4 ms·

SD cards are pretty easy to recover media from, if you haven't overwritten them. Also, I'm a bit surprised by their topology. Reading the bit about the 3TB dri

SD cards are pretty easy to recover media from, if you haven't overwritten them. Also, I'm a bit surprised by their topology. Reading the bit about the 3TB drives, it sounds like three drive failures in their raid5 array would result in lost customer data. I hope they have a 2nd line of defense, e.g. tapes. One company I used to work for ran into sufficient failures (particularly of the living-dead variety, where a second drive fails during rebuild or after reboot) they made tapes the 3rd line of defense, and maintained two copies of all data at the cluster level, so that the total failure of an entire machine was acceptable.

thaumaturgy 11y ago
"A Backblaze Vault is comprised of 20 Storage Pods, with the data evenly spread across all 20 pods. ... Drives in the same drive position in each of the 20 Storage Pods are grouped together into a storage unit we call a “tome”. ... Every file uploaded to a Vault is broken into pieces before being stored. Each of those pieces is called a “shard”. ... Each file is stored as 20 shards: 17 data shards and 3 parity shards. Because those shards are distributed across 20 storage pods in 20 cabinets, the Vault is resilient to the failure of a storage pod, or even a power loss to an entire cabinet." From https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architecture/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect..., which is well worth taking a few minutes to read. Their approach to data resiliency is pretty neat and full of the kind of common-sense reasoning that warms the very bottoms of my ol' sysadmin's heart ("use simple parts" and "build the tools you need to run your infrastructure", among others).
- atYevP 11y ago
  Yev from Backblaze here -> Glad you like the build! We have more fun things we're working on in that regard ;-)

thaumaturgy 11y ago

"A Backblaze Vault is comprised of 20 Storage Pods, with the data evenly spread across all 20 pods. ... Drives in the same drive position in each of the 20 Storage Pods are grouped together into a storage unit we call a “tome”. ... Every file uploaded to a Vault is broken into pieces before being stored. Each of those pieces is called a “shard”. ... Each file is stored as 20 shards: 17 data shards and 3 parity shards. Because those shards are distributed across 20 storage pods in 20 cabinets, the Vault is resilient to the failure of a storage pod, or even a power loss to an entire cabinet." From https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architecture/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect..., which is well worth taking a few minutes to read. Their approach to data resiliency is pretty neat and full of the kind of common-sense reasoning that warms the very bottoms of my ol' sysadmin's heart ("use simple parts" and "build the tools you need to run your infrastructure", among others).

atYevP 11y ago
Yev from Backblaze here -> Glad you like the build! We have more fun things we're working on in that regard ;-)