Im looking for a looong time solution for backup of data that I can’t lose.
I was looking at your Backup video with Jay and you mention that you have your data on turning disk. What do you mean turning disk, offline disk, online disk?
Perhaps a video of longtime backup, different media and there ability to hold data?
I have data that I HAVE TO keep for dekades.
I was thinking of a old server that i have. Fill it up with disk and use TrueNAS with ist ZFS scrub task. Leave it offline and only fire it up a couple times a year for running the scrub task to check the data.
How much data do you need to keep? LTO and Bluray are two technologies that are rated to decades if stored properly. Amount of data may dictate the technology. Look at the Panasonic website for details on Bluray, unless they moved it when they partitioned/sold off the optical department.
For smaller amount DVD-RW (phase change technology) works for a long time, in my case I have some at around 20 years. If paranoid you can zip/rar with error correction encoded into the files. RAR with a decent size parity set can recover a lot of missing pieces.
There is another aspect of keeping data… You also need to refresh that data periodically. You can’t rely on a sleeping technology to hold your stuff. When you need it most, you may find that the disks have stopped spinning from disuse, or the reflective layer has rotted, or the tape has glued itself together from a slight amount of humidity. Some of these things can be fixed, some are terminal (as far as I know).
Ultimately, I have video tapes here that are 50+ years old, and with a small amount of care, they still play back. Combine tape with the error correction built in, and you have a winner. But you also need to move that data from LTOx to LTOx+1 when the devices can no longer read your old tapes. It happens, I don’t think there is a current device on the market that can read the current LTO tapes and the LTO1 tapes from decades ago, just a range of support.
And failing all that, laser etch to gold plates, chose your encoding technology for this.
I would say LTO-7 as a minimum, but upon reading this wiki, the future seems dim:
Seems that few are making the tape drive mechanism now, and few are making tapes.
I’m seeing 3 and 4 layer Bluray being listed as archival, but I thought that only single and dual layer qualified. Even at 4 layer with 100GB or 128GB, your data will take a lot of time to record. If it is in chunks that fit nicely, then optical disk might be a good choice when coupled with a decent library so you can look up what you need. If it’s a single database that just keeps growing, then your only real options are LTO or NAS (or cloud but look at the fees).
The other question being, how quickly do you need to retrieve the data? If you need it “right now” (time enough to boot the NAS or shuttle the tape) and need to jump to multiple parts “right now”, then NAS might be the only choice. If you need it as chunks and can “schedule” looking for it (court order, old medical record, security video, etc.) then optical with a library might be a good choice.
Hi, thanks for the advice you gave above, but I am also a little concerned about data security. Even though NAS system is useful and easy in use, I think that at the same time it’s vulnerable to security threats such as unauthorized access, malware, or ransomware attacks. I would consider using Rotating Disk Drives, but it gets expensive considering that sometimes I need to store huge ammount of data, beside that I usually loose them in the mess that I have in my working space.
So, can you pls recommend me a safe online disk? I know my question seems quite strange, but I am a little paranoid, especially the data leaks that happen from time to time made me think about the data security very much lately.
Thanks in advance, Ashlyn
NAS is no more susceptible to unauthorized access than any other physical media you would keep on site. My NAS devices are all locked down with physical security (locked doors), strong passwords and 2 factor authentication. But I also don’t just keep one copy of my data I have the primary copy on one NAS, I have a secondary copy on a device running RSYNC as a backup target (a raspberry pi based NAS), and I also keep a copy of my data in Amazon Glacier. Amazon by default stores multiple copies of the data in 2 or more geographically diverse availability zones. My data in Glacier is encrypted at rest as well as encrypted in transit. So I have no concerns about security.
The Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes run on the world’s largest global cloud infrastructure with virtually unlimited scalability and are designed for 99.999999999% (11 nines) of durability. Data is redundantly stored across multiple Availability Zones that are physically separated within an AWS Region.
11 nines of durability means that if you store 1 million objects for 10 million years, you would expect to lose no more than 1 object in that time. You aren’t going to do better than that, regardless of whatever technology you use.
If you have a good back up policy and use file system snapshots (among other security best practices) then you are well protected against malware/ransomware.
Never keep the backup online… if an hacker get access you lose even the backups… I saw an example of that not a long time ago.
Raid and backups… a lot of people with NAS and hardware raid have lose their data as their nas is old and the hardware dies… and then the raid is tied to the hardware… so they can only get to the data if they have exactly the same nas to move over the pool too. So software raid is better.
also if you have bad luck and a thunder lightning strikes and it kills both the server and the backup server/nas the backups is gone… Nowadays there is a lot of better powersurge protection, but still it is a lottery to blindly trust that it will protect you in all situations.
I always have one online backup, one offline backup and one offsite backup on the most important stuff… Offsite as a bad fire will kill even the offline backups.
Thanks for help. Firstly, I will make a secondary copy of my data because I didn’t even thought about it before (silly of me to not take this into accounting), and then I will surely check for the Amazon Glacier, judging by this statement I assume that if it’s not the best for sure it’s one of the best solution right now.
Again thanks Louie for the help, and also thanks to the administrator for approving my comment.
Make sure to read the fine print on Amazon storage, at least some of it is cheap to put the data up, put you pay for it if you pull it back down. Our IT people limit certain things based on this because they don’t want to have to pull 2tb down from Amazon if a user does something stupid and needs a restore. It can get costly, at least with the plans we are using.
The opposite is also true… How much does it cost to lose the data? If you really need it, then large amounts to download it again are justified.
