I have a 2 bay NAS, and I was planning on using 2x 18tb HDDs in raid 1. I was planning on purchasing 3 of these drives so when one fails I have the replacement. (I am aware that you should purchase at different times to reduce risk of them all failing at the same time)

Then I setup restic.

It makes backups so easy that I am wondering if I should even bother with raid.

Currently I have ~1TB of backups, and with restics snapshots, it won’t grow to be that big anyways.

Either way, I will be storing the backups in aws S3. So is it still worth it to use raid? (I also will be storing backups at my parents)

  • Andres Salomon@social.ridetrans.it
    1·
    24 days ago

    @Atemu @beastlykings Every few decades seems optimistic. I have an archive of photos/videos from cameras and phones spanning from early 2000s to mid-2010s. There’s not a lot, maybe 6gb; a few thousand files. At some point around the end of that time period, I noticed corruption in some random photos.

    Likewise, I have a (3tb) flac archive, which is about 15-20 years old. Nightly ‘flac -t’ checks are done on 1/60th of the archive, essentially a scrub. Bitrot has struck a dozen times so far.

    • Atemu@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      14 days ago

      Interesting. I suspect you must either have had really bad luck or be using faulty hardware.

      In my broad summarising estimate, I only accounted for relatively modern disks like something made in the past 5 years or so. Drives from the 2000s or early 2010s could be significantly worse and I wouldn’t be surprised. It sounds like to me your experience was with drives that are well over a decade old at this point.

      • Andres Salomon@social.ridetrans.it
        1·
        14 days ago

        @Atemu Well yes, this is experience of self-hosting for close to 25 years, with a mix of drives over those years. I have noticed much better quality drives in the past decade (helium hdds running cooler/longer, nvram, etc) with declining failure rates and less corruption.

        But especially if you’re talking about longer time scales like that (“every few decades”), it’s difficult to account for technology changes.

        • Andres Salomon@social.ridetrans.it
          1·
          14 days ago

          @Atemu Drives from the mid/late-2000s in particular were just poorly behaved for me. Recent drives (2014+) have been much better. Who knows how 2030s drives will behave? So I will continue scrubbing data as I swap out older drives for newer ones.

          • Atemu@lemmy.mlEnglish
            1·
            13 days ago

            Oh absolutely; I would never advocate against verifying your data’s integrity.