I just need to preserve some old data that I have on my computers, so I was wondering what would be the best way to archive stuff long term.
Blu-ray disks ? Multiple HDDs ? What do you guys suggest ?
I just need to preserve some old data that I have on my computers, so I was wondering what would be the best way to archive stuff long term.
Blu-ray disks ? Multiple HDDs ? What do you guys suggest ?
A couple different threat models to consider, hardware failure vs human failure. Things like RAID can effectively cover the hardware failure side and be fully transparent. Human failure is a bit more tricky. There are a number of old expressions about backups but one that’s good to keep in mind is snapshots are not backups. They’re convenient and easy to automate but if the system making them goes kerplooie they’re pretty useless.
A tiered version is good for off device backup, using diff backups routinely to only copy the new or changed data with a periodic full backup.
Cold disks are great but make sure to test them periodically, nothing worse than looking to restore a chunk of data only to find the backup can’t be read.
Note that RAID only covers one specific hardware failure. To the point where IMHO, you cannot consider it a data security measure, only a data availability one.
Curious what you mean here. Aside from RAID0 all tiers allow for at least one disk to fail without loss. If the whole raid controller fails you can typically replace that independently and import the foreign config. This is all talking about hardware backed RAID of course, not a soft-raid config.
There are much worse ways for a RAID controller to fail than suddenly not doing anything. What if it doesn’t notice it has failed and continues to write to a subset of devices only? Great recipe for data corruption right there.
Bad RAID controller/HBA, CPU, RAM, Motherboard, PSU are all hardware failures that RAID does very little (if anything) to mitigate. One localised incident in any of them out could make all of your drives turn into magic smoke or bits go bad.
You cannot rely on that sort of setup for data security. It only really mitigates one relatively common hardware to push storage system uptime above 99.9%. That has a place in some scenarios where storage “only” being 99.9% available has a significant impact on total availability but you’d first have to demonstrate that that is the case.
Fair enough if using a more expansive version of hardware failure. Things like a house fire would presumably destroy a series of optical disks which would make most any in house option non-functional. Network based backups could also fail to transmit data securely and accurately as well so really any sort of replication solution needs validation of the data is of significant value. A first step in preservation is to not have the box that it came from burn down, and have a way to recover if someone does a ‘sudo rm -rf /’ accidentally.
Well, it makes any option that only uses a single location non-functional. Having two copies at home and one at a distant location (as recommended by the 3-2-1 backup rule of thumb) mitigates this issue.
Absolutely. Though the network is usually assumed to be unreliable from the get-go, so mitigations usually already exist here (E2EE, checksums, ECC).
Absolutely correct. An untested backup is probably better than nothing but most definitely worse than a tested backup.
Certainly something that must be mitigated but this is getting out of “hardware failure” territory now ;)