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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31724 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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I suppose that a well-maintained RAID system would work too. But physical media seems idiot proof.

Why mention RAID? I’m honestly curious because this comes up a lot with data hoarding. RAID helps with maintaining uptime and availability for an applications during a disk failure, but it does not provide backups. With RAID your capacity investment is diminished by mirroring or parity storage cost, which could be better allocated to additional backup media. Do you agree?

I disagree. The reason RAID is not a backup is because it does not protect against accidentally deleting data, and compared to an external backup the chance of something breaking both drives is greater because they're next to each other. However, it is not better than external backups in terms of capacity; the data is just as big regardless of where you store the drives or how you access them. It's less space-efficient than having a single external copy, but that's not a backup, that's your primary copy being stored elsewhere.

And practically speaking, RAID is more reliable than external backups because it's being constantly checked through normal disk usage. If your external backup has had an error, you won't find out until you access it, which is really bad if the reason you're accessing it is because your primary copy doesn't work. In a company you can make it someone's job to verify the backups by periodically restoring them to a test system, but most individuals won't be doing that.

However, it is not better than external backups in terms of capacity; the data is just as big regardless of where you store the drives or how you access them. It's less space-efficient than having a single external copy, but that's not a backup, that's your primary copy being stored elsewhere.

I mean if I have 10 disks and split 5 into a data pool with no mirroring/parity and 5 into a backup set, then I have half the total capacity of all disks. However if I turn 5 into a raid, I’ll have some number of disks capacity -N depending on raid level. I could then turn the backup set into the same raid level (online backup) to match, but in this case raid gives me less than half the total capacity of all disks due to extra parity storage.

And practically speaking, RAID is more reliable than external backups because it's being constantly checked through normal disk usage. If your external backup has had an error, you won't find out until you access it, which is really bad if the reason you're accessing it is because your primary copy doesn't work.

True, however my approach would be to have both online and offline backups. Online ZFS backup should help here. To keep costs down, this is just 3 disks for every dataset zpool I’d set up. Then, an additional 3 disks when that runs out. Add another disk or tape in to this for offsite backup if you want.

Also offline guards against ransomware.

What do you think, what is your approach?

For relatively unimportant stuff I just use RAID. If ransomware wants me to pay for my Factorio saves I can start a new game instead. My more important private stuff is all documents, so I keep an extra printed copy (and for the really important stuff I also keep copies with my relatives in case I lose everything in a fire). For important stuff that I don't need to hide, I use immutable storage on the internet (e.g. git, bittorrent, ipfs). That would be my advice to anyone who wants to hoard books electronically: find a like-minded community, make a torrent with everything you want to hoard, and ask them to seed it.

On the latter point of immutable storage, I’m not convinced we won’t have some sort of on onerous blackout from a “global cybersecurity incident” as defined from the WEF. No route to host, but I want my data. So I do keep hoarding locally.

Do you agree?

Quite possibly. I haven't really given it much thought TBH. I just think digital archival methods don't have a great (or long) track record. Certainly, any one person's efforts wouldn't be likely to survive their death.

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