Also, wipe your hard drives before you throw out computers. Folks throw PCs out all the time in my office building, and I pick them up to refurb and ‘freecycle’ them. More than half the time, I’ll plug it in to see if it will boot it up, and the drives are still intact, and loaded up with personal data… Then I plug in my DBAN USB stick and wipe the drive(s) 3x.
As a consultant, my superpower is having read all the READMEs that come out for the software I specialize in, and re-reading them each time a customer calls and complains about a specific bug on an old version of the software.
The cool kids have left the building and moved on to building the next thing.
Monterey still gets security updates. :)
Really? I just handed down a 2017 MacBook Pro – still supported by Apple, meaning it runs the latest OS, and gets patches.
Can you give me an example of any other device with longer software support from the original vendor, at no cost to the end user?
Every media is subject to failure. It’s the process that protects.
If you’re keeping something for your family, consider putting it online on a sharable cloud storage system, or using software that distributes the data to everyone’s computer (BitTorrent / Resilio Sync / DropBox, etc.)
If you want something physical, I’d get a ‘tough’ or ‘high endurance’ USB stick or SD card, and keep updating it quarterly. Flash doesn’t have a great reputation for longevity/durability, so I’d wipe the USB stick clean with zeros then re-write everything with each update.
I normally don’t get into storage at that level – most of the storage solutions I use are enterprise-grade disk from Hitachi/Dell/EMC/IBM, etc. I’ve looked at Gluster, but never really tried implementing it. Ceph seems powerful, but more complicated than I’m willing to get into for my personal projects.
Once you cross a couple terabytes, I start moving everything to tape or (more recently) cloud storage where the day-to-day management is someone else’s problem.
Honestly, I’m “storage agnostic” – in my office I have Hard drives, SSDs, NAS, servers with various types of RAID, Linux boxes with disks in LVM, magneto optical platters, and various tapes.
It’s less about the media and more about the process. As I described elsewhere, I have a large NAS, an onsite copy, and an offsite copy on tapes. It’s the process of keeping offsite copies, regularly updating them, and verifying the copies that protects me, not some sticker on a box that says “100 YEAR STORAGE LIFE” from a company that might not exist next month.
The irony being, just last week, the city I live in just had its first Tornado warning in nearly 50 years.
But they were restoring all my posts and comments for weeks after I deleted them.
I work in IT. Most systems have laughable security. Passwords are often saved in plain text in scripts or config files. I went to a site to help out a very large provincial governmental organization move some data out of one system and into another. They sat me down with a loaner laptop and the guy logged me into his user account on the server. When I asked for escalated privileges, he told me he’d go get someone who knew the service account passwords.
After a few minutes, I started poking around on my own… And had administrative access within an hour. I could read the database (raw data), access documents, start and stop the software, plus, figured out how to get into the upstream system that fed data to this server… I was working on figuring out the software’s admin password when the guy came back. I’m sure that given some more time, I could have rooted the box because the OS hadn’t been updated in years.
Spez thinks that redditors are junkies who are hooked and can’t leave. It was easier than I thought it would be to leave. I only log in once a week for 5 minutes to delete any posts or comments they’ve restored against my will.
Tape is awesome. Relatively inexpensive at scale, huge storage volumes, consumes almost no power compared to what it stores. But it has its time and place. That place is archival and long-term offsite backups that are very infrequently accessed. People aren’t using it for what it’s best at doing.
The backup/archive software I use for work is enterprise grade - Tivoli Storage Manager a.k.a. Spectrum Protect. In my office, I use Time Machine on the Macs, and simply ‘tar’ on Linux to back up specific important directories. Windows machines are backed up by their owners with various tools that I don’t tend to concern myself with.
For the enterprise stuff, what makes it great is that it gives you a huge amount of control and flexibility and storage options. I love the idea of TSM/SP’s ‘incremental forever’ backup methodology. It means you can roll back to any backup at any point in time, as long as you’re storing enough historical versions of the files. The device support is also amazing, and I’ve built systems that can scale to be petabytes large with it.
For my office, I just use what I know is built in and reliable. I know every Linux system has tar, and every Mac has Time Machine. For my NAS device, I make copies of it with rsync to a USB-SATA enclosure with 5 drives, usually every 90 days or so, less if I’ve made a lot of changes.
Sadly, no… My niche is so very, very small that it’s unlikely I can help your specific situation. It’s also a self-preservation thing – giving professional advice for free without contracts in place is a liability issue.
I’m only familiar with ZFS, but only in my lab, not in production… ZFS is great because it can self-heal files / re-allocate blocks. I tried it on SMR drives, and it’s terrible, I advise against it. :)
ZFS is very good, but OFFSITE, TESTED BACKUPS are critical. There’s ‘reliable’ storage (storage that can deal with a failure) and then there’s backups. All the parity in the world won’t save your data from a fire.
In my small office, I have about 100TB of data that’s important to me, so I have a local copy, a backup in my office, and a stack of tapes at home about 1km away. Anything that affects both locations is outside my threat model, as I’ll have bigger issues.
I call this attitude “outrage porn”… There are people that are addicted to it and ready to believe anything that makes them angry. It’s even more sad than the ‘hot milfs in your area’ ads.
WAS from users on mobile. Was.
Oh, and I had a thought about their methodology - the screen recording software only works when it’s booted from the internal hard drive. Boot with a USB stick with a Linux live image, mount the internal drive as read-only, and you can copy the entire thing, and nobody will ever know.