S3. 2.3 cents per gig per month. 20 years is $5.50 per gig. My safety deposit box is $60/year for comparison.
I should also mention that deep archive tier storage is way cheaper at $0.00099 per GB. You could store a terabyte for 20 years for $237.60.
Eric_the_Cerise
For many years, my offsite backup plan was literally a spare HDD in my safe deposit box at the bank.
I had 2 such HDDs. One was employed in active nightly backups at home, and every month or 2, I would take that HDD to the bank, swap 'em out, and put the other one into play for the nightly backups. That way, the HDD in the bank was never more than 2 months out of date.
unkz
I assume you remember your email password? That’s all you’d really need to get in.
unkz
That’s probably overkill. You can easily have enough entropy to defeat brute force and still be memorable. But, I feel like remembering a password isn’t such a giant obstacle, is it? Probably less difficulty than dealing with losing your safety deposit box key and identification in the hypothetical house fire.
maple
Same, although for me it was a disk I rotated to and from a drawer at my office.
When I started working from home, I moved to a big disk in an eBay refreshed office workstation in a closet at my parents place that I use as a restic endpoint. Works great, although not cold storage per se and definitely has a WAF approaching zero.
In fact my break glass situation is a piece of paper with critical passwords written on it and stored in a filing cabinet in my house. Ain’t no script kiddies getting that.
Bonooru
Life expectancy for this sort of thing is 5-10 years in my experience.
sleepydave
Why S3 over Backblaze B2? With B2 the first 10GB is free, $7/TB/mo after that, free egress and API calls, and hot storage. Seems to be a much better offering for OP unless I'm missing something.
whbboyd
When I was looking into this a few years ago, the consensus answer seemed to be that there's not a great option, but archival-quality optical media is probably the best one. (Flash doesn't have great longevity offline, and hard disks are something of a question mark—and the typical failure mode isn't "some degradation", it's "this complicated mechanical device has broken and does not work at all".) Consensus at the time seemed to be that archival-quality media was expensive out of proportion to the increase in quality, and there was a whole lot of discussion of (mostly non-actionable) concerns like the original manufacturer of a piece of media. My conclusion ended up being:
Optical media is cheap enough that just buying the "expensive" stuff is probably worth it.
Burn multiple copies, confirm that they are readable (coasters are pretty uncommon these days, but not unheard-of), and distribute them geographically.
Try to make sure they're stored appropriate, i.e. in a case, in the dark, not too humid.
My schema is mostly to have encrypted backups stored online (in Backblaze B2, in my case), with encryption keys, a copy of my password vault, and a handful of other useful things on the backup disks. In the end, I've got a few dozen megabytes on my backup discs (on DVD media, because that's all that was available, lol).
For long-term storage, the answer is, oddly enough, to keep it online and monitored. Individual units of storage media are pretty fragile, but a NAS with a handful of drives and someone checking up on it regularly will keep data stored more-or-less indefinitely. (Online storage is much easier to accidentally delete stuff off of, of course, so it's not a panacea.)
Eric_the_Cerise
Optical would be better, especially if you're only talking about ~1GB or so.
Still, quality HDDs are typically rated for ~5 years, and probably generally good for double that ... this is particularly true if you're not using them constantly, but just writing data on them and then putting them in long-term storage.
sparksbet
Having a password manager that isn't exclusively tied to a physical device would allow you to have the same password behavior without reusing passwords to improve memorization (which is the biggest risk for most people not using a password manager, not the ability to brute force any particular password). I similarly only have a few passwords memorized, but my password manager contains everything else, including my 2fa backup codes, so I'd be able to get back into other accounts in case of an emergency because I can access that. But I use a password manager that stores my things in the cloud, which I assume OP doesn't want to do because that's the main reason people use KeePassXC.
But changing their password behavior isn't necessary, they just need to ensure they can access their KeePassXC database after a disaster like this. KeePassXC's documentation says you can safely store the encrypted database file in the cloud and recommends regular backups, but if that's too online, I believe copying it to a flash drive and sticking it in a safety deposit box somewhere would work (although it would be somewhat more annoying to update your backup that way). This would probably fill the "backup of passwords and instructions for wife upon death" criteria, at least.
unkz
A terabyte for 20 years would be $1680 at that rate. Backblaze would be better for that first gig but not for all their photo content, unless they also have archival tier pricing.
unkz
S3. 2.3 cents per gig per month. 20 years is $5.50 per gig. My safety deposit box is $60/year for comparison.
I should also mention that deep archive tier storage is way cheaper at $0.00099 per GB. You could store a terabyte for 20 years for $237.60.
Eric_the_Cerise
For many years, my offsite backup plan was literally a spare HDD in my safe deposit box at the bank.
I had 2 such HDDs. One was employed in active nightly backups at home, and every month or 2, I would take that HDD to the bank, swap 'em out, and put the other one into play for the nightly backups. That way, the HDD in the bank was never more than 2 months out of date.
unkz
I assume you remember your email password? That’s all you’d really need to get in.
unkz
That’s probably overkill. You can easily have enough entropy to defeat brute force and still be memorable. But, I feel like remembering a password isn’t such a giant obstacle, is it? Probably less difficulty than dealing with losing your safety deposit box key and identification in the hypothetical house fire.
maple
Same, although for me it was a disk I rotated to and from a drawer at my office.
When I started working from home, I moved to a big disk in an eBay refreshed office workstation in a closet at my parents place that I use as a restic endpoint. Works great, although not cold storage per se and definitely has a WAF approaching zero.
In fact my break glass situation is a piece of paper with critical passwords written on it and stored in a filing cabinet in my house. Ain’t no script kiddies getting that.
Bonooru
Life expectancy for this sort of thing is 5-10 years in my experience.
sleepydave
Why S3 over Backblaze B2? With B2 the first 10GB is free, $7/TB/mo after that, free egress and API calls, and hot storage. Seems to be a much better offering for OP unless I'm missing something.
whbboyd
When I was looking into this a few years ago, the consensus answer seemed to be that there's not a great option, but archival-quality optical media is probably the best one. (Flash doesn't have great longevity offline, and hard disks are something of a question mark—and the typical failure mode isn't "some degradation", it's "this complicated mechanical device has broken and does not work at all".) Consensus at the time seemed to be that archival-quality media was expensive out of proportion to the increase in quality, and there was a whole lot of discussion of (mostly non-actionable) concerns like the original manufacturer of a piece of media. My conclusion ended up being:
Optical media is cheap enough that just buying the "expensive" stuff is probably worth it.
Burn multiple copies, confirm that they are readable (coasters are pretty uncommon these days, but not unheard-of), and distribute them geographically.
Try to make sure they're stored appropriate, i.e. in a case, in the dark, not too humid.
My schema is mostly to have encrypted backups stored online (in Backblaze B2, in my case), with encryption keys, a copy of my password vault, and a handful of other useful things on the backup disks. In the end, I've got a few dozen megabytes on my backup discs (on DVD media, because that's all that was available, lol).
For long-term storage, the answer is, oddly enough, to keep it online and monitored. Individual units of storage media are pretty fragile, but a NAS with a handful of drives and someone checking up on it regularly will keep data stored more-or-less indefinitely. (Online storage is much easier to accidentally delete stuff off of, of course, so it's not a panacea.)
Eric_the_Cerise
Optical would be better, especially if you're only talking about ~1GB or so.
Still, quality HDDs are typically rated for ~5 years, and probably generally good for double that ... this is particularly true if you're not using them constantly, but just writing data on them and then putting them in long-term storage.
sparksbet
Having a password manager that isn't exclusively tied to a physical device would allow you to have the same password behavior without reusing passwords to improve memorization (which is the biggest risk for most people not using a password manager, not the ability to brute force any particular password). I similarly only have a few passwords memorized, but my password manager contains everything else, including my 2fa backup codes, so I'd be able to get back into other accounts in case of an emergency because I can access that. But I use a password manager that stores my things in the cloud, which I assume OP doesn't want to do because that's the main reason people use KeePassXC.
But changing their password behavior isn't necessary, they just need to ensure they can access their KeePassXC database after a disaster like this. KeePassXC's documentation says you can safely store the encrypted database file in the cloud and recommends regular backups, but if that's too online, I believe copying it to a flash drive and sticking it in a safety deposit box somewhere would work (although it would be somewhat more annoying to update your backup that way). This would probably fill the "backup of passwords and instructions for wife upon death" criteria, at least.
unkz
A terabyte for 20 years would be $1680 at that rate. Backblaze would be better for that first gig but not for all their photo content, unless they also have archival tier pricing.
S3. 2.3 cents per gig per month. 20 years is $5.50 per gig. My safety deposit box is $60/year for comparison.
I should also mention that deep archive tier storage is way cheaper at $0.00099 per GB. You could store a terabyte for 20 years for $237.60.
For many years, my offsite backup plan was literally a spare HDD in my safe deposit box at the bank.
I had 2 such HDDs. One was employed in active nightly backups at home, and every month or 2, I would take that HDD to the bank, swap 'em out, and put the other one into play for the nightly backups. That way, the HDD in the bank was never more than 2 months out of date.
I assume you remember your email password? That’s all you’d really need to get in.
That’s probably overkill. You can easily have enough entropy to defeat brute force and still be memorable. But, I feel like remembering a password isn’t such a giant obstacle, is it? Probably less difficulty than dealing with losing your safety deposit box key and identification in the hypothetical house fire.
Same, although for me it was a disk I rotated to and from a drawer at my office.
When I started working from home, I moved to a big disk in an eBay refreshed office workstation in a closet at my parents place that I use as a restic endpoint. Works great, although not cold storage per se and definitely has a WAF approaching zero.
In fact my break glass situation is a piece of paper with critical passwords written on it and stored in a filing cabinet in my house. Ain’t no script kiddies getting that.
Life expectancy for this sort of thing is 5-10 years in my experience.
Why S3 over Backblaze B2? With B2 the first 10GB is free, $7/TB/mo after that, free egress and API calls, and hot storage. Seems to be a much better offering for OP unless I'm missing something.
When I was looking into this a few years ago, the consensus answer seemed to be that there's not a great option, but archival-quality optical media is probably the best one. (Flash doesn't have great longevity offline, and hard disks are something of a question mark—and the typical failure mode isn't "some degradation", it's "this complicated mechanical device has broken and does not work at all".) Consensus at the time seemed to be that archival-quality media was expensive out of proportion to the increase in quality, and there was a whole lot of discussion of (mostly non-actionable) concerns like the original manufacturer of a piece of media. My conclusion ended up being:
My schema is mostly to have encrypted backups stored online (in Backblaze B2, in my case), with encryption keys, a copy of my password vault, and a handful of other useful things on the backup disks. In the end, I've got a few dozen megabytes on my backup discs (on DVD media, because that's all that was available, lol).
For long-term storage, the answer is, oddly enough, to keep it online and monitored. Individual units of storage media are pretty fragile, but a NAS with a handful of drives and someone checking up on it regularly will keep data stored more-or-less indefinitely. (Online storage is much easier to accidentally delete stuff off of, of course, so it's not a panacea.)
Optical would be better, especially if you're only talking about ~1GB or so.
Still, quality HDDs are typically rated for ~5 years, and probably generally good for double that ... this is particularly true if you're not using them constantly, but just writing data on them and then putting them in long-term storage.
Having a password manager that isn't exclusively tied to a physical device would allow you to have the same password behavior without reusing passwords to improve memorization (which is the biggest risk for most people not using a password manager, not the ability to brute force any particular password). I similarly only have a few passwords memorized, but my password manager contains everything else, including my 2fa backup codes, so I'd be able to get back into other accounts in case of an emergency because I can access that. But I use a password manager that stores my things in the cloud, which I assume OP doesn't want to do because that's the main reason people use KeePassXC.
But changing their password behavior isn't necessary, they just need to ensure they can access their KeePassXC database after a disaster like this. KeePassXC's documentation says you can safely store the encrypted database file in the cloud and recommends regular backups, but if that's too online, I believe copying it to a flash drive and sticking it in a safety deposit box somewhere would work (although it would be somewhat more annoying to update your backup that way). This would probably fill the "backup of passwords and instructions for wife upon death" criteria, at least.
A terabyte for 20 years would be $1680 at that rate. Backblaze would be better for that first gig but not for all their photo content, unless they also have archival tier pricing.
S3. 2.3 cents per gig per month. 20 years is $5.50 per gig. My safety deposit box is $60/year for comparison.
I should also mention that deep archive tier storage is way cheaper at $0.00099 per GB. You could store a terabyte for 20 years for $237.60.
For many years, my offsite backup plan was literally a spare HDD in my safe deposit box at the bank.
I had 2 such HDDs. One was employed in active nightly backups at home, and every month or 2, I would take that HDD to the bank, swap 'em out, and put the other one into play for the nightly backups. That way, the HDD in the bank was never more than 2 months out of date.
I assume you remember your email password? That’s all you’d really need to get in.
That’s probably overkill. You can easily have enough entropy to defeat brute force and still be memorable. But, I feel like remembering a password isn’t such a giant obstacle, is it? Probably less difficulty than dealing with losing your safety deposit box key and identification in the hypothetical house fire.
Same, although for me it was a disk I rotated to and from a drawer at my office.
When I started working from home, I moved to a big disk in an eBay refreshed office workstation in a closet at my parents place that I use as a restic endpoint. Works great, although not cold storage per se and definitely has a WAF approaching zero.
In fact my break glass situation is a piece of paper with critical passwords written on it and stored in a filing cabinet in my house. Ain’t no script kiddies getting that.
Life expectancy for this sort of thing is 5-10 years in my experience.
Why S3 over Backblaze B2? With B2 the first 10GB is free, $7/TB/mo after that, free egress and API calls, and hot storage. Seems to be a much better offering for OP unless I'm missing something.
When I was looking into this a few years ago, the consensus answer seemed to be that there's not a great option, but archival-quality optical media is probably the best one. (Flash doesn't have great longevity offline, and hard disks are something of a question mark—and the typical failure mode isn't "some degradation", it's "this complicated mechanical device has broken and does not work at all".) Consensus at the time seemed to be that archival-quality media was expensive out of proportion to the increase in quality, and there was a whole lot of discussion of (mostly non-actionable) concerns like the original manufacturer of a piece of media. My conclusion ended up being:
My schema is mostly to have encrypted backups stored online (in Backblaze B2, in my case), with encryption keys, a copy of my password vault, and a handful of other useful things on the backup disks. In the end, I've got a few dozen megabytes on my backup discs (on DVD media, because that's all that was available, lol).
For long-term storage, the answer is, oddly enough, to keep it online and monitored. Individual units of storage media are pretty fragile, but a NAS with a handful of drives and someone checking up on it regularly will keep data stored more-or-less indefinitely. (Online storage is much easier to accidentally delete stuff off of, of course, so it's not a panacea.)
Optical would be better, especially if you're only talking about ~1GB or so.
Still, quality HDDs are typically rated for ~5 years, and probably generally good for double that ... this is particularly true if you're not using them constantly, but just writing data on them and then putting them in long-term storage.
Having a password manager that isn't exclusively tied to a physical device would allow you to have the same password behavior without reusing passwords to improve memorization (which is the biggest risk for most people not using a password manager, not the ability to brute force any particular password). I similarly only have a few passwords memorized, but my password manager contains everything else, including my 2fa backup codes, so I'd be able to get back into other accounts in case of an emergency because I can access that. But I use a password manager that stores my things in the cloud, which I assume OP doesn't want to do because that's the main reason people use KeePassXC.
But changing their password behavior isn't necessary, they just need to ensure they can access their KeePassXC database after a disaster like this. KeePassXC's documentation says you can safely store the encrypted database file in the cloud and recommends regular backups, but if that's too online, I believe copying it to a flash drive and sticking it in a safety deposit box somewhere would work (although it would be somewhat more annoying to update your backup that way). This would probably fill the "backup of passwords and instructions for wife upon death" criteria, at least.
A terabyte for 20 years would be $1680 at that rate. Backblaze would be better for that first gig but not for all their photo content, unless they also have archival tier pricing.