b) An un-powered SSD drive will eventually degrade and LOSE ITS DATA in a fairly short amount of time (for Backup purposes)? This gets worse with Triple-level-and-up (TLC) Cell structures, BTW. They basically need an electric refresh to keep the cell structure from flipping to another position.
--Depending on the temperature/humidity it's stored in, SSD degradation could be detected in as low as several months or - if you're lucky - possibly as much as a couple of years. But if you don't fire it up every so often and run a data-consistency check, how would you know if your files are succumbing to bit-rot?
--There are many, many more options for backups that don't cost *nearly* as much as SSDs - that's not really what they're intended for. I can see buying an SSD if you want faster startup times on your PC, are into gaming, or you do a lot of virtualization suspending/resuming (R/W multiple gigabytes) every day. SSD's are designed to be faster than spinning disks, NOT necessarily long-lasting without power.
--For now, it looks like the best thing to do is keep your data online, have multiple rotating backups, store some stuff off-site, and copy data from old-drive to new-drive before it breaks. (I would even say real-time Mirroring or RAIDing is getting to be essential for any disk over 1-2TB.) But if you're storing your main backups on SSD media, you're over-spending *and* may be risking data loss if you don't power up the drive every so often.
--JMHO, but I would look into something like M-DISC for reasonable amounts of long-term archival storage. 4.7GB DVD M-Discs were made to the highest standard; 51% sure about the 25GB Blu-Ray M-Discs, not sure about the 100GB BD-R multi-layer discs. (Cloud backup is OK I guess as long as you don't mind 3-letter-agency snooping and you don't have a slow Internet with data caps, but encryption is definitely recommended before uploading.)
--It's not very popular these days, but you could buy a Blu-Ray M-disc burner and a pack of 16x25GB M-Disc Blu-Rays for archival storage(think "stone media") for under $180, and burn ~375GB (uncompressed) onto 16 Blu-Ray DVDs...
--Actually I just checked and it looks like you can now buy 100GB M-disc blu-rays, albeit for a higher cost (and it may not be the same reliable stone-based media with scratch-resistant coating, according to 1 review I read.)
--About a year ago, I did a serious appraisal of all the data I *really* had to put under a "NEVERLOSE" label; and across all my PCs and laptops, it was under 25GB. Most of that was my CD music rips collection. You don't have to keep EVERYthing if you prioritize a little. Most of the other stuff is VMs and copies of things that are available on $something-else in the house.
--Best answer I've seen so far, except for the ZFS responses.
--My question is, how has Synology gotten btrfs to be "stable" when it's still considered to be "experimental" on a regular Linux distro? I've seen reports of people losing all their data on btrfs and still consider it to be at *least* 3-5 years behind ZFS.
--Interesting, but I have to question your math a bit.
> LA to NYC is 18 hours by train, but takes 5 days in an automobile due to the chaotic road system.
--According to G.Maps, Los Angeles,CA to NY,NY is 2,778 miles. 2,778/70MPH *nonstop* (unrealistic?) is over 39 hours.
--On the other hand, New Orleans, LA to NY,NY is listed as ~19.5 hours nonstop by car and ~1D3H by train, so which did you mean? They didn't deploy high speed rail in the US until the 30's, and only then on relatively short sections of track...
--They musta sent the spike back to Boris and hacked the Gibson! Quick Johnny, disconnect Jones before they loopback on a hardline and reverse-hack his tank!
--You could use a "jump server" - setup a cheap Linux cloud server on digitalocean or the like, SSH into that with X forwarding, install vncviewer on the Linux side, and vnc from there.
--Or if I'm misunderstanding and the embedded system was behind NAT, you might setup ssh -> digitalocean with port forwarding and keepalives (from the embedded side), and get back in that way with the cloud server acting as the middleman. That way you shouldn't have to open firewall ports.
--What the actual F do you need EIGHT TERABYTES of real-time storage on a *laptop* for?? Serious question. Why not set up a file server at your house and another one at work, and sync them once a week or so?
--Seriously, I will be *happy* to help you with building a Linux+ZFS+Samba+Squid server (before disk costs) for under $1K. ~12TB of RAID10 storage using 6x4TB disks, free 28-31 day ZFS snapshots included, auto-scheduled monthly scrubs and SMART tests.
--Feel free to email me for a quote (but reference the Slashdot comment.) I have deployed several of these servers and can easily saturate a Gigabit network connection (~90MB-110MB/sec, sustained large-file transfers over Samba or FTP) using off-the-shelf equipment and standard Cat5E cables.
--That may not be a completely valid assumption. Have you visited the website? Teracopy can completely replace Explorer's copy/move function and has a number of additional features.
--Obviously I don't know the low-level technical details, but feel free to give it a try and see if it helps your situation; I'm not here to argue a trivial point.;-)
--Not sure what you mean by "file transfers" but if you mean copying files to another location on the same drive, try Teracopy. It's a free utility that either works with or replaces Explorer's file copy.
"I'm the enemy because I like to think. I like to read. I'm into freedom of speech and freedom of choice. I'm the kind of guy that could sit in a greasy spoon and wonder, gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecue ribs or the side order of gravy fries? I want high cholesterol. I would eat bacon and butter and buckets of cheese. Okay? I want to smoke Cuban cigars the size of Cincinnati in the nonsmoking section. I want to run through the streets naked with green Jell-O all over my body reading Playboy magazine. Why? Because I might suddenly feel the need to. Okay, pal?"
--Seriously man, you should consider banding together with whoever else in your area is in the same fix and start your own company. Feel free to contact me off-slashdot if you want to discuss this, I may have a few ideas and stuff that can help you out.
--5 years power on time? You're pushing it. zpool set autoexpand=on + autoreplace=on for your pool; zpool replace the drives one at a time with 1TB ( ~$61 WD RED ) or 2TB ( ~$79 SG ) NAS** drives before they fail, you can *easily double* (or more) your available disk space by buying them on Amazon these days.
** TLER FTW;-)
--Seriously, ZFS online disk replacement is the easiest way I know of, no downtime and much better than trying to do hours of recovery if both happen to fail at once. It's worth it just for the peace of mind.
--Setup a ZFS+Linux+Samba server as a RAID10 network share drive, copy data to it, take a known-good snapshot. Do a zpool scrub afterward to make sure.
--Then implement a cron script that takes a rolling snapshot Mon-Sun. If you're feeling ambitious you can install the zfs-auto-snapshot package but you should really disable the "frequent" snapshots (every 15 minutes? who really needs that?) and possibly "hourly" snapshots since they will prevent your disks from going to sleep.
--As a bonus, you could also take rolling day-of-month (1-31) snapshots in the same script. Just destroy the existing snapshot name before taking another one.
(Disclaimer: I have done this and the concept appears fairly bulletproof, since ZFS snapshot directories are read-only.) Feel free to ask me for details or provide feedback...
> 4. virtual desktops --So far, this is the only "killer feature" that I have seen so far with Win10 (I upgraded my Win7 laptop in-place but have not used it in months since I found out about Win10 == spyware PLUS braindead break-your-apps anti-user garbage PLUS reboot-whenever-it-senses-$CRITICAL-THING--that-you're-right-in-the-middle-of)
( Aside - you like ST:TOS, you can't be all bad;-) )
> 4. Most IT folks here after 40 HATE CHANGE. Read anything about systemD, WIndows 7 (pre 2014), or anything else? --LOL, u nailed it man;-) One of the reasons we "hate change" is more often than not, change BREAKS THINGS that we have been depending on for YEARS in some cases...
( This is a bug in Ubuntu 14.04 that I just started dealing with - note the lack of support and concern from Canonical over what is a very serious issue for sysadmins: )
Slashdot Mirror
--Umm, you do realize that SSDs are:
a) WAY expensive for backing things up to, and
b) An un-powered SSD drive will eventually degrade and LOSE ITS DATA in a fairly short amount of time (for Backup purposes)? This gets worse with Triple-level-and-up (TLC) Cell structures, BTW. They basically need an electric refresh to keep the cell structure from flipping to another position.
--Depending on the temperature/humidity it's stored in, SSD degradation could be detected in as low as several months or - if you're lucky - possibly as much as a couple of years. But if you don't fire it up every so often and run a data-consistency check, how would you know if your files are succumbing to bit-rot?
--There are many, many more options for backups that don't cost *nearly* as much as SSDs - that's not really what they're intended for. I can see buying an SSD if you want faster startup times on your PC, are into gaming, or you do a lot of virtualization suspending/resuming (R/W multiple gigabytes) every day. SSD's are designed to be faster than spinning disks, NOT necessarily long-lasting without power.
--For now, it looks like the best thing to do is keep your data online, have multiple rotating backups, store some stuff off-site, and copy data from old-drive to new-drive before it breaks. (I would even say real-time Mirroring or RAIDing is getting to be essential for any disk over 1-2TB.) But if you're storing your main backups on SSD media, you're over-spending *and* may be risking data loss if you don't power up the drive every so often.
--JMHO, but I would look into something like M-DISC for reasonable amounts of long-term archival storage. 4.7GB DVD M-Discs were made to the highest standard; 51% sure about the 25GB Blu-Ray M-Discs, not sure about the 100GB BD-R multi-layer discs. (Cloud backup is OK I guess as long as you don't mind 3-letter-agency snooping and you don't have a slow Internet with data caps, but encryption is definitely recommended before uploading.)
Refs:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/h...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/...
https://www.maketecheasier.com...
--To prevent confusion, it looks like the correct name for the package is " xorriso " (FYI)
xorriso - command line ISO-9660 and Rock Ridge manipulation tool
--It's not very popular these days, but you could buy a Blu-Ray M-disc burner and a pack of 16x25GB M-Disc Blu-Rays for archival storage(think "stone media") for under $180, and burn ~375GB (uncompressed) onto 16 Blu-Ray DVDs...
--Actually I just checked and it looks like you can now buy 100GB M-disc blu-rays, albeit for a higher cost (and it may not be the same reliable stone-based media with scratch-resistant coating, according to 1 review I read.)
--About a year ago, I did a serious appraisal of all the data I *really* had to put under a "NEVERLOSE" label; and across all my PCs and laptops, it was under 25GB. Most of that was my CD music rips collection. You don't have to keep EVERYthing if you prioritize a little. Most of the other stuff is VMs and copies of things that are available on $something-else in the house.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.mdisc.com/
--Best answer I've seen so far, except for the ZFS responses.
--My question is, how has Synology gotten btrfs to be "stable" when it's still considered to be "experimental" on a regular Linux distro? I've seen reports of people losing all their data on btrfs and still consider it to be at *least* 3-5 years behind ZFS.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/ind...
https://lwn.net/Articles/67681...
--Looks like both of those links are for Vista, but running something like Crap Cleaner is better than running MS "disk f**k^Wcleanup" anyhow ;-)
--Interesting, but I have to question your math a bit.
> LA to NYC is 18 hours by train, but takes 5 days in an automobile due to the chaotic road system.
--According to G.Maps, Los Angeles,CA to NY,NY is 2,778 miles. 2,778/70MPH *nonstop* (unrealistic?) is over 39 hours.
--On the other hand, New Orleans, LA to NY,NY is listed as ~19.5 hours nonstop by car and ~1D3H by train, so which did you mean? They didn't deploy high speed rail in the US until the 30's, and only then on relatively short sections of track...
--They musta sent the spike back to Boris and hacked the Gibson! Quick Johnny, disconnect Jones before they loopback on a hardline and reverse-hack his tank!
/ amidoinitrite ?
--You could use a "jump server" - setup a cheap Linux cloud server on digitalocean or the like, SSH into that with X forwarding, install vncviewer on the Linux side, and vnc from there.
--Or if I'm misunderstanding and the embedded system was behind NAT, you might setup ssh -> digitalocean with port forwarding and keepalives (from the embedded side), and get back in that way with the cloud server acting as the middleman. That way you shouldn't have to open firewall ports.
--Man, she's been missing out all this time. Wonder if she'll be inclined to do more after this.
--But Mike, we're roight in the middle of Bastard Squad--!
/ love that show
--What the actual F do you need EIGHT TERABYTES of real-time storage on a *laptop* for?? Serious question. Why not set up a file server at your house and another one at work, and sync them once a week or so?
--Seriously, I will be *happy* to help you with building a Linux+ZFS+Samba+Squid server (before disk costs) for under $1K. ~12TB of RAID10 storage using 6x4TB disks, free 28-31 day ZFS snapshots included, auto-scheduled monthly scrubs and SMART tests.
--Feel free to email me for a quote (but reference the Slashdot comment.) I have deployed several of these servers and can easily saturate a Gigabit network connection (~90MB-110MB/sec, sustained large-file transfers over Samba or FTP) using off-the-shelf equipment and standard Cat5E cables.
--That may not be a completely valid assumption. Have you visited the website? Teracopy can completely replace Explorer's copy/move function and has a number of additional features.
--Obviously I don't know the low-level technical details, but feel free to give it a try and see if it helps your situation; I'm not here to argue a trivial point. ;-)
--From what I've heard (and some light personal use) it's written more efficiently than the OS-level copy function. That's all I know ;-)
--Not sure what you mean by "file transfers" but if you mean copying files to another location on the same drive, try Teracopy. It's a free utility that either works with or replaces Explorer's file copy.
http://www.codesector.com/tera...
/ standard disclaimer, I have nothing to do with Teracopy - just have used the software and found it to be useful for me
"I'm the enemy because I like to think. I like to read. I'm into freedom of speech and freedom of choice. I'm the kind of guy that could sit in a greasy spoon and wonder, gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecue ribs or the side order of gravy fries? I want high cholesterol. I would eat bacon and butter and buckets of cheese. Okay? I want to smoke Cuban cigars the size of Cincinnati in the nonsmoking section. I want to run through the streets naked with green Jell-O all over my body reading Playboy magazine. Why? Because I might suddenly feel the need to. Okay, pal?"
/ your post made me think of this ;-)
--Seriously man, you should consider banding together with whoever else in your area is in the same fix and start your own company. Feel free to contact me off-slashdot if you want to discuss this, I may have a few ideas and stuff that can help you out.
>You forgot for the most part "The Cat from Outerspace".
--The book was better, IIRC. Been a long time since I read it tho
--5 years power on time? You're pushing it. zpool set autoexpand=on + autoreplace=on for your pool; zpool replace the drives one at a time with 1TB ( ~$61 WD RED ) or 2TB ( ~$79 SG ) NAS** drives before they fail, you can *easily double* (or more) your available disk space by buying them on Amazon these days.
** TLER FTW ;-)
--Seriously, ZFS online disk replacement is the easiest way I know of, no downtime and much better than trying to do hours of recovery if both happen to fail at once. It's worth it just for the peace of mind.
HTH :-)
--You what now? ;-)
--At work, we have 6x1080p network/environment monitors that can be linked with Synergy spanning software.
/ Amidoinitrite? :b
--Setup a ZFS+Linux+Samba server as a RAID10 network share drive, copy data to it, take a known-good snapshot. Do a zpool scrub afterward to make sure.
--Then implement a cron script that takes a rolling snapshot Mon-Sun. If you're feeling ambitious you can install the zfs-auto-snapshot package but you should really disable the "frequent" snapshots (every 15 minutes? who really needs that?) and possibly "hourly" snapshots since they will prevent your disks from going to sleep.
--As a bonus, you could also take rolling day-of-month (1-31) snapshots in the same script. Just destroy the existing snapshot name before taking another one.
(Disclaimer: I have done this and the concept appears fairly bulletproof, since ZFS snapshot directories are read-only.) Feel free to ask me for details or provide feedback...
--Call me when you can successfully compile the Linux kernel on this thing...
--I think you mean, you can hold the Left SHIFT key in during boot... ;-)
--Dunno about a barge pole, but I found you a nice 10-footer:
http://www.amazon.com/Breeze-H...
> 4. virtual desktops
--So far, this is the only "killer feature" that I have seen so far with Win10 (I upgraded my Win7 laptop in-place but have not used it in months since I found out about Win10 == spyware PLUS braindead break-your-apps anti-user garbage PLUS reboot-whenever-it-senses-$CRITICAL-THING--that-you're-right-in-the-middle-of)
( Aside - you like ST:TOS, you can't be all bad ;-) )
> 4. Most IT folks here after 40 HATE CHANGE. Read anything about systemD, WIndows 7 (pre 2014), or anything else? ;-) One of the reasons we "hate change" is more often than not, change BREAKS THINGS that we have been depending on for YEARS in some cases...
--LOL, u nailed it man
( This is a bug in Ubuntu 14.04 that I just started dealing with - note the lack of support and concern from Canonical over what is a very serious issue for sysadmins: )
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubu...
--Thanks, that was informative :-)