Next 20 years with Tumbleweed or Leap - Family Document Storage

Hello,
I’m sure this question might sound familliar at first, but my case is very specific.
In 2002 I bough IBM Intellistation with P4 320GB SCSI drive and external backup iomega 320GB drive.
I have installed Suse 8.1 Professional on it.
This computer had only one use, to store important family documents in pdf, jpg, txt files, spreadsheets, etc.
It was not used for anything else except, storage and creation of documents.
No internet connected to it, no updates etc.
It was serving us well until 2020 when I think it got Covid19 and power supply died, I have replaced it with used one from you know which bay. But one day last year it did not boot any more.
While I have all data, I need new machine. Which I actually built now.
It is very task specific PC, Core i5 3.2GHz, 16GB RAM, it has 1x 240GB SSD drive to boot from, 2x 1TB 3.5" 7200rpm spinners for storage, CD/DVD RW and external 2TB 3.5" drive for back-up. I might ditch SSD drive and replace it with 2.5" HDD for reliability. It has an external, scanner connected and 2.5K USB camera to take photos and epson printer.

Now, I have successfully tried both Tumbleweed and Leap 15.5 on it with everything running as it should.

It currently runs Leap 15.5, and it will never be connected to the internet again after I have installed all software and updated it.
All drives are encrypted including external one.

Is there any reason why Tumbleweed would be better than Leap for this simple task to serve for next 20 years?

Many thanks,
Zuse

I don’t see how. Tumbleweed is a rolling release. If you’re not going to update it (to get the latest and greatest and, occasionally, broken packages), you’d do much better staying with Leap.
I’d also update it for a couple of months to weed out any wrinkles, and then isolate the system.

That I believe it’s good advice, maybe even keep updating regularly until the end of life of 15.5.
Thank you

I have a system running here that houses the backups. That is that once a week I rsync from the other systems to it. And when a restore is needed (sometimes users delete or brake one of their files, but a general recovery after disk failure is also possible) it might be booted an extra time in the week.

It has no internet connection (no route to it). It is running openSUSE 13.1 (text only). Nothing changed there for years. Rock stable.

BUT, you must be sure that you never will want to add new functionality to the system. Use it only for what you build it for. And as long as the hardware does not fail, it will function on and on.

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Hello,
one statement in your post was standing out for me:

From all I’ve read about studies on this topic SSDs are more reliable. There are findings that the lifetime failure rate of hdds is over 6% vs below 1% for ssds. Considering that there are no moving parts in ssds, I think that makes sense. No reading head crashing when there is a sudden power interrupt, etc.

I just thought I would point that out. Could be an important factor for your purpose. Maybe you want to do your own research for your project.

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This could be the topic for one very long conversation.
If in principle we agree with this statement, we would need to specify “lifetime”.
We know now after 40 years of using HDD’s that they can last 20-40 years if they would not fail within first 2 years.
We do know as well that SSD’s would last around 3 to 5 years.
The big difference is that if I will put data on a HDD and put it in a drawer for 5 or 10 years, you just plug it back in again and off you go, all data is still there. You do that with SSD, oh boy…
And I have probably over 100kg’s of HDD’s around the house LOL!

But if you ignore the studies which are paid by we don’t know who, and visit one of many very old DC’s in London.
You will find servers/ mainframes running AIX/Unix from 1990’s, and there is thousands of them, happily spinning, creating enough heat to keep worm a small town.
And you will find two WEEE plastic pallet crates, one is labelled SSD and the other is labelled HDD.
The one with SSD’s gets filled up at amazing rate, the one with HDD gets usually filled up only when they replace the whole NAS rack.
I know some company was replacing the whole racks of 70GB SCSI drives with the whole racks of 8TB SATA drives, how many racks I can’t tell you, but loads of them.
I might be old school and very biased but trust me I love SSD’s as a system drives, they are super fast but I would not trust them with any data that is of archival value.

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