Recommendations for Tools for Backing Up and Archiving to Removable Media
Backups and archives are often thought of as similar. And indeed, they may be done with the same tools at the same time. But the goals differ somewhat:
Archives are designed to survive for many years, protecting against disaster not only impacting the original equipment but also the original person that created them.
Reflecting on this, it implies that while a nice ZFS snapshot-based scheme that supports twice-hourly backups may be fantastic for that purpose, if you think about things like family members being able to access it if you are incapacitated, or accessibility in a few decades’ time, it becomes much less appealing for archives. ZFS doesn’t have the wide software support that NTFS, FAT, UDF, ISO-9660, etc. do.
This post isn’t about the pros and cons of the different storage media, nor is it about the pros and cons of cloud storage for archiving; these conversations can readily be found elsewhere. Let’s assume, for the point of conversation, that we are considering BD-R optical discs as well as external HDDs, both of which are too small to hold the entire backup set.
I would welcome your ideas for what to use. Below, I’ll highlight different approaches I’ve looked into and how they stack up.
