B2 is $0.06/GB/year, while a regular HDD would cost ~$0.03/GB/drive-lifespan.
[0] https://blog.macsales.com/43702-we-bet-you-didnt-know-that-y...
At 10TB, you're paying $600/year on B2, a price at which you could outright buy two 10TB drives and stick them in a larger NAS setup with ZFS or a simpler RAID-1 array.
https://www.duplicati.com does that for free being open-source thing, all platforms supported.
This was a cost analysis, mostly for those that can't afford B2. You can buy two drives for the cost of a year at Backblaze and have N+1 redundancy.
> You're paying Backblaze to ensure that GB can be accessed in the future
No doubt, which is why I prefaced this with "If you don't need to have your data in the cloud".
The "device" you use today will, in all probability, not be usable after a number of years, no matter whether you spin it up regularly and maintain it in a working condition.
I have backups in countless floppies, diskettes, Zip drives, 9-track, QIC, DAT, SCSI, ...
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This is a clever exploit none the less (not a pejorative).
Are you sure about that? I'm no expert, but I thought it was advisable to power up spinning platter disks at least every so often, once a year say?
And where are you keeping this backup, same box?
Is there a specific reason why you would need to do that? I'm not really aware of any.
> And where are you keeping this backup, same box?
This is ultimately up to you, depending on what kind of redundancy you deem necessary and whether you have multiple physical locations where you could store the said drives.
SSD’s definitely do this.
Even if hard disks don’t do this, mean time to repair is a crucial parameter in raid durability calculations. If you spin the drives up once a year, the mean time to repair is 6 months. Most raid systems are likely to lose data if it takes more than a few days to repair.
If something like permanent.org is setup intelligently they can even have a plan for a backblaze demise (god forbid) and use the fund to migrate to another provider(s) in that case.
Assuming we're talking about storage in perpetuity without the need for maintenance, the fund would need someone trusted to administer it.
I personally wish there was an inexpensive, trusted place for me to deposit a large sum of money, and have it automatically paid to service providers to maintain my domain/hosting/online identity in perpetuity, or until my deposit/endowment runs out.
This sounds like what I want, only just for data.
I would love there to be an option available at Backblaze B2 pricing, without a massive invasion of privacy. Right now I'm using Linode's Object storage, which is priced at $0.02/GB per month which is still reasonably priced for my needs.