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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

>I've been weary of using rewritable media for some time now as a consequence

I briefly considered using bluray disks as a backup for my photos and other critical docs. But getting a decent bluray burner seems not so easy these days with most production winding down. Next best thing looks like the "object lock" feature on object store services that prevents deleting objects for a certain time.

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I pretty much instantly wrote off physical media because I know I won't reliably move it to a separate location. If I'm going to have backups, I want ones that are not within fire/flood range of my computer.

In terms of preventing "oops" moments, I'm mainly relying on software (restic) for that, where I trust that (A) backups always append data rather than replacing and (B) it's logic works for marking which data to purge based on rules is accurate. [0]

[0] https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/stable/060_forget.html#remo...

You want to make sure the append only is enforced by the hosting provider rather than duplicity. Your backups should be resistant to having an attacker on the system who can run arbitrary commands with duplicity.

Right, defense against internal "oops" accidents looks rather different than defense against purposeful sabotage.

While the local backup service uses an API-key with limited privileges, I need to go back to the bucket/storage-zone settings and see what I can enable, how it would affect total storage, and whether I (with additional privileges) can reliably grab the correct mix of old-blobs to do a restore.

I bought a tape library for my backups, but that's probably an overkill.

On the other hand, LTO-5 drives are now pretty affordable. And each tape cartridge holds around 2Tb of data for about $20.

Wait really ? That's a huge change from last time I looked. How much did this setup cost you?

I kinda overdid it with a tape library (40 tapes capacity, LTO-9), but I'm using it for my company's AI model backups. _That_ setup was about $12k.

I had a smaller setup before, with a simple external LTO-5 drive. Used drives are now are about $300, and you can probably find them cheaper. And LTO-5 is the minimum realistic version, it's the first one that supports LTFS and it has reasonable tape capacity.

> Next best thing looks like the "object lock" feature on object store services that prevents deleting objects for a certain time.

Lol, no. "As of today we are closed. Goodbye."

Especially considering what giving even a two weeks now considered "generous".

This is for backups. The threat here is that random ware uses your backup script to delete/encrypt the backups too. With object lock the api key the script has can only add data.

The probability that the object store goes out of business at the exact time your own copy dies is insignificant.

No object lock API would help you if the business where you rent the service is going out of... business. With all your data - and you are without.

Or even fancier - just changing the price for the egress.

That only matters if it happens literally at the same time as a failure of your primary storage. If they increase the price you can just close your account and move the backup to another service.

The probability of a hard drive failure or ransomware at the same time as backblaze or aws going out of business is pretty much not worth thinking about.

The probability of an attacker using the api key in your backup script to destroy the backups is far more possible.

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