P[drive failure]: how reliable is your NAS?

P[drive failure]: how reliable is your NAS?
khz.ac

That said, I actually agree with much of the final architecture decisions made by the author. BTRFS raid1 with an offsite copy in a geographically distant area is a pretty good solution for the average person's personal documents. Possible improvements would be:

- Multiple offsite copies in different locations

- Hardware diversity (differing models of HDD, host PC, power supplies, etc.)

- Staggered hardware upgrades on a 5-10 year cycle

- Cold storage (offline) copy

https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css

The single best thing you can do to preserve the information is to put your data in the hands of a full time engineering team with redundant, on-call support whose sole purpose is to make sure that no bits are ever lost or flipped.

An ability to allocate even 40 hours a week to maintaining a highly durable DIY NAS solution doesn't even show up next to this. Any perception to the contrary is merely an ego trip. Control != durability. Do not conflate these things.

The problem with these extremely unlikely events is that it's really hard to reason about them because we don't have a lot of samples to draw from. My handful of personal samples tell me that lightning is the ultimate equalizer and that otherwise hard drives are mostly immortal. Clearly this is not an accurate depiction of the actual statistical distribution, but it's all I can come up with having N ~= 100. Backblaze and Amazon have owned way more hard drives than I can even imagine. They can get much closer to modeling actual reality.

I understand for certain classes of data (every anime show ever produced by Japan), you might not want to actually pay for the kind of durability guarantees that a big provider can offer. However, what about your other documents? Tax and legal forms? Are we comfortable storing this in the same way across 2 different residential sites?