It has been 6 years since i moved to Russia and bought my first harddrive here. Over these last several years my personal storage has grown up to 10 TB and it keeps on growing.
Obviously, their time has come and in the last year i lost 3 harddrives with valuable data. This is why i began to think about a more reliable long-term storage for my data.
A few years ago, i would have simply bought more harddrives but since the HDD factory in Malaysia burned down in 2013, harddrives have become expensive.
The second problem with harddrives would be the fact that since i need a long term backup storage meaning the hard drives will probably not be used for years before i need them, there is no guarantee that after a few years it will demagnetize resulting in corrupt data.
I have been looking for some solutions for a while and i have some ideas as well as pros and cons and will list them here.
Online cloud storage. Far from my preferred method, but i am willing to settle for this as my third backup but not my primary one. Here is why:
First and most obvious reason is i am the kind of guy who is always strapped for money to the point where i almost never pay my bills on time (yes i already had my electricity shut down a few times and i am constantly in debt to the utility companies) and this might result in my data being deleted from the cloud because i either forgot, or couldnt afford to pay for a few months.
Second reason is i simply dont trust companies like that because anything could happen from that company getting bankrupt and my data getting lost/sold to god knows who, censored by the Russian government because of a current state of digital paranoia and informational war with the west (tons of this is going on here from banning pokemon go to establishing a massive digital surveillance infrustructure over the russian internet in the name of anti-terrorism. Proxies these dont work more often than they do and if they do, they are slow and glitchy as hell and it wont be long before things like VPN will become illegal.
To make my point, 5 years ago i wrote a short story about a future digital dystopyan/orwellian-like state and now i get to see it being established
Moving on: SSDs The finally good trend ive been noticing in the last few years is that SSDs are finally becoming cheaper BUT WAIT! Russian government wants to establish import fees of up to 60% on all electronics in order to stimulate its own electronics industry and to persuade investors to open factories withing the countriy. Little to be said that living in this country is like playing the Russian roulette and i see no point in hoping for the best.
And besides, SSDs of a 10Tb size are still pretty expensive.
And one last thing: (i am not sure how true this is or not so fill me in here if anybody knows this better than me) SSDs to some degree have the same problem as regular harddrives in terms of magnetic fields within the flash memory (apparentley flash memory is also based on micro-magnetic fields inside the chip) Will get demagnetized and corrupt my data in few years. And to be fair, ive dealt with corrupt data on flash drives more often than on harddrives. So i too am skeptical of this solution.
Optical disks (DVDs Blue rays etc) a good hard copy solution which isnt magnet based but first problem is that i will need tons of these and unfourtunatley, this kind of media physically degrades over time. (i wish optical media came in protective cartriges like the PSP disks or some of the first cd roms back in the late 80s)
Streamers/tape drives. By far the most promising method altho from what i have read and from what people told me, there are a lot of varying opinions on this ranging from the most unsecure long term storage to the most solid method.
I did some research a while back on streamers and i dont really remember the names of different types of technologies but i had my eyes on 2 types. One of which is where the actual cassette drive tends to be extremley expensive- like from $1000 up to $5000. BUT the actual casettes to those types of drives are extremley cheap, around $20-$50 per TB (these kinds of casettes come at 500gb max) and even cheaper if you buy them used, (i am down with that because there are tons of them being sold, I saw an ad where a dude is selling 50TB for $200)...
The other type of streamer i researched is pretty much the opposite. The device itself is pretty affortable (up to $500) but the cassette cartridges for them are pretty expensive.
Then there is an issue of how good the actual streamer is, some record data with tons of errors, others claim its totally solid. And there is also a veriety of opinions concerning the long term storage as well. Ive been told that i dont have the proper conditions for storing such tape drives without the data being corrupted over the years.
I actually own an old seagate streamer but its too old and the cartriges to such devices are no longer sold and are low capacity anyway (1gb-5gb/casette)
Ultimately my core problem here is a financial one, which is why in the recent few weeks i ditched the field of low-paying technology and trying to switch over to real-estate/bankruptcy financial area where i have real chances of earning $5000-$15000 per sale (besides, i am tired of working with other-people's technology.
I am still interested in researching this topic and by all means feel free to enlighten me with things i dont know or might be wrong about, Maybe i am not the only one concerned about the ramifications of harddrive death making this an interesting topic for other people on this forum. The goal so far is high capacity and cost effective solution over a long term period.
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