Hello!! Some recent technical problems on my family’s NAS gave me a big scare and finally pushed me to figure out a way to back it all up. I’m asking here specifically because I really don’t know where to even starts because of the fact I’ve got just under 50 terabytes worth of data stored in a 7-disk RAID-5 and would prefer to keep it cheap. What are your suggestions?
Edit: thank you for all the suggestions, I’ll probably be considering using Backblaze for backups, or perhaps seeing if I can scrounge up old unused disks from people I know. Thank you all again <3
I would definitely keep them warm, as in a running machine.
Drives on a shelf die more often than always-on drives.
Really? Do you have any source on that?
If it’s true, I bet it’s only if they’re actually running without ever spinning down.
Nothng official, sorry, wish I did!
Mostly personal experience. But that experience is also shared among a group of peers and friends in the SMB space where their clients think they can keep stuff on externals in an office safe only to find they’ve gone tits up nearly every time they pull them out a couple years later. And not the enclosures, the drives themselves - they all have external drive readers for just these kinds of circumstances.
In the enterprise you’d get laughed out of a datacenter for even suggesting cold drives for anything. Of course that’s based around simple bit rot concerns, and why file systems like ZFS use a methodology to test/verify bits on a regular basis.
If nothing else, that bit rot should be enough of a reason to not store data on cold drives. It’s not what drives were designed (or tested) to do.