Theoretically, they need tl be re-written every few years at most. Read everything off, format and re-write. Checking for corruption would be adviasable when you do it.
If you mean USB sticks (thumb drives), I have a few 20 year old ones that I dust off from time to time when all I need is something small. Some have been in a drawer for years before I touched them again.
My backup scheme is either Github or Google Drive, whatever I have uploaded in Discord DMs, and a snowballing pile of unorganized hoarded files, which One Day™ I will sort.
One thing you could do is buy the.largest external drive you can get on black friday sales. Then just copy everything in it. No sort. Just dump it all in there. Think of it like clearing the table unto a large garbage bag. Then unplug it, put it in the closet, and do it again whenever you remember.
Even a mess like that is better than no backup at all.
Good thing you added that. I’m so old-school/paranoid that I must have ownership of and physical access to the backup media to be able to count them as a backup.
My backup scheme:
Computer --> 3 different cloud drives and github.
Also
Computer --> Wyoming home NAS --> USB external drive (weekly), swapped out every year and the old one stored in a waterproof gunsafe in the basement.
Wyoming home NAS --> Florida office NAS – > USB external drive (weekly)
Wyoming home NAS --> Austin office NAS --> Tape (monthly) --> IronMountain for 7 years.
If you are a single dev, all it takes is 14 USB sticks. 12 monthly backups and two for daily backups that you rotate weekly.
Just for my sanity, do you have to power up usb drives every so often or they corrupt?
Theoretically, they need tl be re-written every few years at most. Read everything off, format and re-write. Checking for corruption would be adviasable when you do it.
If you mean USB sticks (thumb drives), I have a few 20 year old ones that I dust off from time to time when all I need is something small. Some have been in a drawer for years before I touched them again.
My backup scheme is either Github or Google Drive, whatever I have uploaded in Discord DMs, and a snowballing pile of unorganized hoarded files, which One Day™ I will sort.
One thing you could do is buy the.largest external drive you can get on black friday sales. Then just copy everything in it. No sort. Just dump it all in there. Think of it like clearing the table unto a large garbage bag. Then unplug it, put it in the closet, and do it again whenever you remember.
Even a mess like that is better than no backup at all.
Good thing you added that. I’m so old-school/paranoid that I must have ownership of and physical access to the backup media to be able to count them as a backup.
I’m about to kick off a full offline backup of my GOG library over the holidays because I need that physical backup.