Storing SSD and HDD Safely

Please post any tips or advice you have in general relating to laser scanning either whilst onsite or office based.
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RyanT
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Storing SSD and HDD Safely

Post by RyanT »

I'm looking for a good way to store our backup drives. We have multiple solid state and hdd. Right now we have some of them in an anti-static Gorilla Drive Box (looks like an ammo box), but we've run out of room and they're not cheap. I've thought of getting some foam cut for a file cabinet drawer or some thing similar, but there's got to be a better way. Any ideas are appreciated. Thanks!
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Re: Storing SSD and HDD Safely

Post by dhirota »

We recently have had a potential failure of SSD raid system.

This may not be the appropriate thread, but if you are keeping the SSD or HDD as a long term backup device than you should read this Google report if it has not been illustrated on LSF (I have not seen it).

"Using data from millions of drive days in Google datacenters, a new paper offers production lifecycle data on SSD reliability. Surprise! SSDs fail differently than disks - and in a dangerous way. Here's what you need to know."

"SSD age, not usage, affects reliability."

http://www.zdnet.com/article/ssd-reliab ... xperience/
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Re: Storing SSD and HDD Safely

Post by landmeterbeuckx »

Sorry to barge in. No ssd or HD but i'm looking to burn every project to blu-ray m-disc for archiving.

They suppose to last more than a lifetime. Has anybody have experiences with them?
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Re: Storing SSD and HDD Safely

Post by flohrd »

One thing that matters also: data formats. If you have to store data over a long period of time make sure you are using a data format that won't become obsolete over the years. This is a challenge on its own as data formats evolve or get replaced with something new all the time.

Same applies to encryption: make sure you will remember your password and also that there will be a usable software in 10 years that can handle your encrypted data...
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Re: Storing SSD and HDD Safely

Post by landmeterbeuckx »

Daniel,
Which formats do you think? E57, txt, rcp?
Interesting to know to export every project for the future.
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Re: Storing SSD and HDD Safely

Post by flohrd »

It depends on your use case and what kind of data you want to preserve.
If data size does not matter so much an ascii format may be beneficial because it is very easy to read (as long as it is documented!).
Even if there were no tools in the future that could read the format, it would be very easy to write a reader for it or convert it to something else.

Binary formats of course are more compact but also more complex and often times proprietary.
Scanner vendors are taking care about compatibility though. We can still read the very first fls files from way back then in SCENE today and I would guess it is the same for the other vendors and software makers as well.

But if a software is discontinued or someone goes out of business you might be in trouble if they don't make the thing open source...
For a really secure long term storage (10 years+) I would use a vendor-agnostic format. I would prefer ascii over binary if I could afford the extra storage cost or try to find a simple and open binary format.
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Re: Storing SSD and HDD Safely

Post by ddustin »

landmeterbeuckx wrote:Sorry to barge in. No ssd or HD but i'm looking to burn every project to blu-ray m-disc for archiving.

They suppose to last more than a lifetime. Has anybody have experiences with them?
We burn our scans to Blue-Ray on occasion and it works well.
There is a Blue-Ray manufacturer that claims to guarantee their disc's will last 1000 years.
No idea how they tested that, but if they have a time machine, I want in ;)
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Re: Storing SSD and HDD Safely

Post by jamesworrell »

My 2 cents .. leave this to the professionals and put in on cloud storage.

I'll talk about Azure as I know more about it ..

So starting with the self-managed SSD/HDD scenario - you want a minimum of two .. probably three copies at disparate sites - no point having two copies in your office and the office burns down. This goes to cost comparisons later. Need multiple copies, especially for when you drop a drive like I did yesterday. #crunchy

You also have to manage, longer term, technology changes - so interfaces like SATA, USB, You have to keep rolling with the times. Same goes for vendor-specific file formats .. like rolling all your Cyclone 7 databases (say) to Cyclone 9.

You have to remember to copy to all three drives when changes made .. yada yada. This is not fool-proof. User error can creep in here.

Looking at Azure - at the "storage stamp" level, there are three copies of your data made, with checksums computed per block etc. The storage system regularly scans the blocks, recomputes the checksums, if it doesn't like what it sees, it restores from one of the replicas.

Read more on Azure redundancy:
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/window ... t-storage/

You can also have snapshots in case you stuff up. Say you accidentally overwrite or delete something you shouldn't. You can get it back.

Geographical redundancy is also automatically handled. When you send something to one datacenter, before you receive a "committed" signal back, the same data can be propagated to a second datacenter at least hundreds of miles away .. say East US and West US. If a datacenter blows up .. you are golden.

Pricing - their new'ish Azure Cool BLOB storage is spot on for this time of work:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/ ... l-storage/

Finally - things can be scripted via tools like AzCopy:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/docum ... se-azcopy/

Say you have a "drop" folder - you can schedule tasks to upload.

If you want to think less about it - you can even spin up a StorSimple virtual machine image - it has auto-offload to cloud when data is not accessed for a while:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/docum ... -overview/

Geographically redundant cool storage for 2c per gb per month.

Lots to put in? Check out the "football":
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/prici ... rt-export/

If you are really paranoid .. duplicate to AWS or Google.
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Re: Storing SSD and HDD Safely

Post by LPaulCook »

A personal account with HD backed up data sent you overnight in case of a disk failure at Carbonite.com is unlimited storage for a fixed annual fee under $200!

Data is encrypted at my PC and again when it arrives at Carbonite it is encrypted again, double encryption. 6 drive RADE there and duplication at multiple sites in undisclosed data centers far apart across the USA.

I've used them now for 15+ years and highly recommend them.

I also backup locally to my external hard drives.
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Re: Storing SSD and HDD Safely

Post by Matt Young »

The company 3M used to make Scotch VHS tapes in the 80's and put a lifetime guarantee on them...

None of the media you use now will be relevant in 30 years let alone 1000.

To 3M's credit, they apparently still honour the lifetime guarantee to this day!
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