How to Lose 100TB of Data: A Guide to My $2000 Mistake

[Mark Kaine]

31 minutes ago, Caroline said:

The amount of dust in that case is disturbing

 

Oh, yeah? 

 

 

 

[Archer42]

2 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Actually with Mistake 1, people always say you need backups and should have offline backups...but I've always been curious if anyone actually thinks in regards to budgets of people...even at 86tb of storage assuming 12TB discs and if you were lucky to get it for $200 each...which is unrealistically cheap, that's 8 discs at $1600...for a cold storage backup.  If you had 86 tb of data, would you be willing to pay an extra $1600 for it to be safe in a cold storage?  Off-site backups make less sense for a consumer if they have 86tb of data...you're going to be paying a crazy amount per month.  It's only a mistake if there is critical data on the drives or data that you cannot live without.

Thing is, the same budget can be spent differently.

It is not related to this specific case directly, but i've often seen people buy expensive 6-8 bay nas, put expensive hdd-s in (wd gold and such), build redundant array and consider their data completely safe. That is a mistake.

The same budget could be used to buy more hdd-s (cheaper ones) and use them differently - without redundancy (which is needed for availability, not data safety) but with backups.

Yes, it would still be a compromise, still not 100% reliable by any means, but it will protect from more potential ways to loose data.

[wanderingfool2]

3 hours ago, Archer42 said:

It is not related to this specific case directly, but i've often seen people buy expensive 6-8 bay nas, put expensive hdd-s in (wd gold and such), build redundant array and consider their data completely safe. That is a mistake.

Yes, that is a mistake.

 

I've mentioned it in my other post, but if that data isn't that important then not having a backup is not necessarily a mistake when you factor in the cost of drives.  An example again being, I have data that isn't backed up (but takes up a ton of room), on the order of 5TB.  I have about another 4TB of data that is more important, but still fairly worthless to me, which I keep on a RAID5...because the ability to still access it if a drive fails is still wanted but not important if it doesn't survive a rebuild or if it's all lost.

 

To out-right say someone made a mistake, that might not have been a mistake (which could very well be in this case) is just counter-productive.  The mistake that should be highlighted here is, don't trust cables from a different power supply (unless you 100% know what you are doing)