this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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Digital degrades faster than physical, and if youre trying to preserve things you do not want to be leaving it in a digital rental storage.
Especially files that you license, not technically actually own, like almost all digital games.
Citation needed.
Degradation can be handled by using filesystems (ZFS, BTRFS) and hardware (ECC RAM) to catch and fix degradation. Any cloud storage system worth paying for will do that for you. I trust something like Backblaze far more than DVD for data storage.
Digital media has a shelf life of 5 years before damage, even sooner if the hard drive sits unrun. CDs have 50, and thats just the rewritables.
If you are trusting a for-profit company to maintain your preservation attempts, youre as dumb as those poor bastards stuck with discontinued and unsupported eye and ear implants who suddenly lost vision and hearing when the company stopped maintaining the software.
Especially if you are trying to preserve any data you legally do not own. They arent your friend, youre barely their customer, and they will dump you and your data the second it might make them more money or cause them less legal trouble.
Again, citation needed.
This really depends on how the data is stored. If it's on a crappy USB drive, 5 years is generous. If it's on a ZFS or BTRFS drive in RAID with ECC RAM and hardware is replaced as it fails, it'll last potentially indefinitely.
And 50 years is really generous. I've lost, broken, or damaged most of the game disks I've ever owned, and I'm far younger than 50yo. Yeah, if you don't touch it and leave it in a box for 50 years, it'll probably survive (assuming you don't have a fire or something), but I'm guessing that's not going to be the case.
If it's pirated, you can probably just re-pirate it in 50 years. If you just lost the license due to a company going under, you're unlikely to be sued.
Regardless, it's easy to encrypt your data so scans don't pick it up. Just store the keys (and instructions so you remember) in a few other places. Many services offer a free bottom tier, and keys are unlikely to be more than a few kilobytes.
I know you can google "X media option degredation." You do not need me to link you to a search engine. If youre advocating methods of preservation, you should already know this information.
But if you think paying a company for cloud storage is "potentially indefinite," I dont think you should be giving preservation advice.
Especially with a sentence like "you can probably just re-pirate it in 50 years." Thats so completely nonsensical.
How so? I can still pirate games from 20-30 years ago, probably further back. If you're going to pirate anyway, let other people store the files for you.
But if you're not going to pirate, you shouldn't have to worry about storage services taking down your files. If there's a claim against it somehow, you can show evidence that you purchased it legally and you're good. If you're worried, just encrypt it and their scanners won't find it so they'd need to be tipped off that it contains illegal content (and likely need a warrant to attempt to decrypt).
Any why would paying a company to store things be poor advice long term? If you're worried about the company going under, duplicate it across services (doubles your costs). You can also keep local backups as well, like DVDs, but I certainly trust the company more than my personal storage solution.
Because if your preservation method is "let other people do it for me and Ill pirate it when I want it," you arent preserving anything. Full stop, that is not preservation. Someone else is doing that for you. In the same way "just buy your veggies from safeway" isnt home grown gardening.
You are on lemmy, I dont really think I should explain to you why you cannot trust a public profit driven company to have your interests at heart. They are capable of just deleting your data the second it benefits them to do so, and you have no real recourse or defense from that. Personal usage is fine, and taking that risk is fine, but that is not adequate preservation of media. Youre not preserving things.
Duplicates are also sort of an expected precaution for preservation. If you are preserving media, you should have at least 1 duplicate, and 3 copies is probably ideal.
Like. If you dont want the hassle of trying to preserve things thats fine. But preservation is something you shouldnt take lightly if youre trying to do it, because your copy may be the only surviving copy a century or longer from now.
I don't see what that has to do with anything.
I trust interests when my interests align with theirs, and I don't when they don't. A social media company profits from ads, so their interests will always lie with the advertisers. I used Reddit because it had the content I wanted (mostly technical and product advice), and I left when it was clear they cared more about profits than customer experience (hated new Reddit and their mobile, which were tuned to deliver more ads).
I'm not on lemmy to "stick it to the man," I'm on lemmy because I hate ads and I dislike Reddit's app. If a company offered me a better experience (the experience here is okay, but still kinda sucks), I'd totally go with them. I value anonymity, and lemmy so far delivers enough content while providing anonymity, so I use it.
With a storage company, my interests directly align with theirs. They want to sell to more storage space, and I want to buy storage space. Them screwing me over means they lose that storage customer. There's plenty of competition as well, so I'm going to pick the one that has the lowest price for the features I need, such as redundancy, resiliency, and availability. Why would they delete my data? That's what's keeping them in business...
That said, I won't go with Google because they have a track record for abandoning products and they're an advertising company, so my interests don't align with theirs. If Backblaze buys an advertising company or something, yeah, maybe I'd bail. But their business is storage, so them abandoning storage customers makes no sense.
Yeah, if you're trying to preserve things for a century or more, you'll want a lot more redundancy. That means a mix of:
DVDs aren't going to cut it. If you just want something to backed up in case a digital platform revokes licenses or something (i.e. literally what were talking about), an off-site backup company is going to be better than whatever you roll yourself at home in terms of a mix of convenience, redundancy, resiliency, and cost. That's what they do, and they're pretty efficient at it.
I'm super excited about things like IPFS taking off for reducing the barrier (and cost) for digital backup, but until then, centralized, managed storage is going to be a better bet for most people than a local NAS (or worse, a random USB drive) or physical media solution. The redundancy alone is worth it.