Gregory's Server@mr_daemon Backups are hard. Your choice seems to be between unreliable optical media that’s cheap or insanely expensive LTO drives that you can actually rely on.
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21 comments
 @mr_daemon Yeah. I would have to buy two drives and store one in hopes that it survives. @mos_8502 @mr_daemon Unfortunately if it has any rubber parts (belts, rollers, etc.) those are likely to perish unless they are sealed in an oxygen-free atmosphere, eg. a jar flushed with CO2 or N2 or Ar.  @mr_daemon @mos_8502@studio8502.ca I still have my working QIC-40 drive and software but due to belt routing inside the tapes, I have my work cut out for me before I can restore my BBS backup from 1993.  @mr_daemon @mos_8502 we researched the other day whether we could use a tiny wine fridge as a climate control device for tapes... we concluded that we cannot. the small ones are based on Peltiers not compressors, so any cooling is minimal, and regardless of size they don't seal the air and do nothing for humidity @mr_daemon @mos_8502 it would very much be a solution for people who have too much money but not megacorp data center levels of money, anyway. not really ideal. @irenes @mr_daemon best idea I’ve come up with is using those fancy long lasting “M-Disc” BD-R discs in a Blu-Ray burner, and even that is more than I can presently afford.  @mos_8502 @irenes Personally at this point i'm banking on ZFS's ability to not have silent corruption and my capacity to maintain the local raidz2 array as well as an off-site mirror of verifiable encrypted blocks. Not everything is `perfectly image-able` however, so this isn't perfect, but it sure beats old media that's 2 solid months away from biodegrading. At least I can check integrity of it at will, and have multiple copies  @irenes Nitrogen or CO2 (via liquid nitrogen or dry ice) is probably the most accessible for the home user. Just need a way to store it with really good seals too. @SiteRelEnby yeah.... well, CO2 is safer in that there's less asphyxiation risk, but neither thrills us. really humidity control is the big thing we think. @SiteRelEnby yeah... a long time ago we stored backups in AWS glacier. it was at a period in our life before we achieved financial stability, and at one point we were unable to pay the bill for a few months. we're sure the backups still physically exist (destroying them would cost money), but for practical purposes they are now permanently irretrievable. @SiteRelEnby also the originals they were backups of were destroyed during that same period, for reasons that shared a cause with it, so it's "real" data loss for us. @SiteRelEnby also over the next few years we're intending to accumulate, like, web scrapes and things of similar size, and even just the transfer cost for that would be prohibitive, so that's why we've been looking into very-high-volume removable media for our cold storage. @SiteRelEnby but yeah tier 1 is definitely going to be a RAID connected by SAN to our servers that we're going to have at some point, heh :)  @irenes @mr_daemon @mos_8502 the worse thing with that sort of thing is the peltier really lends itself to very very tight temperature control and none of them have it, at all. Now, at the lab equipment price point, sure, you can get that there! @beige_alert @mr_daemon @mos_8502 yeah absolutely. the products seem to be aimed at people with more money than scientific knowledge to evaluate whether it's doing anything useful >< @beige_alert @mr_daemon @mos_8502 that's kind of a recurring theme that we see across a long list of product categories and a large span of time products that claim to do something useful but if you understand the proposed mechanism, it's clear that they can't do that thing. if you don't, it sounds sufficiently science-ish that you might buy it........... @mos_8502 @mr_daemon Multiple copies of optical data, with error recovery sections. |
@mos_8502 I did tape for a while, and while it does last forever when stored properly, the drive is what's gonna die before it's time to recover and that's a whole other can of worms.
I have some stuff forever trapped on DDS3 and DLT tapes as a result, because all the drives are dead