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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • It’s pretty dependent on humidity and temperature, so a DVD buried in a well sealed plastic bag with a desiccant pack is actually in good conditions. No light, generally cool, and low humidity are perfect.

    A hard drive has a lot of moving parts that must work and are basically impossible to replace. With optical media you’re just storing the platters, and I’m sure you’ll still be able to track down a drive somewhere. You can still find VHS players and those have been obsolete for 25 years.


  • traches@sh.itjust.workstoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    4 months ago

    I’d go with optical media here. Probably multiple capsules.

    • M-Disk (DVD if it will fit, otherwise Blu-ray)
    • Make an encrypted archive of your data. Strong password - I suggest diceware with 8 or more words so you might remember it in 30 years
    • Use DVDisaster to add parity data. You sacrifice some space, but you get error tolerance in exchange
    • Wrap the disks up in good jewel cases, well sealed plastic, along with some good big silica gel desiccant packs.
    • Put all that in the smallest durable, airtight container you can
    • stash somewhere it probably won’t be disturbed for a few decades. Memorize.
    • destroy all evidence you did this.


  • I strongly recommend ZFS as a filesystem for this as it can handle your sync, backup, and quota needs very well. It also has data integrity guarantees that should frankly be table stakes in this application. Truenas is an easy way to accomplish this, and it can run docker containers and VMs if you like.

    Tailscale is a great way to connect them all, and connect to your nas when you aren’t home. You can share devices between tailnets, so you don’t all have to be on the same Tailscale account.

    I’ll caution against nextcloud, it has a zillion features but in my experience it isn’t actually that good at syncing files. It’s complicated to set up, complicated to maintain, and there are frequent bugs. Consider just using SMB file sharing (built into truenas), or an application that only syncs files without trying to be an entire office suite as well.

    For your drive layouts, I’d go with big drives in a mirror. This keeps your power and physical space requirements low. If you want, ZFS can also transparently put metadata and small files on SSDs for better latency and less drive thrashing. (These should also be mirrored.) Do not add an L2ARC drive, it is rarely helpful.

    The boxes are kinda up to you. Avoid USB enclosures if at all possible. Truenas can be installed on most prebuilt NAS boxes other than synology, presuming it meets the requirements. You can also build your own. Hot swap is nice, and a must-have if you need normies to work on it. Label the drive serial number on the outside so you can tell them apart. Don’t go for less than 4 bays, and more is better even if you don’t need them yet. You want as much RAM as feasibly possible; ZFS uses it for caching, and it gives you room to run containers and VMs.