Suggestions for long term encrypted data storage?

[Duranis]

Have been told this afternoon that it is going to become a requirement to store child protection data for 20 years after the child has left the school.

 

From what I have been told this data is:

• Not used on a daily basis (accessed maybe monthly).
  
• Is mostly all paper at the moment so will need to be scanned for digital storage.
  
• Probably will not take that much space to store the data (rough guess 100mb per child max, this is a complete guess though).
  
• Is obviously highly sensitive and needs to be secure.
  

 

First thing that came to mind would be 2 external hard drives with encryption (hardware based). Use one as a working drive which will be kept on site in a safe and plugged directly into the laptop of the staff that need access to it. The second would have the data copied to it once a month (I would prefer more but was told this would probably be enough) and would otherwise be kept off site in the safe of another federation school.

 

First question is, does this sound viable or would there be a better solution? I thought this would be a good way as its simple (staff are all used to using encrypted flash drives), the data is secured (not shared on network, easy to physically secure) and it is self contained (not reliant on other software, computer setups, etc to be usable).

 

If this is a good way to go does anyone have any suggestions on what drives to look at or specific features I should look for? I'm also not sure I would trust any drive to store data for 20 years reliably so will have to look at specs on this as well to put in recommendations for checking drive integrity and when they should be replaced (suggestions on what to look out for?).

 

Edit: Hmm this should probably have gone in the hardware section......

Edited March 6, 2015 by Duranis

[sjatkn]

I've heard on This Week in Enterprise Tech (Twit TV) that the best long term storage option is actually DVD or BluRay. A quick Google seems to agree:

Long term data storage. What is most reliable. Question inside.? - Data Storage - Storage

 

The biggest issue will be the readers for what ever storage technology going obsolete and making it impossible to read back even if the media is good. Someone suggested putting it in to several of the major players online storage, Amazon Glacier, Google Drive, OneDrive for Business, etc. The idea being that at least one of them will still be with us and that they will at least make sure the data held within them is still available. Further to that is that the actual format of the data goes obsolete and there is no software to actually understand it.

 

At first thought I would suggest that if this is true then we would need to leave the data in our current MIS systems and hope we can afford the live storage to cope with it. That way it would always remain on a suitable storage media and also remain in a usable format. It would also help if the likes of Capita would build a system that could handle some form of offline or split storage so that the archive data could be put on something very slow and cheap.

[xenonive]

I'm currently doing a long term server backup of MIS server /sharepoint split over a few M-DISC blu rays once a year to have a system to be able to read our backups unless upgrade has been preformed then use normal backup system to temp restore second server if needed. We then pay for SQLbak.com to backup and encrypt/store every day our SQL databases to a backup account on Google drive which has unlimited data. We are currently storing about 1tb stored so far.