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Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2023

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Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2023

#71

Post by pcurve »

kstrauser wrote: post #33
pcurve wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. All drives kick the bucket at some point. That's why I use BB. I don't trust myself with NAS. The ones that never failed me were any drives made by Quantum using SCSI interface. 5 drives, zero failure over 10+ years. But those were slower and cooler running units.

I’ve got a NAS backed up to Backblaze. It’s a nice setup. I can quickly recover from local data loss, or replace a RAID disk when needed, but if the NAS gets hit by a bus then I still haven’t lost everything.

That is a nice setup since it minimizes recovery time to nothing. I'm guessing you're using their B2?

I've had 2 drive failures since using BB so it's been worthwhile. But their Download software is pretty dreadful if you have large amount of files. I may try their ship-drive option next time.

Tracking their stock price, they are operating pretty lean, so I don't fault them for having crappy software.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2023

#73

Post by gymbeaux »

patrakov wrote: post #69
gymbeaux wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The local electronics recycling company where I live (US-FL) shreds hard drives by default and many of their enterprise clients apparently ask for it when they “donate” their old PowerEdge servers, NASes and whatnot. Now obviously the recycling company could try to discourage this in lieu of a 3 (or 7 or 100 or whatever) zero of the drives and then resell them as they do everything else they get “donated” to them… ma…

> Eventually, AES-256 can probably be brute-forced in a reasonable amount of time. No. See https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/6141/amount-of-... Time is not the bottleneck, energy is. They invoke Landauer's principle which states that irreversible computation has an intrinsic cost in terms of energy per elementary operation, namely, k T ln(2) where k is the Boltzmann constant. Assuming brute-force search, m…

VERY interesting read, thank you for that.

It’s worth noting several people’s answers state something to the effect of “quantum computing might be able to do it” and indeed I don’t expect an i9 or a ThreadRipper to ever defeat AES-256.

Re: Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2023

#74

Post by calamari4065 »

gruez wrote: post #56
calamari4065 wrote: post #55

Close to 10 years ago, I bought a "new" hard drive on Amazon. When I got it, I happened to notice some suspicious signs of wear, like corrosion on the PCB from someone's greasy fingerprint. I dive into the SMART stats and it's completely zeroed. Not quite what I'd expect from a new drive. So then I start scanning the drive. The partition table was deleted, but it was full of data, most of it encrypted. It was also ba…

>it was full of data, most of it encrypted. [...] Encrypted or no, if that was a backblaze drive, they were disposing of drives with customer data still on them Who cares if there was "customer data still on them" if it was encrypted? One of the nice things about encryption is that you don't have to worry about wiping drives.

Except for the part that there was a lot of clear text on it. It probably contained metadata. It did contain the name of some Backblaze employee, that's how I tracked it back to them.

Would you be comfortable publicly posting the encrypted database from your password manager? Or encrypted copies of your financial information? Go on, drop a google drive link if you're so confident

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