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Comment by poisonborz | Hacker News Reader

So private consumers should just pay cloud subscription if they want safer/modern data storage for their PC? (without NAS)

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No, private consumers have a choice, since Linux and FreeBSD runs well on their hardware. Microsoft is too busy shoveling their crappy AI and convincing OEMs to put a second Windows button (the CoPilot button) on their keyboards.

Probably. There are levels of backups, and a cloud subscription SHOULD give you copies in geographical separate locations with someone to help you (who probably isn't into computers and doesn't want to learn the complex details) restore when (NOT IF!) needed.

I have all my backups on a NAS in the next room. This covers the vast majority of use cases for backups, but if my house burns down everything is lost. I know I'm taking that risk, but really I should have better. Just paying someone to do it all in the cloud should be better for me as well and I keep thinking I should do this.

Of course paying someone assumes they will do their job. There are always incompetent companies out there to take your money.

My setup is similar to yours, but I also distribute my most important data in compressed (<5GB) encrypted backups to several free-tier cloud storage accounts. I could restore it by copying one key and running one script.

I lost faith in most paid operators. Whoops, this thing that absolutely can happen to home users and we're supposed to protect them from now actually happened to us and we were not prepared. We're so sorry!

Nah. Give me access to 5-15 cloud storage accounts, I'll handle it myself. Have done so for years.

If you need Windows, you can use something like restic (checksums and compression) and external drives (more than one, stored in more than one place) to make a backup. Plus "maybe" but not needed ReFS (on your non-Windows partition), which is included in the Workstation/Enterprise editions of Windows.

I trust my own backups much more than any subscription, not essentially from a technical point of view, but from an access point of view (e.g. losing access to your Google account).

EDIT: You have to enable check-summing and/or compression for data on ReFS manually

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/ref...

> I trust my own backups much more than any subscription, not from a technical standpoint but from an access one (for example, losing access to your google account).

I personally use cloud storage extensively, but I keep a local version with periodic rclone/borg. It allows me access from everywhere and sleep well at night.

NTFS has Volume Shadow Copy, which is "good enough" for private users if they want to create image backups while their system is running.

First of all, that's not a backup, that's a snapshot, and NO, that's not "good enough", tell your grandma that all her digitised pictures are gone because her hard drive exploded, or that one most important jpeg is now unwatchable because of bitrot.

Just because someone is a private user doesn't mean that the data is less important, often it's quite the opposite, for example a family album vs your cloned git repository.

... VSS is used to create backups. Re-read parent.

Not good enough, you can make 10000 backups of bitrotten data, if you don't have check-sums on your block (zfs) or files (restic) nothing can help you. That's the same integrity as to copy stuff on your thump-drive.

The same applies to those filesystems on Linux which don't check for bit-rottenness, which will be the majority of installs.

Your average grandma would use ext4 when using Linux. Android phones don't do that as well and I don't know about iOS, but apparently APFS only does metadata checksumming.

>> if you don't have check-sums on your block (zfs) or files (restic)

....

I think Microsoft has discontinued Windows 7 backup to force people to buy OneDrive subscriptions. They also forcefully enabled the feature when they first introduced it.

So, I think that your answer for this question is "unfortunately, yes".

Not that I support the situation.

Having a NAS is life-changing. Doesn't have to be some large 20-bay monstrosity, just something that will give you redundancy and has an ethernet jack.

No, if they need ZFS-like function, they just pay for NAS.

ZFS is not in the same market with AWS S3.

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