On the flip side of that, when one of my drives start to get full, I can git annex drop file.ext (which considers annex.numcopies) then it removes the file from the repo, freeing space on the disk.
Oh nice. That alone would be worth it for me. Okay, sold. Thanks for the info.
At least I would consider having the same files on drives of different manufacturers, so you can avoid e.g. firmware problems that affect a whole series of drives from one company. That said, I was myself too lazy wrt to this point, but I will definitely do it when buying the next set of backup drives.
Git-annex supports encrypted storage at different cloud services, I guess this would really count.
I’m not very comfortable with cloud storage, so I don’t use it. My six drives are spread over three different manufacturers.
I’ve been eyeballing a blu ray burner for backup, but it isn’t quite cheap enough.
And the media are not big enough. The maximum you can get is 128 GB, I would need 10 disks for a full photo backup. With 128 GB disks hardly available and expensive (>10 €/disc) this is not feasible at the moment, I agree. The price tag may be OK for a half year backup cycle, but handling 10 disks of that size at the write speeds provided …
With cloud storage, I am not comfortable as well (besides my own own/nextcloud, but this is on site as well and therefore doesn’t count).