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A comment on Ask HN: What's a reliable long-term personal storage medium?.

Re:Ask HN: What's a reliable long-term personal storage medium? by hashtree on Sunday September 01, 2013 @12:40PM (#6311018)
Never trust a single piece of hardware. Never trust two either.

For me:

  - SANs/NASes make use of ZFS-Z2 or RAID 6. But, RAID is NOT a backup!
  - Have two or four separate backups in rotation (depending on how critical
  the data is). Half of which are located at a local bank's safety deposit box. Boxes
  typically run less than $75 per year. Work with the branch manager to get a
  top-level box for improved flood mitigation.
  - Each week, make a trip to the bank and switch them out.
  - These are awesome transports for this approach:
  http://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Forensics-Drive-Transporter-Classic/dp/B002IY6B9U
  - Careful of SSDs in RAID, they tend to all fail within a short period of time
  due to their reliable point of failure with writes.
If it is critical data, I get a little more crazy. ;) If the cloud is more your style, you might check out SpiderOak (but, again, unless treated as a backup it should not be used as such). I make use of this as well.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: What's a reliable long-term personal storage medium? by andyakb on Sunday September 01, 2013 @05:13PM (#6312172)
This seems way over the top. How muuch extra reliability does this get you when compared to RAID+1 locally and amazon glacier or s3? For the super paranoid, add a non-amazon based online backup as well. This seems to have made sense before these services were available, but just doesn't seem worthwhile anymore
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: What's a reliable long-term personal storage medium? by hashtree on Sunday September 01, 2013 @06:19PM (#6312402)
Hmm... I should reframe this. I just noted it says personal. I didn't see the qualifier, ignore my previous post as it is for my actual business data (e.g. huge persisted data stores, logs, etc).

Personal looks like:

  - Two or more personal computers (e.g. iMac and MBA) with SpiderOak syncing between.
  - Once weekly I backup to disk (basic rsync), take said disk to safety deposit
  box (as mentioned above), trade it out with another with the previous weeks data.
  This makes sense for me (over AWS) for the amount of data I have,
  the fact I do this anyways for my business, and that I do not trust most services
  with my data.
  - More recently, I've been doing a year-end permanent archive to disk going back
  2 to 3 years.
[ Parent | on HN ]