1y ago

Mechanical or SSD for offsite storage that’s updated at least yearly?

I have about 100gb and growing that is critical for my business. File size growth is slow, so it will be years and years before it even gets to 200gb.

I have multiple local copies and a copy in google drive, but I want to leave a hard drive at my mother-in-law’s house.

I only want 2.5 form factor or smaller as my mother-in-law will be carrying it here when she comes to visit us on the city.

I’m not sure what the recommendation is. I’m not a millionaire, I’m just freelance. So, I’d like to minimize cost.

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29 comments

You say that data is critical for your business, have you considered a cloud backup as well? AWS has very cheap storage options depending on the speed the file needs to be available at. Also I’d definitely not go with flash memory, bit flips can be a real danger. I’d go with a 1 TB HDD in an enclosure, additionally to a cloud backup
- OP already says that multiple backups and cloud copies exist. I do not recommend mechanical hard drives because they're inherently fragile. If OP really needs high-quality long-term archival storage that is robust and lasts forever, I will recommend a tape drive and do so with a straight face.
  Bit-flipping is, frankly, a non-issue to such an extent that even considering it seriously is moving into tinfoil hat territory.
  
  Google Drive does not count as cloud backup, especially for something business-critical.
  
  On its own, no, but it can be used, like any cloud storage solution, as part of a robust backup strategy. Particularly, if the desktop sync feature is enabled, every client machine that has the sync application installed will download and synchronise the contents of the Google Drive locally. If the Google Drive servers go kaput this still means you've essentially got several off-site backup copies of the data on Google Drive.
  
  https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/?p=pm&c=s3&z=4
  This was what I was thinking about. I would definitely not use gdrive a a critical backup and the glacier tier at aws should be sufficient and cheaper than a hdd for years
  
  Backblaze B2 is another option. Not sure if its as cheap as Glacier as its hard to compare usage based billing.
  I pay about $1-2 USD/mo for 100GB. Storage is about $0.02/day, The rest of the cost is access costs.
  I use rclone to do my own encryption. Most of the cost is probably backing up my phone nightly (Round Sync which is rclone on Android). Specifically signal results in a new 400Mb backup every night with 99% of the same data as the last backup.
  
  I agree with tapes if the data is large and not accessed frequently. Magnetic tapes are still one of the most information-dense mediums, surprisingly. WORM tapes are Write Once Read Many and are used by serious large enterprises for long-term archival storage.

29 comments