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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • Universiality, basically: almost everyone, everywhere has an email account, or can find one for free. As well as every OS and every device has a giant pile of mail clients for you to chose from.

    And I mean, email is a simple tech stack and well understood and reliable: I host an internal mail server for notifications and updates and shit, and it’s rapid, fast, and works perfectly.

    It’s only when you suddenly need to email someone OTHER than your local shit that it turns to complete shit.






  • Debian stable is great: it’s, well, stable. It’s well supported, has an extremely long support window, and the distro has a pretty stellar track record of not doing anything stupid.

    It’s very much in the install-once-and-forget-it category, just gotta do updates.

    I run everything in containers for management (but I’m also running something like 90 containers, so a little more complex than your setup) and am firmly of the opinion that, unless you have a compelling reason to NOT run something in a container, just use the containerized version.


  • I’m the same way. If it’s split license, then it’s a matter of when and not if it’s going to have some MBA come along and enshittify it.

    There’s just way, way too much prior experience where that’s what eventually will happen for me to be willing to trust any project that’s doing that, since the split means they’re going to monetize it, and then have all the incentive in the world to shit all over the “free” userbase to try to get them to convert.



  • completely disable Windows Update

    Since this is a work thing, I’d maybe check with whomever is in charge of your shit that you’re not violating any compliance shit by turning updates off.

    If you’re not, cool, then whatever, but compliance bullshit is awful and sucks and it’s better if you’re not the reason you fail an audit.

    Edit: for the OP, not you.




  • The format is the tape in the drive, or the disk or whatever.

    Tape existed 50 years ago: nothing modern and in production can read those tapes.

    The problem is, given a big enough time window, the literal drives to read it will simply no longer exist, and you won’t be able to access even non-rotted media because of that.

    As for data integrity, there’s a lot of options: you can make a md5 sum of each file, and then do it again and see if anything is different.

    The only caveat here is you have to make sure whatever you’re using to make the checksums gets stored somewhere that’s not JUST on the drive because if the drive DOES corrupt itself, and your only record of the “good” hashes is on the drive, well, you can’t necessarily trust those hashes either.


  • So, 50 years isn’t a reasonable goal unless you have a pretty big budget for this. Essentially no media is likely to survive that long and be readable unless they’re stored in a vault, under perfect climate controlled conditions. And even if the media is fine, finding an ancient drive to read a format that no longer exists is not a guaranteed proposition.

    You frankly should be expecting to have to replace everything every couple of years, and maybe more often if your routine tests of the media show it’s started rotting.

    Long term archival storage really isn’t just a dump it to some media and lock it up and never look at ever again.

    Alternately, you could just make someone else pay for all of this, and shove all of this to something like Glacier and make the media Amazon’s problem. (Assuming Amazon is around that long and that nothing catches fire.)


  • I’m using blu-ray disks for the 3rd copy, but I’m not backing up nearly as much data as you are.

    The only problem with optical media is that you should only expect it to be readable for a couple of years, best case, at this point and probably not even that as the tier 1 guys all stop making it and you’re left with the dregs.

    You almost certainly want some sort of tape option, assuming you want long retention periods and are only likely to add incremental changes to a large dataset.

    Edit: I know there’s longer-life archival optical media, but for what that costs, uh, you want tape if at all possible.




  • Buy multiple drives, setup some sort of raid, setup some sort of backup. Then set up a 2nd backup.

    Done.

    All drives from all manufacturers are going to fail at more or less the same rate (see: backblaze’s stats) and trying to buy a specific thing to avoid the death which is coming for all drives is, mostly, futile: at the absolute best you might see a single specific model to avoid, but that doesn’t mean entire product lines are bad.

    I’m using some WD red drives which are pushing 8 years old, and some Seagate exos drives which are pushing 4, and so far no issues on any of the 7 drives.


  • Make sure, if you use hardware RAID, you know what happens if your controller dies.

    Is the data in a format you can access it easily? Do you need a specific raid controller to be able to read it in the future? How are you going to get a new controller if you need it?

    That’s a big reason why people nudge you to software raid: if you’re using md and doing a mirror, then that’ll work on any damn drive controller on earth that linux can talk to, and you don’t need to worry about how you’re getting your data back if a controller dies on you.


  • So have you looked at using a N95 filter in a respirator?

    I don’t know if that’ll work for you, but they certainly stay in place much better than any mask, and there’s a wide variety of them that have the filter in various locations so maybe that’d be a better option?

    You look a little bit Fallout while wearing them, but they’re super comfortable for hours (because that’s how people who wear them use them), cheap to replace the filter when the time comes, and they seal spectacularly well and are easy to fit.