[QUOTE=kriesel;580296]"In the cloud" has its uses, but it is brittle. Imagine someone's working business records stored that way. A competitor could get the client list by hacking.[/QUOTE]

I would argue that with the proper use of encryption the "attack surface" security risks can be managed.

However, I agree with you and retina. "Cloud" has its place, but like anything, has to be properly understood and modeled.

This includes costs. Amazon, for example, is more than happy to "ingress" your data for almost nothing. Egress, on the other hand, can be surprisingly expensive!

And then, of course, there's the matter of bandwidth... Just how quickly can you, for example, download a TB of data at the site the data needs to be at?

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a VW Van packed with backup tapes. Latency sucks, though, at an approximately linear function of distance." - A professor of mine at UVic.

Just as way of example and in no way endorsing this particular service, Feral Hosting is a "seedbox" service at £10/month with 1TB of storage. There's ssh access so you could just use it as storage and not for it's intended purpose. No doubt other self-hosting services exist which are cheaper, I seem to recall website hosts back in the day for around £5/month but they were oversubscribed and slow. I wouldn't use it as the master backup, but as a convenient first responder backup it could do the job.

I know that goes against your no subscription request, but really I don't know if anything else fits the bill. Do flickr and company actually allow you to download terabytes quickly? I'd bet more than a dollar they'd throttle you to hell and back before you could retreive a sizeable collection.

[QUOTE=Bottom Quark;580260]The MTBF is usually given in erase/write cycles for USB drives. There's not a lot of data out there for "erase/write only a small number of times, then leave them unused in storage for X years."[/QUOTE]

The rule of thumb I've stuck with is to plug a USB drive in every year or so and "refresh" by copy paste, it could be complete nonsense but what I've been led to believe is that bit rot is more likely when spinning rust is left to rust.


[QUOTE=kriesel;580262]...
I recently went through some personal floppy disk backups made in the 1980s to early 1990s. (Hundreds of 5.25" 320KB, 1.44MB, even some 160KB.)
In limited testing before reformatting them to blank media, the media were still readable.
...[/QUOTE]
I went through hundreds of 1.44MiB floppies from the Amiga/Atari era, only a few failed to read. They're probably longer lasting than burnt CD/DVD's which are notoriously leaky.

[QUOTE=M344587487;580474]I went through hundreds of 1.44MiB floppies from the Amiga/Atari era, only a few failed to read. They're probably longer lasting than burnt CD/DVD's which are notoriously leaky.[/QUOTE]

/Somewhere/ I still have the source code for [URL="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4J8kaqBhXg"]Amoeba Invaders[/URL]. It got [URL="https://www.lemonamiga.com/games/details.php?id=3645"]relatively good reviews[/URL] at the time (except for one particular company who threatened to sue us...). :smile:

I've always been partial to Flickr even though it's no longer as great as it used to be. Imgur does offer free unlimited storage, but it has a limited feature set and a god-awful interface.

[QUOTE=ixfd64;580498]I've always been partial to Flickr even though it's no longer as great as it used to be.[/QUOTE]
You're not the only one; I'm also fairly happy with my Flickr account and even have a link to it on my Prime Pages bio:
[url]https://primes.utm.edu/bios/page.php?id=505[/url]

edit: How did you get 5,264 pictures on your account? I thought that non-pro accounts were limited to 1,000:
[url]https://www.flickr.com/photos/ixfd64/[/url]
[url]https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/1/18051950/flickr-1000-photo-limit-free-accounts-changes-pro-subscription-smugmug[/url]