5 ms·

When it comes to reliability, simple solutions are usually the best. I still use spinning rust as my primary back up --- arranged in a redundant array with off

When it comes to reliability, simple solutions are usually the best. I still use spinning rust as my primary back up --- arranged in a redundant array with offset manufacture dates.

valianteffort 3y ago
Buy some blu-ray discs. Losing data is soul crushing and while blu-rays are not necessarily cheap they will outlive you and are easy to store/copy.
- jqpabc123 3y ago
  Too slow --- takes too long to backup.
- supertrope 3y ago
  Pressed discs sure. Consumer grade BD-R discs should only be considered data in transit.
  - BirAdam 3y ago
    There’s always MDISC, but you’d need a ton of them.
ksec 3y ago
>I still use spinning rust as my primary back up --- arranged in a redundant array with offset manufacture dates. You will still need to set up either BTRFS or ZFS to avoid silent Data corruption which is happening more often than most people know. And you have to set it up to scrub it from time to time. It isn't automatic. Arguably the cheapest solution that hit the above bar would be Synology DS223J at $180, their newest entry model with BTRFS support ( on a fairly old Linux Kernel, I think it is 5.10 that will never get updated again in the life time of the product ). You will still need to buy 2 HDD in redundant RAID and set it up yourself. And it is quite bulky as well. Hardly consumer friendly. And that is before 99.9999% on HN jumping on you, telling you need another backup for this NAS, or another off line, third location devices.... It is sad, not only just consumer. Judging by the number of comment here plenty in the tech industry simply uses an additional copy, or external SSD devices as backup. And I can understand why, but there simply isn't a simple, easy to use consumer solution that offer enough security for a reasonable price. And I have been stating this for more than a decade already. Your Kids's video are worth a lot more than you can imagine. Tried explaining it to your wife some of those video are gone.
- joshcafe 3y ago
  My favorite trick for this lately has been to use a stripe of mirrored pairs, where each pair is a WD Gold and a WD Red Pro (of matching size). They're very similar drives (AFAICT, WD Gold is just a Red Pro but with a higher lifetime r/w rating) but it makes me feel a bit better that they're not from too similar of batches without having to actually temporally space out my purchases. I can buy 1 of each in the same cart. And then for truly unrecoverable data, I back it up to S3 Deep Archive which seems to be one of AWS's only reasonably priced offerings. Don't ask me how much it's cost in egress bandwidth to pull it all back though. I'm hoping if I end up needing it I'll be grateful enough for my foresight to justify paying it.
  - lowbloodsugar 3y ago
    So they can fail at the same time or did you make sure they are from different batches? Anyway, why use four disks from the same manufacturer???
    - em-bee 3y ago
      in my case i use 2.5" 5TB disks. there is only one model from one manufacturer making those. i bought one each from two different shops located in different parts of the country 5 years ago. i used them in a mirror raid. one of them died a year ago. then i got two more drives, one of which was second hand slightly used. the price was good and i figured it was a good way to ensure i'd get drives from two very different batches.
    - joshcafe 3y ago
      I'm not sure what exactly you mean - they're different lines of drives. And different SKUs on Amazon. The probability of me getting sibling drives out of that - and that's assuming the only difference between red pros and golds are binning - is infinitesimally small.
somat 3y ago
Heh, me too, but just a reminder raid is not a backup. raid can keep your data online in the face of some types of hardware failure. It won't protect against mistakes, malice, or disaster. backups will. What I do is build one good drive array then each machine gets a cheap local drive and can access the good drive via network and I don't have to spend too much putting redundancy in each machine. Now... "looks around embarrassedly" time to work on that backup system.

When it comes to reliability, simple solutions are usually the best. I still use spinning rust as my primary back up --- arranged in a redundant array with offset manufacture dates.

valianteffort 3y ago

Buy some blu-ray discs. Losing data is soul crushing and while blu-rays are not necessarily cheap they will outlive you and are easy to store/copy.

jqpabc123 3y ago
Too slow --- takes too long to backup.
supertrope 3y ago
Pressed discs sure. Consumer grade BD-R discs should only be considered data in transit.
- BirAdam 3y ago
  There’s always MDISC, but you’d need a ton of them.

ksec 3y ago

>I still use spinning rust as my primary back up --- arranged in a redundant array with offset manufacture dates. You will still need to set up either BTRFS or ZFS to avoid silent Data corruption which is happening more often than most people know. And you have to set it up to scrub it from time to time. It isn't automatic. Arguably the cheapest solution that hit the above bar would be Synology DS223J at $180, their newest entry model with BTRFS support ( on a fairly old Linux Kernel, I think it is 5.10 that will never get updated again in the life time of the product ). You will still need to buy 2 HDD in redundant RAID and set it up yourself. And it is quite bulky as well. Hardly consumer friendly. And that is before 99.9999% on HN jumping on you, telling you need another backup for this NAS, or another off line, third location devices.... It is sad, not only just consumer. Judging by the number of comment here plenty in the tech industry simply uses an additional copy, or external SSD devices as backup. And I can understand why, but there simply isn't a simple, easy to use consumer solution that offer enough security for a reasonable price. And I have been stating this for more than a decade already. Your Kids's video are worth a lot more than you can imagine. Tried explaining it to your wife some of those video are gone.

joshcafe 3y ago
My favorite trick for this lately has been to use a stripe of mirrored pairs, where each pair is a WD Gold and a WD Red Pro (of matching size). They're very similar drives (AFAICT, WD Gold is just a Red Pro but with a higher lifetime r/w rating) but it makes me feel a bit better that they're not from too similar of batches without having to actually temporally space out my purchases. I can buy 1 of each in the same cart. And then for truly unrecoverable data, I back it up to S3 Deep Archive which seems to be one of AWS's only reasonably priced offerings. Don't ask me how much it's cost in egress bandwidth to pull it all back though. I'm hoping if I end up needing it I'll be grateful enough for my foresight to justify paying it.
- lowbloodsugar 3y ago
  So they can fail at the same time or did you make sure they are from different batches? Anyway, why use four disks from the same manufacturer???
  - em-bee 3y ago
    in my case i use 2.5" 5TB disks. there is only one model from one manufacturer making those. i bought one each from two different shops located in different parts of the country 5 years ago. i used them in a mirror raid. one of them died a year ago. then i got two more drives, one of which was second hand slightly used. the price was good and i figured it was a good way to ensure i'd get drives from two very different batches.
  - joshcafe 3y ago
    I'm not sure what exactly you mean - they're different lines of drives. And different SKUs on Amazon. The probability of me getting sibling drives out of that - and that's assuming the only difference between red pros and golds are binning - is infinitesimally small.

somat 3y ago

Heh, me too, but just a reminder raid is not a backup. raid can keep your data online in the face of some types of hardware failure. It won't protect against mistakes, malice, or disaster. backups will. What I do is build one good drive array then each machine gets a cheap local drive and can access the good drive via network and I don't have to spend too much putting redundancy in each machine. Now... "looks around embarrassedly" time to work on that backup system.