Medium term cold storage options?
Increasingly I'm looking at my backup solution and I'm not totally happy. My "threat model" I guess is if the house burns down and we only make it out with the shirts on our backs. Alternatively if I get hit by a bus I'd like a backup of passwords and maybe some instructions for my wife.
Mostly irrelevant discussion on my current backup or lack of situation
Up until recently I had a VPS running syncthing as a central backup for all my devices but it kind of looks like that got randomly wiped or something... my plan up until that happened was that I have a computer in a locker at work that I occasionally fired up to sync my syncthing stuff. This has some issues, the big one being that it doesn't deal with bus factor.
My next plan (and the point of this topic) is to have some data stored offline in a safe deposit box at the bank or some other secure location and swap the data out at some interval like 6 months or 1 year. The stuff I REALLY care about is easily under 1gb and stuff I kind of care about (photos and that kind of thing) is < 1tb.
Also currently I'm paying for iCloud each month even though I've mostly left the mac-osphere. This is where my < 1tb of photos are. I intend to download all of that and stop paying for iCloud in the coming months.
TL;DR What are decent medium term cold storage options for < 1gb that I can be really sure will be good for several years (maybe 10 or 20 years at the extreme end) and is fairly cheap. I was thinking optical media but I'm kind of lost as to what specifically to get and how to not get conned by buying fake media (m discs). I (somewhat randomly) have an m disc drive in my computer but I don't know if thats overkill or not? My important stuff may even fit on a CD actually...
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.
If my house burns down and I don't have anything except a (hypothetical) brand new computer then how do I access that?
Edit: and bus factor.
I assume you remember your email password? That’s all you’d really need to get in.
I don't actually. I moved EVERYTHING to long random passwords. I don't want my email to get hacked because thats kind of the key to being able to reset a shit ton of passwords. Also it has 2fa now so if I don't have access to a 2nd factor (or maybe a backup code... I should set that up) then I'm screwed.
I know maybe 4 of my current passwords:
bank card pin
log in for my computer
phone pin
password for KeePassXC
password for work accounts but only because they make me put it in endlessly and also don't allow me to use a phone at work AT ALL... so I use a weak password I can remember
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.
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.
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.
How long is an HDD really good for?
Life expectancy for this sort of thing is 5-10 years in my experience.