I work in a niche inside a niche. I deal with terabytes of storage, massive servers, a variety of storage tech, and I’ve been in interested in computers in general for… Around 40 years. (Yeah, I’m old.)

I have my own single person company and have worked in 40+ US states, done assignments in the UK, Norway.

AMA.

  • BCsven
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    So no suggestions? dealing with data yourself you must have your own best storage go to? no?

    • TemporaryBoyfriendOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Honestly, I’m “storage agnostic” – in my office I have Hard drives, SSDs, NAS, servers with various types of RAID, Linux boxes with disks in LVM, magneto optical platters, and various tapes.

      It’s less about the media and more about the process. As I described elsewhere, I have a large NAS, an onsite copy, and an offsite copy on tapes. It’s the process of keeping offsite copies, regularly updating them, and verifying the copies that protects me, not some sticker on a box that says “100 YEAR STORAGE LIFE” from a company that might not exist next month.

      • BCsven
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Yeah, just curious. i have heard tape is a decent option or Archival DVD. Running a server and backups what I do now, but it is not really a way to pass on family data like you could with a photo album. Especially when they are less tech savvy family.

        • TemporaryBoyfriendOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Every media is subject to failure. It’s the process that protects.

          If you’re keeping something for your family, consider putting it online on a sharable cloud storage system, or using software that distributes the data to everyone’s computer (BitTorrent / Resilio Sync / DropBox, etc.)

          If you want something physical, I’d get a ‘tough’ or ‘high endurance’ USB stick or SD card, and keep updating it quarterly. Flash doesn’t have a great reputation for longevity/durability, so I’d wipe the USB stick clean with zeros then re-write everything with each update.