Discussion: Digital Data Loss, Storage and Backup

[@Nabeelco]

When buying drives, ALWAYS make sure it's a mix of drives from different brands, models and production runs. If you go to your local computer store and buy 4 of the same drive, all 4 will fail at exactly the same time. I've experienced this first hand when the team who's RAID I took over at work, had bought all their drives all at once. Also: statistically, in a RAID5, when you have a single drive failure, you have a 50% chance that you'll have a second drive fail by the time the array is done rebuilding. So NEVER rely on RAID5. Minimum you want RAID6, with a hot spare in case a drive fails, and a cold spare on standby. In general, if you have a drive failure in your RAID, it's time to build a new RAID. Just pull the data off of it, and start over while you still can.

[@adiblasi]

Great advice!

[@Bryan1342]

Backups, my friend. Backups, backups, backups. Every drive, no matter the manufacturer or medium used will fail eventually either through OS corruption, human error, malice, animal or offspring shenanigans, electrical infidelity, or simply entropy. The most effective insurance is keeping a second copy of your most critical data on a NAS, and/or a third copy with a known and reputable cloud provider offsite (like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Wasabi, take your pick, there are many).

[@adiblasi]

Ahh - I really enjoyed your comment of 'simply entropy...' - thanks for sharing your thoughts!

[@Surefirejacob]

Always when our data is lost is oh no me data it’s more like ohhh nooo me porn

[@yepitiyep]

Thanks for the recap Al, I looked into LTO and stuff and realized it'd be cheaper to get 25 2TB SSD to accommodate my 50TB worth of crap.

[@adiblasi]

Oh yes, tape is expensive as I indicated. The advantage is a long shelf life. Also, as I sent you a message on discord, consider applying a moderate level of compression to get those raw source files down in size.