5 ms·

yeah I'm trying to follow the 3-2-1 idea, I have (1) a copy on the internal HD of a mac studio ultra, (2) a copy on a synology NAS ... both (1) and (2) live in

by plg 3y ago

yeah I'm trying to follow the 3-2-1 idea, I have (1) a copy on the internal HD of a mac studio ultra, (2) a copy on a synology NAS ... both (1) and (2) live in the same server room. I'd like an offsite 3rd copy as well. I had been using Arq with their paid cloud storage option, but the backup has stopped working and after 2 days of polite back and forth with their support they are now ghosting me (!) which is not a _great_ characteristic for someone selling archival cloud backup solutions. I could of course have the Synology NAS backup/archive to one of several cloud services (AWS, Backblaze, Google, Wasabi, ...) but I would love a physical option. For size I am dealing with something on the order of 1.5 TB currently, perhaps growing to 3-5 TB over the coming years. So perhaps too large for CDs.

bombcar 3y ago
That's peanut-sized, to be honest. I would just get a few large USB hard drives when they're on sale (5TB is like $100 new now) from different brands and cycle them. If you wanted to go a bit fancier you could get an RDX drive https://www.overlandtandberg.com/products/rdx-removable-storage/rdx-quikstor/ https://www.overlandtandberg.com/products/rdx-removable-stor... and some cartridges, but you're looking at $100-200 for the drive, plus the cartridges are more expensive than USB: https://www.rdxworks.com/Tandberg-Data-RDX-2TB-8789-RDX.aspx https://www.rdxworks.com/Tandberg-Data-RDX-2TB-8789-RDX.aspx (A 5TB cartridge is $560, you could buy five USB drives and make five copies and that would likely be more reliable than one backup cartridge unless you were really unlucky). They're designed for backup and archival and just appear as a USB drive. I'd go that way for business or if you're cycling cartridges a lot. And out of your data, you can designate "Very important" things like tax returns, documents, etc (which is probably a small portion of the total) and burn those to CD or DVD as additional security.
- jasomill 3y ago
  In terms of hardware, RDX cartridges are just bog-standard SATA hard drives in proprietary enclosures, so no more or less reliable than SATA hard drives in equivalently rugged USB enclosures. I'd actually argue that RDX carts are a bit worse than ordinary USB external hard drives in long-term archival applications, due to an unusual design decision: the SATA hard drives internal to RDX cartridges are locked with factory-preset ATA passwords that serve no apparent purpose other than to make them non-interoperable with standard SATA ports and enclosures, which are more common than RDX drives by several orders of magnitude.

by plg 3y ago

bombcar 3y ago

That's peanut-sized, to be honest. I would just get a few large USB hard drives when they're on sale (5TB is like $100 new now) from different brands and cycle them. If you wanted to go a bit fancier you could get an RDX drive https://www.overlandtandberg.com/products/rdx-removable-storage/rdx-quikstor/ https://www.overlandtandberg.com/products/rdx-removable-stor... and some cartridges, but you're looking at $100-200 for the drive, plus the cartridges are more expensive than USB: https://www.rdxworks.com/Tandberg-Data-RDX-2TB-8789-RDX.aspx https://www.rdxworks.com/Tandberg-Data-RDX-2TB-8789-RDX.aspx (A 5TB cartridge is $560, you could buy five USB drives and make five copies and that would likely be more reliable than one backup cartridge unless you were really unlucky). They're designed for backup and archival and just appear as a USB drive. I'd go that way for business or if you're cycling cartridges a lot. And out of your data, you can designate "Very important" things like tax returns, documents, etc (which is probably a small portion of the total) and burn those to CD or DVD as additional security.

jasomill 3y ago
In terms of hardware, RDX cartridges are just bog-standard SATA hard drives in proprietary enclosures, so no more or less reliable than SATA hard drives in equivalently rugged USB enclosures. I'd actually argue that RDX carts are a bit worse than ordinary USB external hard drives in long-term archival applications, due to an unusual design decision: the SATA hard drives internal to RDX cartridges are locked with factory-preset ATA passwords that serve no apparent purpose other than to make them non-interoperable with standard SATA ports and enclosures, which are more common than RDX drives by several orders of magnitude.