Comment by DaiPlusPlus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DaiPlusPlus | Hacker News Reader

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Google, as a company, is not reliable - I refuse to host anything critical on Google Drive (even G Suite) because there's zero recourse or accountability if a bug in Google's software or if Google arbitrarily decides to ban you for life from their services (e.g. due to misidentifying you from a dodgy YouTube user or repeated Google Play Store policy violations) then they will delete all of your personal and business accounts and you're SOL.

What you have is fine for short-term recovery - but I'd make sure you have a long-term and/or cold-storage option set up. It doesn't need to be anything particularly fancy: I'd get a rugged+ portable+external single-drive USB enclosure with a single 16TB drive and have the Synology do a backup of your most critical data onto that drive and store it in your bank's safety deposit box or better yet: leave it with a trusted friend who lives in rural Minnesota or similar.

It goes without saying to encrypt that drive as you won't have full custody of it: but use a simple, proven encryption scheme with a large ecosystem that you know that you'll be able to decrypt in 10-20 years' time.

For backup drives that I keep local to me, I refuse to encrypt them because (in my experience) the possibility of being unable to decrypt data in a desperate or urgent situation just makes me wince.

What do you make of comparable services from other providers, say, Amazon Glacier?

I've used glacier. For stuff you don't need to restore in a rush, it's cheap.

I did however have a recent health scare and it made me wonder how my non tech wife could possibly have restored the files as the interfaces are all heavy.

Not a factor I'd previously considered when assessing my backup/restore.

> For stuff you don't need to restore in a rush, it's cheap

That was my thinking. It seems a good fit as a last-resort backup. Low month-on-month storage costs, high retrieval costs. So we're essentially betting that we'll never retrieve the data. Which seems fine.

Also, it apparently has strong assurances against data-loss. Lots of nines. [0]

> how my non tech wife could possibly have restored the files as the interfaces are all heavy

It's all web-API-based, right? Is there a a decent FOSS GUI to navigate it?

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/features/

If you retrieve the data slowly it's cheap. It's expensive if say you are a retailer who needs their database restored asap.

I use a Linux perl client!

I suppose the biggest risk is failure-to-pay, as with all cloud backups/storage. If I allow my payment card to expire, Amazon aren't obligated to continue to store my data. If I drop off the grid for an extended holiday, that could be a real risk.

To my knowledge, Amazon offer no means of prepaying.

You get emails. Imho it's not a big risk.

Possibly you miss the mail, the mail into spam, forget to fix it.

> Amazon aren't obligated to continue to store my data. If I drop off the grid for an extended holiday, that could be a real risk. To my knowledge, Amazon offer no means of prepaying.

Another option I've been meaning to set-up is two-way Synology sync between sites. My parents have a Synology box and now that they have a decent internet connection (DOCSIS, not ADSL's 768kbps upstream) we could backup each others' data on each other's Synology boxes. I just need to figure it out...

> If I allow my payment card to expire, Amazon aren't obligated to continue to store my data.

Business idea: cloud archive storage where you pay when you upload data and optionally pay a modest monthly fee for real-time access to stored data, but they'll guarantee to keep your data for you if you stop paying: you'll just need to pay to retrieve that data.

As the long-term archival data wouldn't need to be stored in a data-center: just a commodity tape-library box in a basement in a farm somewhere near a freeway I imagine it would be kinda cheap to run as a business. You could set-up a Foundation or other entity to ensure long-term continuity of operations and have it self-sufficient through an endowment. E.g. a $1m endowment would easily pay for something like this into perpetuity.

There was Permanent.org, three months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22943620

I agree with this comment on how that project completely fails to provide the necessary assurances of dependable longevity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22944681

If offered by an organisation that I can trust to still exist in, say, 40 years time, this might work. Maybe Google/Amazon/Microsoft have this credibility. Maybe. There's no way it would work as a start-up.

You'd also need to charge enough upfront that you can still turn a profit if they stop paying immediately. Asking for upfront payment of 40 years of data-storage fees, might be a problem.

> a commodity tape-library box in a basement in a farm somewhere near a freeway

I'm not a data-storage expert by any means, but that doesn't sound anywhere near good enough. You need to redundantly protect against flood, fire, crime, etc. You'll also need to be able to retrieve data at scale. You're essentially rolling your own Amazon Glacier.

I have bad experiences encrypting backup drives. If they corrupt a little the data might be gone. You also have the problem of keeping track of the key for years.

Protip: write the passphrase in sharpie on the slither of whitespace left available on the drive’s spec sticker

What's the point in encrypting the drive if the key is written on the drive?

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