[archiebunker]

Excellent post. Great information. I have a question about SSDs, though. Google has published their information about hard drive and SSD survival in their data centers. It can be viewed here: http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/servers-storage/googles-ss... So my question is how we mere mortals can deal with all the maintenance. It may well be that spinning hard drives are best for us.

[ChrisDutrow]

I'm not sure spinning hard drives are more reliable outside of data centers - at least not for laptops because you are carrying them around (anecdotaly, I recently had en employee break a hard drive in a laptop after dropping it).

It probably doesn't really matter as much as your intuition might suggest anyway because each drive can and will fail. And they fail at similar rates (as opposed to an exponential difference of a factor of 10x or more). So you need to take similar precautions for each type of drive.

For personal use - I use exclusively SSDs because they are much faster. The I put all the information I don't want to lose in dropbox.

For servers, all data that is important goes in a database cluster (Cassandra) with a replication factor of 3. Those drives are backed up daily offsite. For data that cannot be lost at all (even a days worth), I also copy each record to Amazon S3 every time it is changed. - I'm sure there are many other ways to tackle this problem.

[ladzoppelin]

"The I put all the information I don't want to lose in dropbox." I don't think its healthy to consider cloud storage backup. For example I am pretty sure you could loose everything to Ransomware.

[lwf]

In re the Ransomware point, Dropbox provides all users with access to snapshots of their files going back 30 days:

https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/11

So, as long as you notice before the clock runs out, you should be able to recover from ransomware via file history.

[I work for Dropbox, but am not speaking on behalf of my employer.]

[ValentineC]

I know Dropbox sells Extended Version History [1] as an add-on, but it'll be awfully nice if Pro users had maybe 60 days of file history, versus 30 days for free. Just a thought.

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/113

[brianwawok]

You assume HDs will die. Keep 3 copies of all data, at least 1 far away, and diff regularly. If a HD lasts 2 years vs 10 in average, doesn't really change the best practice to keep your data.

[jfoutz]

Just to elaborate a bit, it's pretty easy to keep three copies of stuff you care about. First, you have the working copy, on the machine itself. A big backup disk is pretty straightforward. I use time machine, which isn't super reliable, but it's very very easy.

Now, when it comes down to it, do you really need to backup the OS? or your installed software? if the machine and the backups fail, you're going to be reinstalling anyway (probably) So, for the third copy i rely on 3rd parties. Different people have different needs, you might want to do something fancy in house.

It pretty much boils down to finding a service for your stuff. I have a couple of private github repos. Photos on iCloud and whatever Alphabet is calling Picasa these days. 20 gigs of music to Amazon or Alphabet (or both). Administrative stuff, like taxes, i just email to myself. It's probably smarter to keep that in dropbox or something along those lines.

The key point is, there are the things you make or capture that are irreplaceable, save those lots of places. There's a bunch of other crap on your computer to make it be useful. That stuff is trivial to reinstall. Well, ok, it might cost you a day or two to redownload and reconfigure emacs just so - but with a little planning you can put that config in git, so it's easy to restore or set up on a new machine.

It's almost better to think in terms of, if i had to upgrade tomorrow, what would i need to copy over? that's the stuff to be really fussy about.

[simcop2387]

> Now, when it comes down to it, do you really need to backup the OS? or your installed software? if the machine and the backups fail, you're going to be reinstalling anyway (probably)

I'd counter this with what I do with my laptop. The OS is considerably smaller than the data I actually care about (<20gb), it takes almost no time to backup and so it leaves me with a very quick ability to restore the system to a known good state in the event of some kind of failure. I don't do constant backups of it, but maybe once a month i'll update the backup I have of the OS.

[jfoutz]

Yeah, I was trying to point out you don't really need 3 copies of everything, and really 1 is enough for some stuff that's easy to replace. But the stuff that matters, you should have lots of copies of that. 2 backup disks is another way to go, just swap them, say, weekly. Photos from a once in a lifetime trip? make a bunch of copies, local and remote.

[x0x0]

And prefer filesystems which actively check data integrity.

[capitalsigma]

Except you let the machine handle that for you with RAID.