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Comment by piepoter | Hacker News Reader

Then I stand corrected. Is there anyway to avoid drive failures or should we accept the fact that they will break eventually? Also, the data is interesting and appreciated.

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Yev here -> There's no way to avoid drive failure. We circumvent drive failure issues by using our vault architecture (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect...). It's essentially like a giant RAID++. Anything mechanical will break down eventually, which is why we try to push people towards having backups - the more copies of the data you have the less chance you have of all those mediums failing simultaneously, resulting in loss.

There's no real way to avoid failure in any particular piece of hardware. Eventually, everything from the HDD to the computer it's in will fail. The only wait to ensure data durability is to back up across multiple independent physical sites. Even then, there's never a guarantee - it's just that the chance of data loss decreases to levels where other issues start being more problematic, e.g. global nuclear war.

All things fail eventually.

Even if it physically works forever you can have things like "bit rot" so you should continuously backup to different medias and locations

Buy a RAID enclosure or setup a home RAIDed server and do backups. You cannot avoid it but you can mitigate the damage.

I really wish that consumer OSs would mandate RAID (mirroring at the minimum), requiring additional steps to install on unprotected storage. This should have been implemented even back during the early days of consumer hard drives, or at the minimum have a warning on boot that "Your data is stored on temporary storage -- go [here] to configure redundancy". At least something that puts it front and center that storing data on a single hard drive will eventually lead to data loss.

Also would be nice to have a similar warning to "Your data has not been backed up in [x] days".

I use a Mac. I get those warnings.

I use a Synology drive (using Synology's RAID-like format) for my Time Machine backups, and a Drobo for my less critical stuff.

They have WD drives. I have not liked the Seagates. However, I like the HGST stats.

One of the nice things about both Drobo and Synology, is that I can change the drive type and capacity "on the fly."

Ugh, god why? Why must people in our industry daydream about over-complicating things all the time? Very few use-cases benefit significantly from mirrored disks. The amount of data a user actually cares about having a backup of is often significantly smaller than the OS and related garbage on a disk that they can do without. Besides which, a local mirror isn't a good backup anyway!

My thinking is that this would serve a similar purpose to the trend for web browsers to warn users of insecure websites -- the more "in your face" the warnings are, the more incentive there is for providers to be secure.

I've had friends / relatives experience drive failure a few time in the past, and the look of horror they have when there is very little I can do to help them recover their photos etc. is something that I hate seeing.

And having the OS give a simple warning (that can be dismissed, with a "don't show me this any more" checkbox) would not over complicate things, and may end up saving some people's data.

Really no different than the current warning that Windows has, when you don't have antivirus installed. Or the fasten seatbelt signal that comes on the dashboard of your car when you start it. Or the flashing red light that gets added to some stop sign controlled intersections.

Also it would be nice if there was a standard way that backup software could inform the OS of backup status (this way it would serve as a secondary check in case the backup software's internal reporting fails to notify the user of bad backups). Just a little nice-to-have.

(I'm not advocating for this to be a legal requirement, just a nice feature if any OS vendor wants to add it).

> My thinking is that this would serve a similar purpose to the trend for web browsers to warn users of insecure websites -- the more "in your face" the warnings are, the more incentive there is for providers to be secure.

Another thing I hate about the industry today: being hostile to the user and trying to force them to use their computer how you want them to use it.

> I've had friends / relatives experience drive failure a few time in the past, and the look of horror they have when there is very little I can do to help them recover their photos etc. is something that I hate seeing.

Then teach them about proper backups. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand "don't keep all your eggs in one basket". Or if you're going to implement some stupid forced user-hostile scheme at least use something that actually qualifies as a backup.

> And having the OS give a simple warning (that can be dismissed, with a "don't show me this any more" checkbox) would not over complicate things, and may end up saving some people's data.

Here's what will happen: the user will dismiss the dialog without even reading it. We have decades of experience showing us this. Users have learned that "warning" dialogs are meaningless precisely because of crap like this. Oh yeah, and they're super annoying.

> Really no different than the current warning that Windows has, when you don't have antivirus installed.

Exactly my point.

I've looked into RAID at home but came to the conclusion that there are plenty of easier/cheaper ways to do backup. I just use USB drives, have a couple rotating Time Machine backups plus Backblaze. (Plus, when I think of it once a year or so, I have one more copy of my main data disk that I keep in a fire box.)

I don't really use Windows but you can do something similar--though in my experience it's not as simple.

I don't really care if I avoid any downtime. So long as I have belt and suspenders backups, I'm pretty comfortable.

RAID is for lower downtime, not data protection.

If we're talking about "protecting" consumers, I think it might be wiser for all OS vendors to provide a free tier of version-controlled cloud storage.

Backup is much more important than RAID in most situations. RAID doesn't protect from user error, virus, fire, etc.

I think Windows does remind to create backup (but not very loudly and it accepts local backups to another drive which is poor solution).

Unfortunately, almost everything is cheapest possible. For example, I would prefer ECC RAM as standard. It's very cheap for production (one additional chip per RAM stick), but Intel wants to force people wanting reliability to pay for Xeon CPU and most people don't care.

More specifically, adopt a 3-2-1 scheme for data you care about: store it in three places, two onsite but on different media, and 1 offsite. Backblaze is probably as good a choice as any for offsite storage, Tarsnap is also really popular here.

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