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Comment by munk-a | Hacker News Reader

> Cloud backup is a stupid idea. At any moment it could go dark, for any reason, and you have no recourse. Might as well bare your throat and hand some random stranger a razor.

I really disagree - physical storage in your home is the common alternative for a lot of consumer users - and that physical storage will involve maybe unplugging your external hard drive between backups - but otherwise never checking for the consistency and accuracy of the data nor the hardware. If you're working in a data center then it's your job to do these things and it doesn't take very much time... for normal folks cloud backups are likely going to be more reliable.

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> cloud backups are likely going to be more reliable

I've seen enough HackerNews articles:

1. My account got deleted and I can't find a human to talk to and all my pictures going back 20 years are gone!

2. A hacker guessed my password and deleted my online presence! It's all gone!

3. My storage provider went bust and all my stuff is gone!

If my cloud backup backend provider cancels my account, my backup software will quickly complain. There will be a window of exposure, but I can act quickly.

If my backup harddrive is in the same house as my main storage and my house burns down, I'm fucked.

If I'm fancy, I may have multiple backend storage providers, too. Lot easier to do that then to have multiple houses. I wanted to use a safe deposit box in the past, but last time I called banks near me, they didn't even have safe deposit boxes available to rent! I can ask some friends, but then will be limited in frequency of updates, still.

I haven't yet implemented it but perhaps a reciprocal syncthing arrangement with an IT knowledgeable friend?

I didn't think syncthing supported encrypted replicas - that's why I passed on it years ago for a dropbox-like use case. I wanted to have a replica in the cloud as a relay, without having to fully trust the machine. A quick google suggests they may have something beta along these lines, so this may change.

I believe Resilio can do it, but it is closed source.

If you're looking for backups and not dropbox-like functionality, then something like restic might be more appropriate. It does actual content addressed backups, so you've got history for those times when you realized you messed something up six backups ago.

Syncthing now supports untrusted encrypted nodes, and it's fairly reliable.

"Redundant Array of Inexpensive Cloud Storage Providers is not a backup!!!" <grin>

(Can we make RAICSP a thing? Or do multi-cloud solution vendors already has a snappy marketing term for storing everything on all of S3, Azure Blob, and Google Storage at once?)

It's not? Why?

Yeah, I’m falling on this too. A client with write-only privs to a buckets on multiple cloud storage providers is literally the most durable backup in human existence right now. Like nothing else will get you worldwide DR and 30+ 9’s of durability.

3 (designed for) 10 9’s systems whose failure modes are wholly independent might be 30 9s.

I strongly suspect (as in “for the right price would stake my life on it”) that there are some common failure modes across the major cloud vendors’ offerings.

Your advice is directionally sound (and is what I do for family docs and photos); I just think it has fewer meaningless 9s than you’re imagining.

Sorry, just riffing on the “RAID is not a backup” that gets yelled at everybody who ever did an rm -rf on their raid by accident…

It's probably not a bad idea, but if they're all linked to a single e-mail account/provider, things might turn sour quickly.

Companies like Iron Mountain provide this service to businesses. Even if a bank no longer offers safe deposit boxes (and you were relying on their "safe", which for small banks was an arbitrary thing), there are usually facilities in larger cities that offer the same sort of service.

Just went through this with my family (in Australia) when the local bank branch said they were shutting down the service. It was basically a locked room in their branch, there was no "safe" involved.

There’s “cloud backup” and there’s “storing everything primarily in one cloud provider”.

And:

4. My crypto exchange disappeared/went bankrupt/was a scam and now my crypto is all gone.

I swear, some people never learn.

Don't be silly! That could never happen to my crypto exchange

Of course not! And they're _totally_ 1:1 fully backed with USD!

not your keys, not your coins. no exceptions.

Well I guess you should have both. That’s the point point right? Redundancy?

I think you've fallen into the trap of being scared by the news. Normal hard drive failures don't make it to HN because they're so boring and common. You even had one yourself. That's how unreliable maintaining your own backup device is.

This very story is just that - people had their own hard drive and it wasn't maintained for security so it got erased. At least this article needs to be added to your mental list of failures of local storage to balance your news-driven bias.

"At least this article needs to be added to your mental list of failures of local storage to balance your news-driven bias." What a toxic comment. You are saying far more about yourself than you are of someone you don't know at all. Projection and a lot of anger/hate inside.

> You are saying far more about yourself [...] a lot of anger/hate inside.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

Then why be wrong/unhelpful/provocative?

Backblaze's latest drive report shows an annual failure rate for hard drives of 0.85%. I very strongly suspect the total of all failures of the type you're listing there is many orders of magnitude lower than that across all cloud storage users.

If you care about your backups, a single cloud vendor/account vanishing isn't going to be a problem, in exactly the same way that if you care about your backups,m a single drive failure will not be a problem. They are both predictable and mitigable risks.

> in exactly the same way that if you care about your backups, a single drive failure will not be a problem

0.85% is extremely high. I've rolled enough 1s on d100s to know that I wouldn't take those odds!

Yeah, but it certainly feels in the right ballpark from my personal experience. I’ve normally got 20 or so drives in use at any time (perhaps fewer spinning rust drives not that ssds are more common), and I have a drive go bad occasionally - not every year or two, but certainly every 5 years. So I reckon they’re at least order of magnitude right.

I have found that filesystem corruption or accidental deletion is far more common than physical drive failure.

> I can't find a human to talk to and

Obviously customer support is a finite resource.

That's why companies need to start paid/premium customer support: when you lost access to your account, you should be able to pay 10, 100, 1000 of money to talk to a real person who understand how the system works and where there a mistake was made.

Like a hacker stole your account and you cannot take it back? A special person will to do a background check (e.g. call your employer) to verify that you is actually you.

Robot erroneously blocked your account because of misclassified spam-like activity? Your account is restored, and you are fully refunded.

do you know of any tools for consistency/accuracy? I've been meaning to do some basic md5 checks for all my files but haven't gotten around to it. Every now and then I find a corrupt jpg image that has a rectangular band running through it or something of the like.

Generally I'd recommend using a filesystem designed for that. Something like btrfs or (I think) ZFS, which have checksums built into the filesystem (and if you set them up in a RAID configuration, these checksums can be used to correct data as well)

I believe that's some form of bitrot. AFAIK only ZFS can deal with this (assuming you use ECC RAM).

EDIT: According to Wikipedia, ZFS, Btrfs and ReFS offer strategies to deal with various forms of data degradation, although it appears as if ZFS is still king.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation

For all my important photos I use par files. Using command-line tools like par2create and par2repair is simply part of the routine of storing photos from the camera on the NAS.

I also use it for music files, in the past too many mp3s got broken.

Yup, I also do this. Photos get moved into monthly folders, and every now and then, I run "par2create par2file *".

Before I did this, in the past, I restored from backup and found I had damaged jpeg files. With par2, there's at least a recourse.

parchive and md5deep

http://md5deep.sourceforge.net/

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