The novice said: "I will save my working files, but not my system and application files, as they can be always be reinstalled from their distribution disks."
The master made no reply.
The next day, the novice's disk crashed. Three days later, the novice was still reinstalling software.
If that's your situation, it might be worth backing up applications. However, there are better solutions that make this irrelevant. For instance, using NixOS, you can literally back up a single text file describing your system setup, and you can recreate the system from it automatically in minutes, guaranteed to be bit for bit identical.
In my experience that works in box like 80% of the time. Which is great! But a backup is great in case it doesn’t.
If you are wondering ‘How are you getting that much failure’, it’s because I like to freeze older versions and they often decay for one reason or another (can’t get files for example)
A novice asked the master: “What must I do to learn the Zen of Backup?” The master whacked the novice in the head, grabbed the keyboard, and ran sudo rm -rf /. The novice smiled and left feeling enlightened.
The $/TiB storage cost currently creates weird choices in backup media... even making some older media formats economical again. Just finished a consumer storage option survey yesterday.
Even if you account for consumer drive+spare cost, a 8TB HDD is still the best JBOD option. For under several dozen 25GB projects, the BD-R disc drive is currently the cheapest media backup option (about 35% cheaper than HDD above 12TiB). Note 50G and 100G BD EOL media are actually equal to or a worse deal than HDD.
Also, HPE LTO9 18GB Tapes are currently around 5 to 15 times cheaper than HDD and SSD in terms of data storage cost, but the fixed cost of tape auto-loaders and drives don't always make sense until you have a significant amount of backup data. Tapes may also create a single point of failure in use... so incremental backups are a non-zero risk, and triple redundant hardware is required (old hardware gets hard to find.)
The classic joke is still true: "Fast, cheap, or good.. choose any two..."
I looked in to the bluray thing and concluded it just doesn't make sense at any level. You have to buy a bluray writer which will become increasingly rare, and then you are limited to 25GB disks where you have to factor in a chunk of that will go unused as each project won't fit on exactly 25gb.
For the effort you are expending, just getting a hard drive makes way more sense even if the $/gb is technically a little worse. The utility of hard drives is much better.
Blu-ray, or any non-rewritable optical media, guarantees that it hasn't been tampered with. If I were attacked by malware, I like the confidence that the Blu-ray backup is absolutely guaranteed to be the same as on the date it was written. A hard disk used for backup might have been reattached to the network at some point after the initial backup and gotten infected/corrupted/altered.
> Blu-ray, or any non-rewritable optical media, guarantees that it hasn't been tampered with.
In terms of external tampering, I think that need is better-served by encrypting everything, which you probably want to do anyway. Or at least using some sort of checksum signed by a key.
However if the focus is "what if the backup process is compromised", then yes, having some date which is beyond its writing-reach may be useful. Another aspect of this might be a remote-backup system where one set of credential is enough for daily backups and restore, while another is needed in order to access a set of older duplicates that are remotely maintained as ransomware-protection.
>I looked in to the bluray thing and concluded it just doesn't make sense at any level.
I mostly agree, but the 25GB M-Disc EOL media format is fairly interesting for archival purposes. The gamble actually made sense in this rare instance as each active project folder still fit on one disc, and the $120USD omnidrive firmware drives should keep the retro-equipment running for a few more years. These are relatively inexpensive even with a spare unit in the box.
>just getting a hard drive makes way more sense
In many cases this can be true, but the 3 years of HDD flight time compared to the 7+ year SSD wear life is also fairly close. It is weird, but the cost of higher capacity 18TB/24TB HDD also no longer make sense for JBOD either... unless you are hitting rack space constraints. =3
Just bought an LTO drive yesterday (after failing to cool its predecessor properly - dont be like me). They got more expensive more or less in line with HDDs :(
It isn't too expensive for my use case – per month, I retrieve about 500GB a month from Glacier Instant Retrieval to verify, which costs ~$15. Combined with other costs, my monthly bill is ~$50.
I used to use Backblaze B2, which had cheaper egress at the cost of slightly more expensive storage (I think ~$5/TB/mo, with free egress up to 3x all current storage?) So I paid $20. But at some point AWS opened a datacenter near me, and I couldn't ignore how much faster data transfers got.
AWS is an option up to 30TiB, but also feeds into the over-provisioned data-center market pressures. The recent "rclone --gui" solution does bestow rsync/sshfs like features for Windows users now, and remote mounts are easier/cleaner to bring up. =3
If you are wondering ‘How are you getting that much failure’, it’s because I like to freeze older versions and they often decay for one reason or another (can’t get files for example)
> The master said: "Now you are truly enlightened."
A novice asked the master: “What must I do to learn the Zen of Backup?” The master whacked the novice in the head, grabbed the keyboard, and ran sudo rm -rf /. The novice smiled and left feeling enlightened.
A master after my own heart.
Other than photos, music and videos, everything I have ever done in the last 40 years is 1.57Gb.
Media is where it got expensive.
Even if you account for consumer drive+spare cost, a 8TB HDD is still the best JBOD option. For under several dozen 25GB projects, the BD-R disc drive is currently the cheapest media backup option (about 35% cheaper than HDD above 12TiB). Note 50G and 100G BD EOL media are actually equal to or a worse deal than HDD.
Also, HPE LTO9 18GB Tapes are currently around 5 to 15 times cheaper than HDD and SSD in terms of data storage cost, but the fixed cost of tape auto-loaders and drives don't always make sense until you have a significant amount of backup data. Tapes may also create a single point of failure in use... so incremental backups are a non-zero risk, and triple redundant hardware is required (old hardware gets hard to find.)
The classic joke is still true: "Fast, cheap, or good.. choose any two..."
Best of luck =3
For the effort you are expending, just getting a hard drive makes way more sense even if the $/gb is technically a little worse. The utility of hard drives is much better.
In terms of external tampering, I think that need is better-served by encrypting everything, which you probably want to do anyway. Or at least using some sort of checksum signed by a key.
However if the focus is "what if the backup process is compromised", then yes, having some date which is beyond its writing-reach may be useful. Another aspect of this might be a remote-backup system where one set of credential is enough for daily backups and restore, while another is needed in order to access a set of older duplicates that are remotely maintained as ransomware-protection.
I mostly agree, but the 25GB M-Disc EOL media format is fairly interesting for archival purposes. The gamble actually made sense in this rare instance as each active project folder still fit on one disc, and the $120USD omnidrive firmware drives should keep the retro-equipment running for a few more years. These are relatively inexpensive even with a spare unit in the box.
>just getting a hard drive makes way more sense
In many cases this can be true, but the 3 years of HDD flight time compared to the 7+ year SSD wear life is also fairly close. It is weird, but the cost of higher capacity 18TB/24TB HDD also no longer make sense for JBOD either... unless you are hitting rack space constraints. =3
I used to use Backblaze B2, which had cheaper egress at the cost of slightly more expensive storage (I think ~$5/TB/mo, with free egress up to 3x all current storage?) So I paid $20. But at some point AWS opened a datacenter near me, and I couldn't ignore how much faster data transfers got.