I just need to preserve some old data that I have on my computers, so I was wondering what would be the best way to archive stuff long term.

Blu-ray disks ? Multiple HDDs ? What do you guys suggest ?

  • Atemu
    2•1 year ago

    There are much worse ways for a RAID controller to fail than suddenly not doing anything. What if it doesn’t notice it has failed and continues to write to a subset of devices only? Great recipe for data corruption right there.

    Bad RAID controller/HBA, CPU, RAM, Motherboard, PSU are all hardware failures that RAID does very little (if anything) to mitigate. One localised incident in any of them out could make all of your drives turn into magic smoke or bits go bad.

    You cannot rely on that sort of setup for data security. It only really mitigates one relatively common hardware to push storage system uptime above 99.9%. That has a place in some scenarios where storage “only” being 99.9% available has a significant impact on total availability but you’d first have to demonstrate that that is the case.

    • Monkey With A Shell
      2•1 year ago

      Fair enough if using a more expansive version of hardware failure. Things like a house fire would presumably destroy a series of optical disks which would make most any in house option non-functional. Network based backups could also fail to transmit data securely and accurately as well so really any sort of replication solution needs validation of the data is of significant value. A first step in preservation is to not have the box that it came from burn down, and have a way to recover if someone does a ‘sudo rm -rf /’ accidentally.

      • Atemu
        2•1 year ago

        Things like a house fire would presumably destroy a series of optical disks which would make most any in house option non-functional.

        Well, it makes any option that only uses a single location non-functional. Having two copies at home and one at a distant location (as recommended by the 3-2-1 backup rule of thumb) mitigates this issue.

        Network based backups could also fail to transmit data securely and accurately as well

        Absolutely. Though the network is usually assumed to be unreliable from the get-go, so mitigations usually already exist here (E2EE, checksums, ECC).

        really any sort of replication solution needs validation of the data is of significant value

        Absolutely correct. An untested backup is probably better than nothing but most definitely worse than a tested backup.

        and have a way to recover if someone does a ‘sudo rm -rf /’ accidentally.

        Certainly something that must be mitigated but this is getting out of “hardware failure” territory now ;)