A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions • Hacker News Board

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#131

Post by wil421 » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 6:08 PM UTC

stef25 wrote: post #110

theshrike79 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because the service is billed as a "backup" not as "cheap cloud storage". If they allowed people to back up unlimited USB drives and networks shares, /r/datahoarder would be all up their business with 1PB storage. This is why they limit it to only stuff you're actually using. If you want generic cloud storage with infinite retention, they have B2

They mention in their docs that this is why they forbid (not limit) NAS. Afaik you could still connect as many 8TB USB drives to your machine.

Boot your windows machine using an iSCSI storage block supplied by your NAS. I’ve wondered if this would work with Backblaze or not. I don’t really care if I lose my plex media so I’ve never tried it.

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#132

Post by vel0city » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 6:10 PM UTC

justsomehnguy wrote: post #128

vel0city wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got nearly 30-year-old optical drives that still work fine today. I can plug a 3.5" floppy drive into my Android phone and it still works. Sure, there's a chance in a decade or so SATA ports disappear, but USB adapters still work. Do you really think in 10-15 years it will be hard to find a device that still talks USB? ZIP drives had a number of mechanical issues (click of death). That's probably the biggest rea…

> Do you really think in 10-15 years it will be hard to find a device that still talks USB? It would take some time to find a mini USB patch right now, especially a good one. Sure, now I can find it. In 10 years? N=1 anecdote: two years ago I helped to recover data from a 2.5" USB drive, which was left in a desk for 5 years. I was forced to use R-Studio and still I got only 90% of data in good enough condition.

A 2.5" HDD isn't the same kind of media as an M-DISC. Magnetic storage will lose its charge over time. I've lost content from bitrot on magnetic media many times as well. Arguing I won't be able to read an M-DISC in 10 years because your magnetic media wore out in 5 years is beyond comparing apples to oranges.

> It would take some time to find a miniUSB patch right now, especially a good one.

I've got a pile of them already. I'll likely keep at least one, probably multiple, along with the optical drive/enclsure (of which I do have multiple as well). I imagine if I hold on to a new in box USB optical drive it will also probably have a cable. So in 10 years when I need to get the data off the drive, I'll probably just use the cable that's right there with the drive that's currently sitting on my desk.

I can go down the street to Microcenter right now and buy one, they have dozens of cables in-stock in-person. There are other stores around in-person which also still sell them. There's loads of vendors online which sell them new today. To my eyes they're not hard to find today at least. I can't imagine in 10 years I'll have somehow exhausted the cables I currently have and will need to source one and there won't even be a listing on ebay for one when there's probably at least many hundreds of millions if not billions of them in existence at the moment. For reference, every PS3 had a mini-USB cable, and there were >84M of those sold. How many other devices came with a mini-USB cable? How many were manufactured and sold on their own? How many are still being produced?

I can't imagine there being probably near billions of something existing and then disappearing entirely a decade from now, other than some kind of food or truly disposable item.

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#133

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 6:28 PM UTC

9dev wrote: post #34

You know… I deal with complexity, redundancy, unexpected errors, hardware specs, software updates, security issues, automated exploits, and so many other things, all day. I just don’t want that at home. I’m sure it’s nice to feel in control of your stuff, but I’d rather do something with my family, read a good book or go for a walk instead of having more of the same shite I put up with all day at work.

I understand this but at the same time I don't have project managers at home (other than GF), Jiras to track, people to pry answers out of, meetings, code reviews, difficult jackasses, performance reviews, etc. I rediscover the reason I went into tech before corporate drudgery drained all of the fun. I can just build things and shape my tech to my household's needs while getting the feeling that I've built something and practiced my craft.

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#134

Post by JeanMarcS » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 7:03 PM UTC

pmlnr wrote: post #36

JeanMarcS wrote: post #25

Ok. So now your house is on fire. How do you retrieve your datas from the melted local NAS ? Or a buglar come and empties it. Don't get me wrong, I'm full "move away from the cloud" in the "proprietary cloud" way. But getting some drive space on a different location is important if you care about your datas. Could be in a relative's or friend's place (so almost no per month cost) or on a cloud drive (I personnaly use…

Ok. So your credit card expired, and the provider cleared your cloud data. How do you retrieve it? See, each has issues.

I thought I stated in my comment that you should have both, sorry if it was not clear

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#135

Post by saltcured » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 7:15 PM UTC

vel0city wrote: post #132

justsomehnguy wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you really think in 10-15 years it will be hard to find a device that still talks USB? It would take some time to find a mini USB patch right now, especially a good one. Sure, now I can find it. In 10 years? N=1 anecdote: two years ago I helped to recover data from a 2.5" USB drive, which was left in a desk for 5 years. I was forced to use R-Studio and still I got only 90% of data in good enough condition.

A 2.5" HDD isn't the same kind of media as an M-DISC. Magnetic storage will lose its charge over time. I've lost content from bitrot on magnetic media many times as well. Arguing I won't be able to read an M-DISC in 10 years because your magnetic media wore out in 5 years is beyond comparing apples to oranges. > It would take some time to find a miniUSB patch right now, especially a good one. I've got a pile of them…

Hmm, I've seen old HDDs fail to spin up or otherwise have catastrophic malfunction, but never heard of them having real bit rot.

I recently booted up some portable PCs from around 1990 to review their HDD content and scrub the disk state before handing them over as e-waste. Easily 25 years on the shelf. I would think you'd have to do something very wrong like storing the HDD near a degausser to lose the magnetic recording.

I do think that SSDs and particularly cheap flash "thumb drives" are capable of having bit rot when left on the shelf for many years.

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#136

Post by cm2187 » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 7:17 PM UTC

RajT88 wrote: post #127

cm2187 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you store stuff on multiple disks? I struggle with windows as a NAS. Windows storage space sucks hard (particularly their RAID5 style parity which has unacceptable performances, but also I had it failing without reporting it, and it doesn't handle parity with column size >8). The native windows software raid is deprecated, and can't handle disks of different sizes. I use stablebit drivepool for a secondary backup…

> The native windows software raid is deprecated, and can't handle disks of different sizes. First I've heard of the deprecation! I'm not sure the second part is true though. I recall during setup my 14tb drives were not exactly the same size, and I found some way around it by just creating a volume of the same size as the first. My OS/Scratch is mirrored 10tb drives, which didn't have the same issue. These were refu…

> First I've heard of the deprecation

The option to create software RAID 5 from disk management has been removed already from Windows 10 desktop (you are supposed to use windows storage space, but as I mentioned, it really sucks for RAID 5). I am sure Windows Server will follow at one point.

> I recall during setup my 14tb drives were not exactly the same size, and I found some way around it by just creating a volume of the same size as the first

Yeah you can create a RAID volume of the min size across all disks. And then you can probably even create another RAID volume with the rumps of the larger disks. But you end up with multiple volumes. More modern solutions (synology, windows storage space) allow you to create a single volume that spans all disks and utilises their whole capacity. Synology by creating a bunch of RAID 5 volumes behind the scene, then joining them with a RAID 0-like (don't think it's RAID, just some sort of virtual volume). Windows storage space by writing strips of your data randomly across all your disks (the number of columns is decorrelated from the number of disks), ensuring that every strip is at most on one disk for single parity.

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#137

Post by RajT88 » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 8:00 PM UTC

teslabox wrote: post #105

cm2187 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you store stuff on multiple disks? I struggle with windows as a NAS. Windows storage space sucks hard (particularly their RAID5 style parity which has unacceptable performances, but also I had it failing without reporting it, and it doesn't handle parity with column size >8). The native windows software raid is deprecated, and can't handle disks of different sizes. I use stablebit drivepool for a secondary backup…

I have an mdisc drive, and a few mdisc DVDs I haven’t burned yet. Someone on/r/datahorder noticed they don’t sell real mdiscs anymore: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33593967

Wow, that is evil! I can see exactly the thought process behind this change as well...

People buying M-Disc's will not notice that they've been sold BluRay discs for decades when they start to decay some day. It's a malfeasance which will only be discovered in the distant future once the discs start decaying, and will be someone else's problem by then. Meanwhile whatever product manager will have made their promotions for cost cutting and increasing revenue.

tl;dr only buy the M-Disc's which are rated for 4x write speed.

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#138

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 8:34 PM UTC

roca wrote: post #6

Security: with local storage it's on you to make sure that your NAS or whatever is constantly up-to-date with security patches. And that's assuming your NAS provider keeps providing patches. It's on you to do all necessary monitoring for intrusion detection etc. Reliability: with local storage it's on you to keep backups, make sure those backups work, replace failing drives, don't accidentally wipe the drive, and mak…

[deleted]

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#139

Post by nightski » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 8:38 PM UTC

lukevp wrote: post #101

toomuchtodo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I setup storage and replication for my father between Florida (primary) and a midwest state (secondary) using two Synology NAS devices. 30TB (VMs and install images because he likes to tinker with tech being retired, as well as lifelong personal data) corpus he was carrying with him on external drives, ~50TB usable after accounting for RAID whatnot. To store this in Backblaze B2 was going to be $180/month ($6/TB). He…

Synology is mostly web based configuration or ssh… maybe install Tailscale so you can remote admin it easily?

Or just set up openvpn, really only takes a few minutes on say pfsense/opnsense.

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#140

Post by 9dev » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 10:19 PM UTC

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #133

9dev wrote: post #34

You know… I deal with complexity, redundancy, unexpected errors, hardware specs, software updates, security issues, automated exploits, and so many other things, all day. I just don’t want that at home. I’m sure it’s nice to feel in control of your stuff, but I’d rather do something with my family, read a good book or go for a walk instead of having more of the same shite I put up with all day at work.

I understand this but at the same time I don't have project managers at home (other than GF), Jiras to track, people to pry answers out of, meetings, code reviews, difficult jackasses, performance reviews, etc. I rediscover the reason I went into tech before corporate drudgery drained all of the fun. I can just build things and shape my tech to my household's needs while getting the feeling that I've built something…

Don’t get me wrong I still have side projects to tinker on and that’s fun and all! But those projects aren’t something I depend on or that will cause me trouble if they don’t work, are destroyed, or hacked.

To me, hosting my data myself would mean a huge serious commitment to make it run and keep it running, and that’d take all the fun out of it. If I update a dependency of a toy project and everything stops working, I can choose to go bug hunting - or just drop it for a week. If my family photo library disappears due to a hardware failure, my home project manager would rip my head off (if I’m lucky).