3 ms·

"Photos of kids? Maybe that one will be The One that we end up framing? Miscellaneous business records? Maybe those will be the ones we have to dig out for a t

"Photos of kids? Maybe that one will be The One that we end up framing? Miscellaneous business records? Maybe those will be the ones we have to dig out for a tax audit? Web pages on government sites? Maybe there will suddenly be an interest in obscure pages on public health policy if a global pandemic happens." Perhaps I am missing something, but these examples all sound like candidates for _offline_ storage, for which no third party custodian or data center is required. The price of large capacity NVMe SSDs continues to fall. The amount of energy, the resource requirements, not to mention the environmental and community impact, of running a car insurance company are miniscule in comparison to that of running a data center.

wongarsu 2y ago
Offline storage is only easy on the very small and the very large scale. On the very small scale you can get archival-grade CD/DVD/Blurays. On the very large scale you dedicate climate-controlled rooms to an automatic tape library. In between is a vast gulf where your only good options are disks that you have to occasionally spin up to check integrity, have the disk trigger a data refresh if it's an SSD, and replace any disks that failed and rebuild their data from redundancy (raid or whatever you prefer). HDDs die even when off [1] and flash storage in SSDs is only rated to hold data for three years without power. Sure, you can roll this yourself, but it can easily go wrong. Easier to either keep the disks spinning or pay someone with a tape archive (e.g. AWS deep glacier) 1 https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/twenty-percent-of-hard-drives-used-for-long-term-music-storage-in-the-90s-have-failed https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/twenty-pe...