datahoarder
Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread
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OP already says that multiple backups and cloud copies exist. I do not recommend mechanical hard drives because they're inherently fragile. If OP really needs high-quality long-term archival storage that is robust and lasts forever, I will recommend a tape drive and do so with a straight face.
Bit-flipping is, frankly, a non-issue to such an extent that even considering it seriously is moving into tinfoil hat territory.
Google Drive does not count as cloud backup, especially for something business-critical.
On its own, no, but it can be used, like any cloud storage solution, as part of a robust backup strategy. Particularly, if the desktop sync feature is enabled, every client machine that has the sync application installed will download and synchronise the contents of the Google Drive locally. If the Google Drive servers go kaput this still means you've essentially got several off-site backup copies of the data on Google Drive.
https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/?p=pm&c=s3&z=4
This was what I was thinking about. I would definitely not use gdrive a a critical backup and the glacier tier at aws should be sufficient and cheaper than a hdd for years
Backblaze B2 is another option. Not sure if its as cheap as Glacier as its hard to compare usage based billing.
I pay about $1-2 USD/mo for 100GB. Storage is about $0.02/day, The rest of the cost is access costs.
I use rclone to do my own encryption. Most of the cost is probably backing up my phone nightly (Round Sync which is rclone on Android). Specifically signal results in a new 400Mb backup every night with 99% of the same data as the last backup.
I agree with tapes if the data is large and not accessed frequently. Magnetic tapes are still one of the most information-dense mediums, surprisingly. WORM tapes are Write Once Read Many and are used by serious large enterprises for long-term archival storage.