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.
Digital media has a shelf life of 5 years before damage
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.
data you do not legally own
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.
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.