this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2024
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datahoarder

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Who are we?

We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.

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i want to buy a few hard drives for backups.

What is the most reliable option for longetivity? i was looking at the wd ae, which they claim is fit for this purpose, but knowing nothing about hard drives, I wouldnt know if it was a marketing claim..

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (8 children)

If you want longevity and shelf stability, tape drives are the way to go. You can get them in very large capacities, even into the hundreds of TB.

Their benefit is that they have no internal motorized components, they are a lot like VHS videocassettes - two spools with tape. This makes them very shelf-stable, unlike hard drives which can have their spindles seize up over time.

They also have absolutely epic data densities. You could store on one tape the contents of dozens of the largest hard drives currently available.

Their downside is that you need highly specialized hardware to read and record them. And this makes the hardware quite expensive.

So why don’t we use tape drives to store data? Because they store said data linearly - great for writing once, terrible for finding or updating said data - and because they are slow. You want to get to a file 20Tb in? Enjoy scrolling past every single byte up until that point.

But for cold backups, there ain’t nothing better.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

exciting but def not for me :)

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