Storage

[toby1]

Here's the thing. I have a few terabyte of precious music files spread over a main computer and external drives.

I want to put these in one place so I started to read about external storage. I looked at say a 4tb drive and thought a decent make like seagate would do it. However reading about drives in general there is a failure figure on new drives of almost 27% in the first year, the general lifespan is 3 to 4 years, and the concensus is that all hard drives will eventually fail - they have a finite lifespan.

So how can I save my music?. I could get paranoid and buy backup drives for backup drives in an infinitive loop? Would the cloud be a safe place - or will I eventually loose my music collection as there is no real long term solution?

?

[doggone]

Even cloud storage is not without risk but should be part of your solution.
I suspect anything stored on google drive should be as a safe as anywhere.
Otherwise duplicated and carefully stored external drives, ideally not kept in the same location are as good as anything. Even if it somehow would not fire up there would be a way to recover data.

I suspect the fail rates are with regular or even constant use.I've got a 'cheap' seagate portable 500Gb attached to the router so it networks, and it has been running for 5 years.
Important stuff is duplicate elsewhere, but it's a quick way to make a second copy almost immediately, or at least same day.

[MCN]

Pish.
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Disclaimer: The comments above may be predicted text and not necessarily the opinion of MCN.

[toby1]

I may be overthinking this - but if I archived to a disc that didn't fire up I probably could retrieve the data - but to where for permanent access ? As you stated the cloud is not 100%, neither is any form of storage - ever.

Unless data is constantly moved and restored it will eventually be lost.

[linuxyeti]

Just have 2 backup disks, and rotate backups to them..
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[Im-a-Ridah]

Microsoft or Google are safe cloud providers but its slow to upload and there is a monthly cost.

As for drives you can protect against drive loss with data redundancy using a RAID system i.e 3 drives set up in RAID 5 to recover from one drive dying. The second issue is backups, which protects against someone robbing your house or something. For this get an external USB drive and store it at a relative's place. Cloud is another alternative as a backup and would protect against almost any threat. It all depends how much you want to spend on the protection. As a backup the main downside of cloud is that its a recurring cost for something you might never use, whereas a USB backup drive is a single fixed cost, and you keep the protection if you stop paying.

Cheap: 1 drive for local storage + 1 USB external backup
Medium: 1 drive for local storage + 1 cloud backup
Expensive: 3 drive local RAID + 1 cloud backup

[The Shaggy D.A.]

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[toby1]

The wider picture. The RAID system recovering a dying drive - the drive died so why will the backup drives set to recover also not die - ad infinitum.?

External USB drives have a finite life The cloud has a backup system why can that not fail? - again even a backup system to backup a system is a system set to fail at some point in it's stated lifetime? After all isn't the whole point of a backup system there because we know the primary system may fail? and so the backup cannot be any different. If it was better it would be the primary system and so on?

Not trying to be pedantic on this, certainly storage can and will last for years, but can't forever the law of averages will mean at some point a failure will claim the data., As I said unless constantly moved and refreshed and duplicated all data will eventually be lost. Food for thought.

[Riejufixing]

[Im-a-Ridah]

[MCN]

I have Tbs and Tbs of 'valuable' shite on several external drives and sticks.

I was advised by a cool IT manager that one should be careful with storage.
Probably fine to ram (no Pun) everything on one device to be convenient but if it dies recovery is difficult.

Dropping the bastirts is usually death.

Opening them (and then separating the discs) is mental/autisic.

The multi-disc devices have the discs VERY precisely aligned using expensive specialist equipment.

My tool at the moment is a WD - My Passport External SSD - 1 TB. It's very fast and up to now has performed flawlessly.

I spread my shit/my shit is spread over several drives.
I mainly use at work to keep history of jobs as the company system is pish.
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Disclaimer: The comments above may be predicted text and not necessarily the opinion of MCN.

[MarJay]

Buy a Synology 2 bay NAS, set it for RAID 1.

Done and done.

Then when one drive fails you swap it for a new one, rebuild and then when the second one dies, replace it and rebuild. Rinse and repeat.

I think it's pretty sad that in the Geek zone so many people who responded with supposedly knowledgable answers actually have no clue how a RAID array works. ([Edit]with notable exceptions! I realised I basically said the same as I'm-a-Ridah )

I've replaced pretty much all drives in a RAID 10 6 drive array, and the data has been fine - not all at the same time obviously but that's the point of it. It's extremely unlikely for a pair of drives to die at exactly the same moment, so you just replace one when it does. Theoretically it should mean that you keep the data forever.

However, there is an issue of a disaster such as a fire or burglary, in which case you also want off-site backups, but it really does depend on how wedded you are to the data.


It's also worth noting that I have a NAS I bought in 2006 that is still working, and one of the drives is original. I replaced the other about five years ago and that is still going too.
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[Riejufixing]

[MarJay]

[Im-a-Ridah]

Also generally when they say 5 year life they mean 5 years of operation, rather than simply 5 years after production! Think "flight hours" rather than "shelf life". If you used it at work for 8 hours a day, every day, it should be good for 15 years. I wouldn't recommend it, but in theory...

[Riejufixing]

[MarJay]

Ok this is the primary line that triggered my prattishness...

[Ste]

Replace the terabytes of music files with a Spotify account and you'll never have to worry about backing stuff up ever again.

"in general there is a failure figure on new drives of almost 27% in the first year"

No there isn't.

[Riejufixing]

[MarJay]

[iooi]

[Pigeon]

[Im-a-Ridah]

[P.]

Depending on your cash, M-Discs are 100+ year life. Got a few at work.

Otherwise decent NAS, few low speed drives in RAID1, not a problem.

[Andy_Pagin]

I keep all my precious stuff on a server at work, can't get any safer since it's all virtualised at a data centre. So if you're in a reasonably secure job with a company that has those facilities you could ask your IT guys nicely.
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