Long Term Storage Encryption – SD vs. USB?

[Average_Joe (Joey)]

@Rasta

I’m not sure about other manufacturers but Sony announced recently that they are discontinuing their writable optical media production. End Of An Era: Sony Cuts Production Of Writable Optical Media | Hackaday

I appreciate your reply!

This is just unbelievable!!!

So soon it won’t be possible to buy blu-ray writable discs? Does that mean we have to go back to DVD writable discs???

[jerm]

Any specific HDDs/SSDs do you guys recommend?

And Western Digital & SanDisk have a very shady business practices:

1. Western Digital and SanDisk fall into that category according to this August 2023 article. WD refused to answer our questions about its self-wiping SanDisk SSDs by Sean Hollister for The Verge. “For months, the company has been laughably silent about how its pricey portable SanDisk Extreme SSDs might lose all your data … Months after our inquiries, Western Digital continues to sell these drives due to deep discounts, fake Amazon reviews, and issues with Google Search that rank favorable results far higher than warnings about potential failures.” This issue has generated three lawsuits. “Western Digital was already forced into a class action settlement over a previous questionable practice: in 2020, the company brazenly tried to sneak SMR drives into its WD Red lineup marketed for network-attached storage devices. The company paid $5.7 million to settle those claims.”

2. 1. Sandisk: A personal story - I bought a Sandisk Ultra Dual Drive USB Type-C flash drive in September 2023. The packaging (and the linked PDF) said to go to a URL for a list of compatible devices. The URL did not exist. When I navigated through the Western Digital Support website and found the support page for the thing, there was no list of compatible devices anywhere.

[Average_Joe (Joey)]

@camp

I would recommend the M-discs or tape for long-term storage. This is what government and other serious archival organizations use.

@Bhaelros

Backblaze

As far as I can tell Backblaze is terrible for privacy.

Privacy Policy

@Viper

How does one encrypt a whole 8tb external drive that doesn’t take 67 hrs?

Create a veracrypt container on your computer, then transfer the container once created to the HDD. If you create it directly on the HDD it always takes longer. Another alternative is to use something like picocrypt to encrypt files and transfer those over.

You mention the M-Discs, but did you see this post from Rasta?

@Rasta

I’m not sure about other manufacturers but Sony announced recently that they are discontinuing their writable optical media production. End Of An Era: Sony Cuts Production Of Writable Optical Media | Hackaday

Sony is known for their high quality products but if they stop producing the blu-ray M discs, would you be able to trust another company?

DVD-Rs are still sold but imo it’s not worth the risk of using the 8.5GB discs so you’re looking at a measely 4.7GB.

How much data is the OP wanting to store?

EDIT:
To help the OP, I just checked the price and I came across these Hitachi products that claim to last for 1,000 YEARS!!!

I’m not affiliated with this or anything and I’m just posting to help the OP and I hope I’m not breaking any rules:

1000 Years Archival Hitachi/LG Digital Storage Blank M-Disc DVD+R | 4.7GB | 3...