it's not impossible, but if it does happen, there will be more to worry about than what your great-great-grandfather's 6th child was named

@foone Magnetic tape probably.

@foone "Go not to the elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes."

@foone

I think they may have ceased manufacture, but the 3.5 inch removable magneto-optical drives were available in 128MB - 2.6 GB, fully backward compatible (apart from the 128MB ones being read-only on the "Gigamo" 1.3 and 2.6 GB drives), IDE and SCSI interfaces on the earlier versions, USB available on later ones, and an estimated 40 year lifespan for the media. (Plus impervious to stray magnetic fields.) I use them (still) for backups. 3:O)> Drive failure might be a future issue. 3:O(>

@foone When my mom asked me the best way to preserve the family photos she's been scanning, my advice was to distribute the full set to as many family members as possible. That's ultimately the best way to keep family information like that alive IMO.

@pmc yeah, maybe I should suggest she get two of them and mail one to us.

@foone @ukscone

Me when I found Utah's archives mentioned in Spain's syllabus for Archives 😮

Me when I searched more about Granite Mountain 😮 😮 😮 😮 😮

@foone

Or she could do what my dad has done.

Print all of Ancestry.com out and store in folders.

Hand draw your family tree, with all 487 relatives. Redraw when you find someone new.

@foone I've been using some second hand salvaged desktop HDDs as my server drives for about three years now with no backup strategy, you're telling me that's a bad idea?

@zrb "losing all your data" is A backup strategy, it's just not a good one

@foone

Ancestry documents: print them on a quality laser printer on acid-neutral paper. Fire safe for storage.

No electronic media is sure to be readable 100 years from now, but toner on paper stored in the dark should be fine.

@wouter eh, not really? they've changed hands a bunch, I imagine they'd just get bought by another investment fund and/or the mormon church

@dysfun @whitequark @foone well, each choice is a compromise. Here we want data that will be available forever. What is a couple hours of write time whe compared to forever?

@gkrnours @whitequark @foone it's the read i'm worried about

@foone M-Disc? :)