Howdy folks, been a while!
I have a network-attached storage of the homemade, extremely hacked kind. It almost looks like it shouldn't work but it's been doing fine for a couple of years by now and with no sign of stopping any time soon.
I've been working on backing it up for the last few months (It's actually not that much data, I'm just very slow) by cataloging everything, compressing what I can and planning other stuff like what formats to use, how to tier stuff (some stuff is way more important than others) and where to put it in the first place.
As I looked up a good cold storage solution the only conclusion that comes is that everything, in one way or another, will definitely and inexorably fail.
That makes sense, but it somehow put a weird dread in me which I couldn't explain, until I stumbled somehow on the Wikipedia page for the concept of "memento mori" and then everything clicked.
Memento mori [...] is an artistic or symbolic trope acting as a reminder of the inevitability of death.
Backing up, in a way, has the same effect: it's a stark reminder of the inevitability of (digital) death. Your hard drives will one day fail. Your back up will one day fail, too.
Hell, if you think about it, data preservation itself, hot or cold that is, revolves about this concept, just applied to other hardware: that website will stop existing, your desktop might fail and so on.
In a way, long-term preservation all boils down to making data last enough that it will at least live as much as you do or, in other words, make it so that you fail before your data.
At least, we can still try to refresh stuff and make multiple copies but, every time I SSH into my NAS, the thought is always there in the back of my mind, expanding into life itself.
That's quite grim to me.
~bartender, how about some apple juice today? Thank you.
I've been thinking about this a lot recently, and maybe "Memento mori" is what I needed to hear. I want to go into archiving, but I think generally it's more about "preservation to serve the future generations" rather than "preservation just because." If something is no longer serving me or someone else, than maybe it's okay to let it go.
Some related what-might-be-called "non-attachment news" I"ve found making increasing sense with increasing age: the best storage solution is to have nothing to save.
Indeed, the less one archives the better.
As usual, for one reason or another I can't exactly get rid of everything, but being mindful about it helps a lot. Your messages are really straight to the point and your life experience shows, thank you :D
My home NAS has multiple uses and stores wildly different kind of stuff. That's exactly why I'm intending to "tier" it, somehow.
I'm planning to backup the absolute essential stuff onto a few blu-rays, hoping that they require as less space and maintenance possible, while the less important stuff stays in some spare hard disk or something, and the rest simply gets whatever's left.
This last part usually amounts to preservation of some software repository or Youtube channels I like, as both of those have a surprisingly low shelf life anyways (especially the latter). As you said entropy always wins, but hard disks' natural demagnetization will probably last longer than most of the "frivolous" stuff I'm preserving. One day, they will be the Internet Archive's "problem" and I will probably have helped quite a few people, so I consider that a win :D
Oh, wow... "blu-ray" haven't heard/seen that term in a while!
I never got past DVD's as storage medium. I'm pretty sure I still have a CD/DVD burner (is that what they were/are called?). Can't remember that last time I used it.
Am I remembering correctly that writing/burning one is a one-time even, i.e. you can't add more later? Was a file system created thereupon at the same time?
Wow... I'm pretty sure I knew such things once upon a time.. and now... *SCRAPHEAP*.... :-)
I'm pretty sure I still have a CD/DVD burner (is that what they were/are called?)
It looks like the most "correct" term would be recorder, but everybody just calls them burners so, yes, that's what they're called :)
Am I remembering correctly that writing/burning one is a one-time even, i.e. you can't add more later? Was a file system created thereupon at the same time?
For my usecase, yes, but multi-session disks (basically, "half-written" disks with some very simple journaling thrown in) were definitely a thing for CDs. I haven't properly investigated whether an equivalent exists for BD-Rs but it looks like it from a quick search.
Also, there are BD-REs, (Recordable Erasable) which are just like CD-RWs (ReWritable), but apparently they're less durable in the long term (and personally a bit scary to handle, imagine overwriting one by accident, the "Write Once Read Many" aspect is a feature IMO).
From what I can tell, Blu-Rays are a quite niche market (the burner costed a bit and I had to order the disks from a weird specialized local seller to get a good price), but they're definitely not dead (I just bought a USB-C burner!). It also looks like the whole market is archival-oriented so I think that's a good sign :D
All I know is that once meaningful data/content loses its pull much more quickly than discs lose their data.
For example, I'll take (this happened yesterday) spending time seeing the youngest grandchild taking first steps letting go of the swimming pool ladder rail - with looks and facial expressions of infinite wonder peppered with mild fear and/or indecision - over digging through formerly meaningful "content" that at best might occasionally evoke a few moments of "oh yeah... *that*...".
In a way, storage solutions provide ways to put a lot of effort into saving content for a person we'll no longer be anyway. We forget that although the content won't change, we will. We would have to save the current state of ourselves alongside instances of same-time-frame content, then be able to reload that state, and *then* dive into said content to fully appreciate it.
But maybe there's a way to sufficiently categorize "who I am right now" in a way that revisiting it could approach "reloading it unto becoming it"? It would take a lot of imagination and denial (of current state), perhaps something akin to "The Method" in acting? So one would first digest a file containing a sufficiently robust description of "self" at the time, and said "method" would seemingly "make it so"... and than one would quickly digest the All Important Content before doubts about truly being the former instantiation of self started setting in to wreck the, well.. *delusional* party....
It's comprickated, this individuality thang! :-)
All I know is that once meaningful data/content loses its pull much more quickly than discs lose their data.
Yeah, that's why I'll stick with blu-rays only with "long term" stuff... and it's surprisingly difficult finding stuff worthy of that name! Also, 25 GBs is way more than I thought.
In general, with the modern version of "memories" (a shitload of photos one will never see in their lifetime), there's definitely some part of looking/traveling back for whatever reason, which I do myself too.
Shoot, thinking about it, nostalgia is literally temporarily "rolling back" into a previous version of self. That's quite wild.
I don't take many "modern memories"; at most I scrape the bottom of the disk into a directory whenever a big change happens to my computer.
The real gold instead for me are my projects, which are both memories and past references, a trampoline for new and exciting stuff; that must be why I care so much to document them so heavily, be it with a truckload of comments or whatnot.
You know what, I think I might put all of my projects in the disk, or at least the done (and mostly "old") ones. Yeah, that will do.
Much more philosophical. I agree, too. Also, can't lose what you don't forget. No hoarding there, either ha
Also, can't lose what you don't forget.
This is a really nice way of putting it. Despite my light data-hoarding (I've barely consumed a TB, and half of it is fire-and-forget video channel scraping), my personal data is quite little; there are people who take thousands of pictures that they'll never see, filling way more that even my laptop could store.
I'm firmly into the "appreciate the moment" club. That's probably why I can even afford to put the really personal stuff (including my software projects) into a few small blu-ray tops.
That's incredibly profound.
Things not created / Can't be saved or recovered / Nor can they be lost
In addition, things saved are a burden. Whether in physical or digital realms, entropy lives and reigns. No matter the organization strategy, labeling/nesting eventually becomes inadequate, new labeling/nesting needs wind up requiring gobs of reorganization effort. Invariably, old labels/nesting don't quite fit in with the new, requiring unsettling compromises. And of course mistakes will be made, leading unto future confusion.
Paradise - aka peace of mind - lost, peoples!
Furthermore, how about all that time/effort that could have been better spent on new creation(s)?
That new character you're developing? What amazing additional qualities it *might* have had had you applied the time/effort to *it* that, instead, you blew on trying to find a meme you once thought so affected you that it would guide your ongoing enlightenment for all eternity - if not longer!
(Oh, and by the way, *if* you found it, it didn't mean nearly as much as you thought it once did anyway, right?)
Let it go. In the context of "practice makes perfect", you're creating better today than you did yesterday anyway. Cast aside the lead vest of permanence! Become airborne today!
hi shoebx, yea I store things locally for fast access and zero downloads time, but beyond that nothing long-term. I mean I suppose some items get back up over and over again, but I watch/consume them over and over again. Kind of like localized streaming. When a video or music thing is "done with", I delete them.
I think NAS are effectively digital storage sheds for the media hoarder, not to piss on someone's library or (as some claim, "ingenious" fle-naming methods) but any video/song(s) I am done with for a long period of time, I delete as they're online one spot or another indefinitely, anyway.
~bartender, red eye coffee. Full day of clubhouse today with a million things to do, ha
I think NAS are effectively digital storage sheds for the media hoarder
Yeah, pretty much. I'm not a huge media hoarder in any regard. I tend to preserve stuff at risk or that I really appreciate so that it can be uploaded somewhere to be consulted once again, outside of my personal data and stuff like that. Storage's cheap and the Internet is way more ephemeral than people believe.
I already saved a bunch of media from being lost, with one channel being watched quite periodically in my circle, so I've already got enough justifications to spend time with my NAS.
Also, tangentially, setting a server up is fun :D