4 ms·

The drive in question sounds like the 2TB bargain that New Egg regularly offers deals on: (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136514 http:

The drive in question sounds like the 2TB bargain that New Egg regularly offers deals on: (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136514 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136...) I've got three of these in a JBOD server, running a couple of months without incident. They're cheap, quiet, and low-power. They're not high-performance, however, and not ideally suited to RAID applications. Also, given the new sector size you can get dreadful performance from them if you aren't careful in setting your partition boundaries. Having suffered the consequences of ignoring data safety rules in the past, I now make a practice of having three copies of important data in at least two separate locations. I'm frankly astonished that there apparently wasn't a differential backup process at the company. I mean, a month's down time, WTF? These hard disks are pretty darn cheap backup media if you've got lots of data (e.g. video files), but after this item I'm wondering if biodiversity should be among my archive criteria. That the drives in question had "chemical degredation on the surface making the data recovery much slower and harder" is a puzzler to me. Perhaps there's something about today's drive materials I'm unaware of, but my CYA radar went off on that choice of words: someone screwed up during the recovery process would be my first suspicion.

mike-cardwell 16y ago
Diversity is a good idea. I have a TimeCapsule which automatically backs up my Macbook once an hour, but I still put important files in my Dropbox folder so I have a 3rd offsite backup of them too.
- pmjordan 16y ago
  Is there anything remotely as convenient as Dropbox, but with sane, client-side crypto? As far as I know, Dropbox encrypt the data, but on the server, which, as far as I'm concerned, is about as good as storing it in plaintext. Alternatively/even better: is there a remote mirroring filesystem and/or block storage system which allows reasonable client-side crypto over a slow asymmetric (ADSL) link? I have a local backup server, it would be great if I could mirror that into a server in a datacentre somewhere. Is there anything remotely as convenient as Dropbox, but with sane, client-side crypto? As far as I know, Dropbox encrypt the data, but on the server, which, as far as I'm concerned, is about as good as storing it in plaintext. Alternatively/even better: is there a remote mirroring filesystem and/or block storage system which allows reasonable client-side crypto over a slow asymmetric (ADSL) link? I have a local backup server, it would be great if I could mirror that into a server in a datacentre somewhere. Has anyone tried this kind of thing with lessfs, dm-crypt and drbd?
  - perniciosus 16y ago
    http://www.wuala.com/ http://www.wuala.com/
    - pmjordan 16y ago
      That looks pretty cool, thanks! Going to read up on the tech behind this and test it out.
  - mike-cardwell 16y ago
    You could combine encfs with Dropbox. Should work quite well as it uses one encrypted file per real file.
    - pmjordan 16y ago
      OK, I'll give that a go too, thanks! EDIT: I guess one disadvantage of this approach is that the file system structure is exposed. Convenient though.
  - Robin_Message 16y ago
    I think this is what TarSnap http://www.tarsnap.com/ http://www.tarsnap.com/ is meant to be for.
    - pmjordan 16y ago
      As far as I can tell, Tarsnap is only for archives, it doesn't give you random-access, mountable-as-a-filesystem style convenience. For backups, Tarsnap is definitely the correct architecture, for syncing, not so much.
      - cperciva 16y ago
        Correct. Theoretically the Tarsnap client-server protocol could be used to synthesize a mountable filesystem, but that would add hard latency requirements -- one of the great advantages of Tarsnap's transactional archive-creation is that it can tolerate high latency and even requests failing with little impact.
uxp 16y ago
I've personally had nothing but trouble from the WD Green series. One of their energy saving features is to spin down sooner, which at least for my usage, just increased how often they spun back up. I also have no idea how they set up their server, but backup issues aside, why is a e-commerce site with subscription plans running their database, media and website off of the same harddrive. The 2TB drive sounds fantastic for the game files, but there is no reason that should be tied to the database which has user information stored on it. Backing up your data in case of these issues is a very high priority, but also configuring your servers so one single failure can't take down every piece of your site should also be considered.

mike-cardwell 16y ago

Diversity is a good idea. I have a TimeCapsule which automatically backs up my Macbook once an hour, but I still put important files in my Dropbox folder so I have a 3rd offsite backup of them too.

pmjordan 16y ago
Is there anything remotely as convenient as Dropbox, but with sane, client-side crypto? As far as I know, Dropbox encrypt the data, but on the server, which, as far as I'm concerned, is about as good as storing it in plaintext. Alternatively/even better: is there a remote mirroring filesystem and/or block storage system which allows reasonable client-side crypto over a slow asymmetric (ADSL) link? I have a local backup server, it would be great if I could mirror that into a server in a datacentre somewhere. Is there anything remotely as convenient as Dropbox, but with sane, client-side crypto? As far as I know, Dropbox encrypt the data, but on the server, which, as far as I'm concerned, is about as good as storing it in plaintext. Alternatively/even better: is there a remote mirroring filesystem and/or block storage system which allows reasonable client-side crypto over a slow asymmetric (ADSL) link? I have a local backup server, it would be great if I could mirror that into a server in a datacentre somewhere. Has anyone tried this kind of thing with lessfs, dm-crypt and drbd?
- perniciosus 16y ago
  http://www.wuala.com/ http://www.wuala.com/
  - pmjordan 16y ago
    That looks pretty cool, thanks! Going to read up on the tech behind this and test it out.
- mike-cardwell 16y ago
  You could combine encfs with Dropbox. Should work quite well as it uses one encrypted file per real file.
  - pmjordan 16y ago
    OK, I'll give that a go too, thanks! EDIT: I guess one disadvantage of this approach is that the file system structure is exposed. Convenient though.
- Robin_Message 16y ago
  I think this is what TarSnap http://www.tarsnap.com/ http://www.tarsnap.com/ is meant to be for.
  - pmjordan 16y ago
    As far as I can tell, Tarsnap is only for archives, it doesn't give you random-access, mountable-as-a-filesystem style convenience. For backups, Tarsnap is definitely the correct architecture, for syncing, not so much.
    - cperciva 16y ago
      Correct. Theoretically the Tarsnap client-server protocol could be used to synthesize a mountable filesystem, but that would add hard latency requirements -- one of the great advantages of Tarsnap's transactional archive-creation is that it can tolerate high latency and even requests failing with little impact.

uxp 16y ago

I've personally had nothing but trouble from the WD Green series. One of their energy saving features is to spin down sooner, which at least for my usage, just increased how often they spun back up. I also have no idea how they set up their server, but backup issues aside, why is a e-commerce site with subscription plans running their database, media and website off of the same harddrive. The 2TB drive sounds fantastic for the game files, but there is no reason that should be tied to the database which has user information stored on it. Backing up your data in case of these issues is a very high priority, but also configuring your servers so one single failure can't take down every piece of your site should also be considered.