I'm honestly thinking I'm going to have to backup my entire G-Drive externally and wipe it (for the security of my Google account). I mean, who knows what will trigger the deletion of your Google account these days... I guess the storage I pay for is just for e-mails.
It’s enough to make me anxious between backups: at least with spinning rust-drives we can transplant the platters and controllers (separately, even!) while SSD hardware recovery is almost unheard of.
I've never had even the cheapest mwave or microcenter special ssd die. Sata or nvme m.2, nothing.
I also haven't had a spindle die in 15 years, ever since I started letting them sleep and using UPS to smooth out power.
That noise you hear is me knocking on wood pretty frantically.
though the ssds i use are for backup and arent used very often for writing... i wonder if that makes a difference?
Two or more external-DDs, copied regularly per how much they are willing to spend time and lose data. One stored in some other place if possible.
RAID is not a substitute for rotating backups.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/synology-warn...
You really want offline backups. Never recommend “not having to back it up regularly”.
uhmm... there is no article. It's a link to a google support forum thread. And the way the author of the initial post (not just the replies) describes the way they use Google Drive and how they use technology in general suggests the person does not have the same level of tech-savvy as a typical HN reader.
Fine, then s/article/post/ in what I said.
> the way the author of the initial post (not just the replies) describes the way they use Google Drive and how they use technology in general suggests the person does not have the same level of tech-savvy as a typical HN reader
I agree; I'm simply pointing out that if you are going to try to execute a project that requires a lot of digital storage of important data, you should be tech savvy, or collaborate with someone who is. You certainly should not expect a free service like Google Drive to be a secure, reliable data store for your only copies of important data.
I think multiply redundant back-ups get expensive, but one external hard drive with scads of space is cheap (at least from the perspective of someone who grew up when you measured space in MB). It won't provide you the security against data failure, but it will provide some recourse for when the cloud provider yanks your data.
But it's definitely fundamentally more expensive because there are tons of fixed costs that would be much better amortized across more parties. The hardware could handle far more than I throw at it, and importantly the incremental cost of expanding the setup is much much lower then the setup cost. My NAS could easily have nearly triple the storage space at "only" the cost of the drives themselves and maybe a bit more memory (which is dirt cheap). It's not processor or bandwidth limited. I don't need that much space, but if there were another few folks joining me on using it and we split the cost between us we'd each pay less for more. And the whole thing as-is leans heavily on my own personal amortization and professional knowledge, I can justify some of it as a business expense and I actually already knew tons of the basics before doing anything for the first time. A larger group could have someone devoting even more time to it.
That's the simple relentless logic behind "cloud services" really behind whatever layers of fancy marketing or conversely outrage. It really is cheaper at a basic level, but unfortunately the way it's often been implemented lends to centralization and perverse incentives.
Efforts to address it have to tackle those head-on. Ideally at a minimum there'd be legally mandated offering of standard "cloud APIs" for every platform so that iCloud or whatever could be slotted right out for something else compatible. It does seem like there is potential for more decentralized sharing and discovery, but the UI and reliability challenges are quite significant. We'll probably see a lot of gyrations back and forth as everyone searches for the right balances depending on their own situations along with whatever semi-ignorant semi-opportunistic bumbling responses governments come up with. Unfortunately even on HN lots of people tend to reach for sledgehammers over scalpels when it comes to the law.