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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

I have, uh, mp3 backups of all the music I have owned from my, um, ludicrously massive CD collection. Is it worth the risk that google might one day decide I am a pirate and block my account?

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For reference, I use FLAC instead of MP3. Your collection may be larger, but my ~12,000 FLAC files take less than 500GB. So I'd say it's a question of value: You could have redundant copies of your music for ~$300 CAD with a pair of Samsung T5 SSDs, or you could someday lose every email, contact, photo, document, Youtube playlist, and MP3 you use Google for.

I'm not saying it's likely, but it only has to be a one-in-100-million chance for it to hit a couple Google users.

How redundant are SSDs actually? I've been doing offline backups, but the OCD kicks in and I start wondering how many I should actually have and how often I should replace them...

I think the general consensus is that you shouldn't just leave them on a shelf for more than a year and that there is some temperature dependency in there.

If you really care about the data, two+ backups stored in different places is completely reasonable. Note that "places" is not limited by physical as trying to maintain independent dependency chains (e.g. a durable storage provider may decide to cut off account access so maybe a second independent storage provider using a different credit card makes sense)

Your OCD may also be helped a bit by having some way to verify you backups (e.g. use ZFS and scrub regularly and/or separate hash manifests of the files).

As a similar person - I've got a couple TB in Backblaze B2, encrypted on my end before upload.

The /r/datahoarder subreddit and it's wiki is a decent starting place for figuring out backup options.

It is not worth the risk. Encrypt those - you don't have to choose a particularly secure key or encryption scheme, just one that's good enough that it's computational infeasible for Google to brute-force that scheme+key size for every one of its users.

Actually, it might be a good idea to encrypt everything on Google Drive - I wouldn't be surprised if they analyze your files and use the results to augment their internal profile about you (or, even if they don't now, they could very easily do so in the future - remember when they scanned your emails to target ads at you?).

And tar/pad them, encryption if not done carefully when combined with compression suffers from the same kinds of problems as ECB.

AKA, it wouldn't surprise me at all, if given a disk with 100 folders, each with 8-15 encrypted files each, that someone couldn't figure out which albums comprise a good number of those directories simply from the resulting file lengths.

Risk is something you have to answer. What are you going to have to do go to get your data and find:

* A few songs have been removed, here and there, such you can't easily determine what has been removed. * Whole albums or your collection is removed. * Your account is disabled and you loose everything related to Google, including all other stored files, email, calendar, Android apps, music and video purchases, etc.

It's not your service, it's Google's. You're only renting access until they decide you're not.

If you are going to use cloud for backup, always use an encrypted backup so they have no idea what you're storing. I highly suggest considering using `rclone` to mount Google Drive. I've had mixed luck with using the encryption module. I would highly suggest `restic`, as it's very easy to backup and restore files.

rent a gcp instance for a bit, rclone mount your drive instance, create another rclone encrypted mount, copy from the unencrypted mount to the encrypted mount. delete unencrypted content.

go to your local pc and rclone encrypt mount your drive. now you have your linux isos and they are encrypted upstream

BackBlaze, my dude

It's a lot more expensive but a nice little synology NAS may be a good investment.

Do you really need a answer?

Has to be a rhetorical question.

I was once responsible for ripping 250,000 CDs, legally, on behalf of various record labels, from tiny to the big 5. I would love to store a backup of all that data in the big cloud services and see which ones deleted my legally-owned data.

Now imagine having to deal with disposition of the data and the ownership of the NAS throughout a bankruptcy.

What I'm trying to find out is what happened to the 250,000 CDs. They were put in storage unit. What happened to the storage unit when the company was liquidated? Did anyone even remember the CDs were there? Did someone bid on the unpaid storage unit and come across the biggest cache of music ever seen?

If you ripped those CDs while contracted by these record labels, I don’t see how it is legal for you to keep the files after the job and call them yours.

You assume that once the job was done, he washed his hands of it and it was over.

I once digitized a large media collection for a company (not audio, though), and it regularly used me as a backup source of last resort for when the files failed/got lost/needed to be transferred in bulk to another company/whatever on their end.

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