I'm curious what this data would look like collated by drive birth date rather than (or in 3D addition to) age. I wouldn't use that as the "primary" way to look at things, but it could pop some interesting bits. Maybe one of the manufacturers had a shipload of subpar grease? Slightly shittier magnets? Poor quality silicon? There's all kinds of things that could cause a few months of hard drive manufacture to be slightly less reliable…
(Also: "Accumulated power on time, hours:minutes 37451*:12, Manufactured in week 27 of year 2014" — I might want to replace these :D — * pretty sure that overflowed at 16 bit, they were powered on almost continuously & adding 65536 makes it 11.7 years.)
Over the past couple of years, I've been side hustling a project that requires buying ingredients from multiple vendors. The quantities never work out 1:1, so some ingredients from the first order get used with some from a new order from a different vendor. Each item has its own batch number which when used together for the final product yields a batch number on my end. I logged my batch number with the batch number for each of the ingredients in my product. As a solo person, it is a mountain of work, but nerdy me goes to that effort.
I'd assume that a drive manufacture does similar knowing which batch from which vendor the magnets, grease, or silicon all comes from. You hope you never need to use these records to do any kind of forensic research, but the one time you do need it makes a huge difference. So many people doing similar products that I do look at me with a tilted head while their eyes go wide and glaze over as if I'm speaking an alien language discussing lineage tracking.
I think it's helpful to put on our statistics hats when looking at data like this... We have some observed values and a number of available covariates, which, perhaps, help explain the observed variability. Some legitimate sources of variation (eg, proximity to cooling in the NFS box, whether the hard drive was dropped as a child, stray cosmic rays) will remain obscured to us - we cannot fully explain all the variation. But when we average over more instances, those unexplainable sources of variation are captured as a residual to the explanations we can make, given the avialable covariates. The averaging acts a kind of low-pass filter over the data, which helps reveal meaningful trends.
Meanwhile, if we slice the data up three ways to hell and back, /all/ we see is unexplainable variation - every point is unique.
This is where PCA is helpful - given our set of covariates, what combination of variables best explain the variation, and how much of the residual remains? If there's a lot of residual, we should look for other covariates. If it's a tiny residual, we don't care, and can work on optimizing the known major axes.
Exactly. I used to pore over the Backblaze data but so much of it is in the form of “we got 1,200 drives four months ago and so far none have failed”. That is a relatively small number over a small amount of time.
On top of that it seems like by the time there is a clear winner for reliability, the manufacturer no longer makes that particular model and the newer models are just not a part of the dataset yet. Basically, you can’t just go “Hitachi good, Seagate bad”. You have to look at specific models and there are what? Hundreds? Thousands?
> if we slice the data up three ways to hell and back, /all/ we see is unexplainable variation
It's certainly true that you can go too far, but this is a case where we can know a priori that the mfg date could be causing bias in the numbers they're showing, because the estimated failure rates at 5 years cannot contain data from any drives newer than 2020, whereas failure rates at 1 year can. At a minimum you might want to exclude newer drives from the analysis, e.g. exclude anything after 2020 if you want to draw conclusions about how the failure rate changes up to the 5-year mark.
(with a tinfoil hat on) I'm convinced that Backblaze is intentionally withholding and ambiguating data to prevent producing too-easily understood visualization that Seagate is consistently the worst of the last 3 remaining drive manufacturers.
Their online notoriety only started after a flooding in Thailand that contaminated all manufacturing clean room for spindle motors in existence, causing bunch of post-flood ST3000DM001 to fail quickly, which probably incentivized enough people for the Backblaze stat tracking to gain recognition and to continue to this date.
But even if one puts aside such models affected by the same problem, Seagate drives always exhibited shorter real world MTBF. Since it's not in interest of Backblaze or anyone to smear their brand, they must be tweaking data processing to leave out some of those obvious figures.
Since it's not in interest of Backblaze or anyone to smear their brand
It is if they want to negotiate pricing; and even in the past, Seagates were usually priced lower than HGST or WD drives. To me, it looks like they just aren't as consistent, as they have some very low failure rate models but also some very high ones; and naturally everyone will be concerned about the latter.
To Seagate's credit though, their warranty service is excellent. I've had the occasional exos drive die (in very large zfs raids) and they do just ship you one overnight if you email an unhappy smart over. Also their nerd tooling, seachest, is freely downloadable and mostly open source. That's worth quite a lot to me...
Somewhat tangent: Imagine my dismay after googling why two of my drives in my NAS failed within a couple of days of one another, and I came across a Wikipedia page dedicated to the drive's notoriety. I think this is one of the few drives that were so bad that it had it's own dedicated Wikipedia page.
Yes this is fairly standard in manufacturing environments. builds of material and lot or down to serial # level are tracked for production of complex goods.
Reminds me of the capacitor blight of the late aughts. Knowing when the device was manufactured helped troubleshoot likely suspect components during repair.
Honestly, at 8 years, I'd be leaning towards dirty power on the user's end. For a company like BackBlaze, I'd assume a data center would have conditioned power. For someone at home running a NAS with the same drive connected straight to mains, they may not receive the same life span for a drive from the same batch. Undervolting when the power dips is gnarly on equipment. It's amazing to me how the use of a UPS is not as ubiquitous at home.
I have a 13 years old NAS with 4x1TB consumer drives with over 10y head flying hours and 600,000 head unloads. Only 1 drive failed at around 7 years. The remaining 3 are still spinning and pass the long self test. I do manually set the hdparm -B and -S to balance head flying vs unloads, and I keep the NAS in my basement so everything is thermally cool.
I'm kinda of hoping the other drives will fail so I can get a new NAS but no such luck yet :-(
Once i made a FreeNAS and i lost all the wedding photo's. The significant other was not amused and i vowed to use a lot of backups. I have a lot of old NASes, from NetGear to Qnap to Synology. Perk of the job.
But these days i use a Synology DS2412 in a SHR RAID6 configuration. Only 1 of the 12 drives failed thus far, but maybe this is because most of the time it's powered off and activated using WakeOnLan. For day to day i use an old laptop with 2 SATA 1TB disks in a Debian configuration. Documentation and photo's get frequently backupped to the big nas and the big nas uses Hyperbackup to a Hetzner storage that costs me around $5 a month. So now they're in three systems, two different media and one other different place. It would be a pain to restore when the house burns down, but its doable.
That reminds me.. i should document the restore process somewhere. There is no way the other family members can do this right now.
they should be spinning most of the time in indle to lubricate things.
or so I've heard.
i have my nas setup as such and have 10y drivers with constant success (they move from main to spare after 5y). i also aim for the 30w amd cpu (which drawn around 5w in idle)
for drivers i spend $300 every 5yr on new ones, so i can keep growing and renewing. and is a pretty low cost considering cloud alternatives.
I only recently replaced a failed HDD and power supply, but otherwise going mostly strong. It will stop responding to the network out of the blue on occasion, but a power cycle gets it back in order.
But I’ve had redundancy for a while with S3, then later (and currently) BackBlaze.
I’ve been looking into replacing it, but I’m hearing Synology hardware and software isn’t as great as it used to be, which is unfortunate, because this thing has been a tank.
I built my home NAS in 2017 the two original drives were replaced after developing bad blocks (4 and 5 years, respectively). The two expansion drives (2018, 2021) are still fine.
I built a NAS for a client, which currently has 22 drives (growing bit by bit over the years) in it (270 GB of raw capacity) and since 2018 has lost only 3 drives.
This NAS, a lenovo ix4-300d, came with Seagate drives (ST1000DM003), so its whatever the SMART 240 counter (Head flying hours) means to Seagate I guess. I just interpret it as "not parked", so it could be doing anything, but this NAS is not doing huge amounts of I/O - mostly just for music, movies, and some personal files. I think all the heads for all platters are on one assembly so they are either all parked or all spinning.
No the entire thing is on a UPS and uptime routinely will say something like 800 days. I also have a whole-home generator so I'm hoping it stays on forever ;-)
I also back it up online through IDrive and take frequent local backups so I don't care if the entire thing fails.
Personal anecdote - I would say (a cautious) yes. Bought 3 WD hard drives (1 external, 2 internal, during different time periods; in the last 10+ years) for personal use and 2 failed exactly after the 5 year warranty period ended (within a month or so). One failed just a few weeks before the warranty period, and so WD had to replace it (and I got a replacement HDD that I could use for another 5 years). That's good engineering! (I also have an old 500GB external Seagate drive that has now lasted 10+ years, and still works perfectly - probably an outlier).
That said, one thing that I do find very attractive in Seagate HDDs now is that they are also offering free data recovery within the warranty period, with some models. Anybody who has lost data (i.e. idiots like me who didn't care about backups) and had to use such services knows how expensive they can be.
I've bought a lot of WD drives over the years and my experience is they used to last 3 years (back when there was a 3 year warranty) and die right after the warranty expired. I think western digital does a very good job making their drives last to the end of the warranty and not a minute longer.
HDD manufacturers offering data recovery...kind of makes sense, and I'm surprised it's never been offered before. They're in a much better position to recover data than anyone else.
Yes, but the warranty is "irrelevant" when the drive actually last the whole 5 years (in other words, I am hoping the replacement drive is as well-engineered as its predecessor and lasts the whole 5 years - and it has so far in the last 3+ years).
If hard drives increase in capacity while maintaining the same MTBF, does this count as an improvement? If you previously stored your data on 10 drives and now you can store the same data on 5 drives, that reduces the probability of failure of the system as a whole, right? Is there some kind of "failure rate per byte" measure that normalizes for this?
It depends on what you’re doing and what you’re concerned about.
For a simplified example suppose you have X drives storing 20TB vs 2X drives with 10TB in a simple RAID 1 configuration. When a drive fails there’s a risk period before its contents are replicated on another drive. At constant transfer speeds larger disks double that period per drive but half the number of failures. Net result the risk is identical in both setups.
However, that assumes a constant transfer speeds, faster transfer rates reduce overall risks.
Hmm, I hadn't considered that doubling the drive size doubles the resilver time and therefore doubles the exposure time for risk of array loss. I guess the math gets complicated depending on RAID topology.
> If you previously stored your data on 10 drives and now you can store the same data on 5 drives, that reduces the probability of failure of the system as a whole, right?
Well it also means in the case of failure you get 2x the spread of damage across the same amount of data
I don't know about this exact metrics, but the Backblaze hard drive report is always a very good read when thinking about failure rates. Maybe check it out and see if you'll get your answers there.
When I am projecting prices I tend to assume a 5 year life for a consumer hard drive. I do wonder from this data and the change in purchasing from backblaze if the enterprise class drives might pay for their extra price if they survive out to more like 9 years. 20% extra cost per TB verses about 30%+ more life time. They do tend to consume a bit more power and make more noise as well. I wish they had more data on why the drives were surviving longer, if its purchasing in palettes there isn't a lot we can do, but if its that enterprise drives are a lot better than NAS or basic consumer drives then that we compare cost wise.
Slightly related: Anyone noticed how sloppy Samsung has become with the reliability of their NVMe firmware? I learned a lesson when I nearly lost a ton of data in a ZFS mirror of two Samsung Pro 990 4TB NMVes, they might have been from the same batch and had the same firmware version. First one NVMe abandoned the system, then I made a ZFS send of a snapshot of the remaining one, followed by an rsync to have the raw data directly accessible as well, and during the rsync the second NVMe also abandoned ship. A reboot fixed it, and all data was still there, but only upgrading the firmware (to one which now has been superseded again) fixed the problem.
I'm really considering no longer buying Samsung Pro NVMes.
I lost about a month of family chats to a Samsung NVME. Yes, I was taking daily backups of the DB, but the damn drive didn't fail catastrophically and instantly. It just started silently corrupting the database, causing little errors until I noticed a month later. By then, my only option was to restore from my backup right before the first error.
The irony is that I'm a huge BTRFS fan, and use it on all my desktops. But this was a database on a server, so of course use EXT4 and be fine with silent data corruption. :/
I think this was either a `number of TBW (terabytes written)` or `% of space used` issue, since both got removed by the OS within 9 hours delta and the same usage (couple of months, ~500GB), because they were in a mirror since the beginning. If it were a sensor issue, SMART data should have shown this. Not saying that a sensor issue does not exist, but I doubt that this was my problem (mine don't have a preinstalled heatsink, I prefer to use my own).
I now use a 3-way mirror and am mixing brands.
One very nice thing: the Samsung Pro 990 4TB has the exact same space (down to the byte) as the WD_BLACK SN850X 4TB, so they can be replaced without any issues. This rarely was the case with SSDs and HDDs and probably other NVMes. Looks like they learned.
Per charts in TFA, it looks like some disks are failing less overall, and failing after a longer period of time.
I'm still not sure how to confidently store decent amounts of (personal) data for over 5 years without
1- giving to cloud,
2- burning to M-disk, or
3- replacing multiple HDD every 5 years on average
All whilst regularly checking for bitrot and not overwriting good files with bad corrupted files.
Who has the easy, self-service, cost-effective solution for basic, durable file storage? Synology? TrueNAS? Debian? UGreen?
(1) and (2) both have their annoyances, so (3) seems "best" still, but seems "too complex" for most? I'd consider myself pretty technical, and I'd say (3) presents real challenges if I don't want it to become a somewhat significant hobby.
Get yourself a Xeon powered workstation that supports at least 4 drives. One will be your boot system drive and three or more will be a ZFS mirror. You will use ECC RAM (hence Xeon). I bought a Lenovo workstation like this for $35 on eBay.
ZFS with a three way mirror will be incredibly unlikely to fail. You only need one drive for your data to survive.
Then get a second setup exactly like this for your backup server. I use rsnapshot for that.
For your third copy you can use S3 like a block device, which means you can use an encrypted file system. Use FreeBSD for your base OS.
3. Park a small reasonably low-power computer at a friend's house across town or somewhere a little further out -- it can be single-disk or raidz1. Send ZFS snapshots to it using Tailscale or whatever. (And scrub that regularly, too.)
4. Bring over pizza or something from time to time.
As to brands: This method is independent of brand or distro.
> 3. Park a small reasonably low-power computer at a friend's house across town or somewhere a little further out -- it can be single-disk or raidz1. Send ZFS snapshots to it using Tailscale or whatever. (And scrub that regularly, too.)
Maybe I’m hanging out in the wrong circles, but I would never think it appropriate to make such a proposal to a friend; “hey let me set up a computer in your network, it will run 24/7 on your power and internet and I’ll expect you to make sure it’s always online, also it provides zero value to you. In exchange I’ll give you some unspecified amount of pizza, like a pointy haired boss motivating some new interns”.
I have a simpler approach that I've used at home for about 2 decades now pretty much unchanged.
I have two raid1 pairs - "the old one", and "the new one", plus a third drive the same sizes as "the old pair". The new pair is always larger than the old pair, in the early days it was usually well over twice as big but drive growth rates have slowed since then. About every three years I buy a new "new pair" + third drive, and downgrade the current "new pair" to be the4 "old pair". The old pair is my primary storage, and gets rsynced to a partition that's the same size on the new pair. Te remainder of the new pair is used for data I'm OK with not being backed up (umm, all my BitTorrented Linux isos...) The third drive is on a switched powerpoint and spins up late Sunday night and rsyncs the data copy on the new pair then powers back down for the week.
>3. Park a small reasonably low-power computer at a friend's house across town or somewhere a little further out -- it can be single-disk or raidz1. Send ZFS snapshots to it using Tailscale or whatever. (And scrub that regularly, too.)
Unless you're storing terabyte levels of data, surely it's more straightforward and more reliable to store on backblaze or aws glacier? The only advantage of the DIY solution is if you value your time at zero and/or want to "homelab".
If you mostly care about data integrity, then a plain RAID-1 mirror over three disks is better than RAIDZ. Correlated drive failures are not uncommon, especially if they are from the same batch.
I also would recommend an offline backup, like a USB-connected drive you mostly leave disconnected. If your system is compromised they could encrypt everything and also can probably reach the backup and encrypt that.
I had to check for data integrity due to a recent system switch, and was surprised not to find any bitrot after 4y+.
It took ages to compute and verify those hashes between different disks. Certainly an inconvenience.
I am not sure a NAS is really the right solution for smaller data sets. An SSD for quick hashing and a set of N hashed cold storage HDDs - N depends on your appetite for risk - will do.
I don't understand what you're worried about with 3.
Make a box, hide it in a closet with power, every 3 months look at your drive stats to see if any have a buch of uncorrectable errors. If we estimate half an hour per checkup and one hour per replacement that's under three hours per year to maintain your data.
Hard drive failure seems like more of a cost and annoyance problem than a data preservation issue. Even with incredible reliability you still need backups if your house burns down. And if you have a backup system then drive failure matters little.
IIRC, the things currently marketed as MDisc are just regular BD-R discs (perhaps made to a higher standard, and maybe with a slower write speed programmed into them, but still regular BD-Rs).
If you don't have too much stuff, you could probably do ok with mirroring across N+1 (distributed) disks, where N is enough that you're comfortable. Monitor for failure/pre-failure indicators and replace promptly.
When building up initially, make a point of trying to stagger purchases and service entry dates. After that, chances are failures will be staggered as well, so you naturally get staggered service entry dates. You can likely hit better than 5 year time in service if you run until failure, and don't accumulate much additional storage.
But I just did a 5 year replacement, so I dunno. Not a whole lot of work to replace disks that work.
Offline data storage is a good option for files you don't need to access constantly. A hard drive sitting on a shelf in a good environment (not much humidity, reasonable temperature, not a lot of vibration) will last a very very long time. The same can't be said for SSDs which will lose their stored data in a mater of a year or two.
Tapes would be great for backups - but the tape drive market's all "enterprise-y", and the pricing reflects that. There really isn't any affordable retail consumer option (which is surprising as there definitely is a market for it).
I looked at tape a little while ago and decided it wasn't gonna work out for me reliability-wise at home without a more controlled environment (especially humidity).
I don't know why you were downvoted, I think for the right purpose tape drives are great.
Used drives from a few generations back work just fine, and are affordable. I have an LTO-5 drive, and new tapes are around $30 where I am. One tape holds 1,5TB uncompressed.
I think they are great for critical data. I have documents and photos on them.
> The issue isn’t that the bathtub curve is wrong—it’s that it’s incomplete.
Well, yeah. The bathtub curve is a simplified model that is ‘wrong’, but it is also a very useful concept regarding time to failure (with some pretty big and obvious caveats) that you can broadly apply to many manufactured things.
Just like Newtonian physics breaks down when you get closer to the speed of light, the bathtub curve breaks down when you introduce firmware into the mix or create dependencies between units so they can fail together.
I know the article mentions these things, and I hate to be pedantic, but the bathtub curve is still a useful construct and is alive and well. Just use it properly.
Readit News
(Also: "Accumulated power on time, hours:minutes 37451*:12, Manufactured in week 27 of year 2014" — I might want to replace these :D — * pretty sure that overflowed at 16 bit, they were powered on almost continuously & adding 65536 makes it 11.7 years.)
I'd assume that a drive manufacture does similar knowing which batch from which vendor the magnets, grease, or silicon all comes from. You hope you never need to use these records to do any kind of forensic research, but the one time you do need it makes a huge difference. So many people doing similar products that I do look at me with a tilted head while their eyes go wide and glaze over as if I'm speaking an alien language discussing lineage tracking.
Presumably required for compliance, if you're selling your products..
Are there decent softwares for tracking this? Or do you use custom spreadsheets or something?
Meanwhile, if we slice the data up three ways to hell and back, /all/ we see is unexplainable variation - every point is unique.
This is where PCA is helpful - given our set of covariates, what combination of variables best explain the variation, and how much of the residual remains? If there's a lot of residual, we should look for other covariates. If it's a tiny residual, we don't care, and can work on optimizing the known major axes.
On top of that it seems like by the time there is a clear winner for reliability, the manufacturer no longer makes that particular model and the newer models are just not a part of the dataset yet. Basically, you can’t just go “Hitachi good, Seagate bad”. You have to look at specific models and there are what? Hundreds? Thousands?
It's certainly true that you can go too far, but this is a case where we can know a priori that the mfg date could be causing bias in the numbers they're showing, because the estimated failure rates at 5 years cannot contain data from any drives newer than 2020, whereas failure rates at 1 year can. At a minimum you might want to exclude newer drives from the analysis, e.g. exclude anything after 2020 if you want to draw conclusions about how the failure rate changes up to the 5-year mark.
Their online notoriety only started after a flooding in Thailand that contaminated all manufacturing clean room for spindle motors in existence, causing bunch of post-flood ST3000DM001 to fail quickly, which probably incentivized enough people for the Backblaze stat tracking to gain recognition and to continue to this date.
But even if one puts aside such models affected by the same problem, Seagate drives always exhibited shorter real world MTBF. Since it's not in interest of Backblaze or anyone to smear their brand, they must be tweaking data processing to leave out some of those obvious figures.
https://backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads...
and graphs:
https://backblazeprod.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads...
Since it's not in interest of Backblaze or anyone to smear their brand
It is if they want to negotiate pricing; and even in the past, Seagates were usually priced lower than HGST or WD drives. To me, it looks like they just aren't as consistent, as they have some very low failure rate models but also some very high ones; and naturally everyone will be concerned about the latter.
According to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001
Somewhat tangent: Imagine my dismay after googling why two of my drives in my NAS failed within a couple of days of one another, and I came across a Wikipedia page dedicated to the drive's notoriety. I think this is one of the few drives that were so bad that it had it's own dedicated Wikipedia page.
Then a drive fails spectacularly.
And that's the story of how I thought I lost all our home movies. Luckily the home movies and pictures were backed up.
But these days i use a Synology DS2412 in a SHR RAID6 configuration. Only 1 of the 12 drives failed thus far, but maybe this is because most of the time it's powered off and activated using WakeOnLan. For day to day i use an old laptop with 2 SATA 1TB disks in a Debian configuration. Documentation and photo's get frequently backupped to the big nas and the big nas uses Hyperbackup to a Hetzner storage that costs me around $5 a month. So now they're in three systems, two different media and one other different place. It would be a pain to restore when the house burns down, but its doable.
That reminds me.. i should document the restore process somewhere. There is no way the other family members can do this right now.
And you didn't have a backup? Ouch. I'm sorry for you.
>i should document the restore process somewhere. There is no way the other family members can do this right now.
I agree. If I passed away, or something seriously bad happened to me, nobody in my family would be able to recover any memories.
I should document how to recover all the data in a simple way. And probably print the document and store it somewhere easily accessible.
they should be spinning most of the time in indle to lubricate things.
or so I've heard.
i have my nas setup as such and have 10y drivers with constant success (they move from main to spare after 5y). i also aim for the 30w amd cpu (which drawn around 5w in idle)
for drivers i spend $300 every 5yr on new ones, so i can keep growing and renewing. and is a pretty low cost considering cloud alternatives.
I only recently replaced a failed HDD and power supply, but otherwise going mostly strong. It will stop responding to the network out of the blue on occasion, but a power cycle gets it back in order.
But I’ve had redundancy for a while with S3, then later (and currently) BackBlaze.
I’ve been looking into replacing it, but I’m hearing Synology hardware and software isn’t as great as it used to be, which is unfortunate, because this thing has been a tank.
I built a NAS for a client, which currently has 22 drives (growing bit by bit over the years) in it (270 GB of raw capacity) and since 2018 has lost only 3 drives.
Is the 10y head flying for each head? Is it for heads actually reading/writing, or just for spinning drives/aloft heads?
I only skimmed the charts, they seemed to just measure time/years, but not necessarily drive use over time.
That said, one thing that I do find very attractive in Seagate HDDs now is that they are also offering free data recovery within the warranty period, with some models. Anybody who has lost data (i.e. idiots like me who didn't care about backups) and had to use such services knows how expensive they can be.
But the warranty lasts only 5 years since the purchase of the drive, doesn't it?
For a simplified example suppose you have X drives storing 20TB vs 2X drives with 10TB in a simple RAID 1 configuration. When a drive fails there’s a risk period before its contents are replicated on another drive. At constant transfer speeds larger disks double that period per drive but half the number of failures. Net result the risk is identical in both setups.
However, that assumes a constant transfer speeds, faster transfer rates reduce overall risks.
Well it also means in the case of failure you get 2x the spread of damage across the same amount of data
The irony is that I'm a huge BTRFS fan, and use it on all my desktops. But this was a database on a server, so of course use EXT4 and be fine with silent data corruption. :/
I now use a 3-way mirror and am mixing brands.
One very nice thing: the Samsung Pro 990 4TB has the exact same space (down to the byte) as the WD_BLACK SN850X 4TB, so they can be replaced without any issues. This rarely was the case with SSDs and HDDs and probably other NVMes. Looks like they learned.
Possibly because the bulk of recent drive production is getting reserved by the AI datacenters?
I'm still not sure how to confidently store decent amounts of (personal) data for over 5 years without
All whilst regularly checking for bitrot and not overwriting good files with bad corrupted files.Who has the easy, self-service, cost-effective solution for basic, durable file storage? Synology? TrueNAS? Debian? UGreen?
(1) and (2) both have their annoyances, so (3) seems "best" still, but seems "too complex" for most? I'd consider myself pretty technical, and I'd say (3) presents real challenges if I don't want it to become a somewhat significant hobby.
ZFS with a three way mirror will be incredibly unlikely to fail. You only need one drive for your data to survive.
Then get a second setup exactly like this for your backup server. I use rsnapshot for that.
For your third copy you can use S3 like a block device, which means you can use an encrypted file system. Use FreeBSD for your base OS.
1. Use ZFS with raidz
2. Scrub regularly to catch the bitrot
3. Park a small reasonably low-power computer at a friend's house across town or somewhere a little further out -- it can be single-disk or raidz1. Send ZFS snapshots to it using Tailscale or whatever. (And scrub that regularly, too.)
4. Bring over pizza or something from time to time.
As to brands: This method is independent of brand or distro.
Maybe I’m hanging out in the wrong circles, but I would never think it appropriate to make such a proposal to a friend; “hey let me set up a computer in your network, it will run 24/7 on your power and internet and I’ll expect you to make sure it’s always online, also it provides zero value to you. In exchange I’ll give you some unspecified amount of pizza, like a pointy haired boss motivating some new interns”.
I have two raid1 pairs - "the old one", and "the new one", plus a third drive the same sizes as "the old pair". The new pair is always larger than the old pair, in the early days it was usually well over twice as big but drive growth rates have slowed since then. About every three years I buy a new "new pair" + third drive, and downgrade the current "new pair" to be the4 "old pair". The old pair is my primary storage, and gets rsynced to a partition that's the same size on the new pair. Te remainder of the new pair is used for data I'm OK with not being backed up (umm, all my BitTorrented Linux isos...) The third drive is on a switched powerpoint and spins up late Sunday night and rsyncs the data copy on the new pair then powers back down for the week.
Unless you're storing terabyte levels of data, surely it's more straightforward and more reliable to store on backblaze or aws glacier? The only advantage of the DIY solution is if you value your time at zero and/or want to "homelab".
I also would recommend an offline backup, like a USB-connected drive you mostly leave disconnected. If your system is compromised they could encrypt everything and also can probably reach the backup and encrypt that.
It took ages to compute and verify those hashes between different disks. Certainly an inconvenience.
I am not sure a NAS is really the right solution for smaller data sets. An SSD for quick hashing and a set of N hashed cold storage HDDs - N depends on your appetite for risk - will do.
Make a box, hide it in a closet with power, every 3 months look at your drive stats to see if any have a buch of uncorrectable errors. If we estimate half an hour per checkup and one hour per replacement that's under three hours per year to maintain your data.
You can't buy those anymore. I've tried.
IIRC, the things currently marketed as MDisc are just regular BD-R discs (perhaps made to a higher standard, and maybe with a slower write speed programmed into them, but still regular BD-Rs).
When building up initially, make a point of trying to stagger purchases and service entry dates. After that, chances are failures will be staggered as well, so you naturally get staggered service entry dates. You can likely hit better than 5 year time in service if you run until failure, and don't accumulate much additional storage.
But I just did a 5 year replacement, so I dunno. Not a whole lot of work to replace disks that work.
Not great for easy read access but other than that it might be decent storage.
AFAIK someone on reddit did the math and the break-even for tapes is between 50TB to 100TB. Any less and it's cheaper to get a bunch of hard drives.
Used drives from a few generations back work just fine, and are affordable. I have an LTO-5 drive, and new tapes are around $30 where I am. One tape holds 1,5TB uncompressed.
I think they are great for critical data. I have documents and photos on them.
Well, yeah. The bathtub curve is a simplified model that is ‘wrong’, but it is also a very useful concept regarding time to failure (with some pretty big and obvious caveats) that you can broadly apply to many manufactured things.
Just like Newtonian physics breaks down when you get closer to the speed of light, the bathtub curve breaks down when you introduce firmware into the mix or create dependencies between units so they can fail together.
I know the article mentions these things, and I hate to be pedantic, but the bathtub curve is still a useful construct and is alive and well. Just use it properly.