Any ideas

Many moons ago, I was having a conversation with a partner of a law firm
on the durability of archive media. He reckoned that ink on vellum was
the gold standard.

 

I assume you mean online somewhere.

 

Naah, maan ... in da clowd, innit!

 

Ok storing it in da cloud until da wind comes and blows it a way

 

This appears to be solely electronic failure. None of my systems here
even recognise its existence.


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Apples and oranges, though. If you keep a computer disc in ideal
circumstances, it'll last a long time (depending on what we mean by
disc, natch). But, we tend to keep using them. Akin to constantly making
prints off the negative. Which will shorten the life considerably.

What the absolute numbers are, though, I have no idea.


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That's something I wouldn't recommend, for a couple of reasons. First,
it's all very well having 2 HDDs in that box with copies of the data
on, but nothing else will be able to read those drives. What happens
when the box itself fails, and is an obsolete model so you can't just
buy an identical one.

Second, IME RAID is not as foolproof as it should be. I've come across
far too many cases where for some reason or other (dodgy firmware, or
just operator error) instead of recovering from one drive failing,
it's just trashed the good drive. IMHO RAID is good where you have
servers that you really don't want to go down at all, but it's not an
alternative to backups.

I have a similar device to the LaCie one (a DLink Sharecenter Pulse -
half the price, but seems to do what I need) but I was careful to
choose one that let you access the 2 drives as separate shares rather
than using RAID or JBOD. I back up each drive to a USB drive, and I
also have the reassurance that each drive has a standard ext3 format
so if the NAS dies I can get at the data from a Linux PC.

Can't argue with this (except to mention the other golden rule of
backups: test them regularly. Are you sure that drive that's been
carried around in a rucksack every week for 2 years is still working
fine?)

David

 

Very dead hard drives are usually the board and not the data platters.
Buy the same drive on ebay and swap controller boards if getting data
back is a priority. I've done it a few times with good results.

Fraser

 

Yes. Not random ukrmer's garages.

 

Hmm, that might well be a plan, in fact.
Given that I can hear / feel the drive spinning up and the heads
calibrating.

What do you fancy Paul? No promises on timescales, though....


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I always thought that there were specific things tweaked on each board
to match the drive heads etc. and that this wouldn't work. It certainly
sounds like it would be worth a try though. Post the results[1].

[1] I don't mean the pictures, obv.

 

Nothing else. Bollocks it's a linux system

Gee I guess we are really exposed keeping terabytes of customer data on
raid, flashed up to a backup raid on the san

The La Cie looks lovely sitting on a shelf though. I think the OP has some
sence of asthetics.

I used to also put stuff on double density DVD's just in case. Then I left
one on a window sill for a month to check the effects. Not only did the UV
trash the disk but some sort of corrosion set in between the plasic and
metal layers.

 

I don't mind you giving that a go as I assume it's a cheaper interim
option than sending the thing away. I assume, therefore, peak hour
collection at Epping is now postponed?

 

It's become trendy to refer to the cloud, donchanow?
I was talking to a self-confessed IT numpty (as in, I don't know and I
don't want to know, I just want it to work, numpty) and he was
offhandedly referring to 'the cloud'. Aha, he really meant his gmail
account.
ffs.

 

I think for a lot of people it's more like a fog.

 

We can postpone. It's really likely to be some time before I make much
progress. Next weekend at the earliest, if that's OK


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OK, not nothing else, but you know what I'm getting at. If you're
lucky, you might be able to get at the data with a lot of fiddling
around with mdadm, dd, etc. If you're unlucky and the NAS maker
decided to do things in a slightly non-standard way, you'll need to
reverse engineer the logical volumes on the disk, or hope the NAS
manufacturer has open-sourced their proprietary drivers.

Or you could just keep the disk in a standard format.

So you use RAID to ensure your servers stay online as much as
possible, and backups for when that goes wrong? And I'd guess probably
tape backups off the SAN to give an extra layer of protection and to
keep something off site? If you're trying to use that as a
counterexample to what I said, you ought to read what I said more
carefully.

Anyone who pays double the price just for the sake of aesthetics is,
by definition, a Mac lover, and therefore doesn't need advice on
backup devices because Steve Jobs will have sold them a Time Capsule.

David

 

The company I work for (not just the MD and sales people, even the
developers who are developing it) insist on describing our next
generation product as "cloud-based". No, it's running on one of the
servers downstairs.

But as long as our clients are happy to pay a premium for a less
functional, less reliable product because the sales people throw in
the buzzwords they want to hear, who cares?