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Originally Posted by Quoth
Leave it connected and it's vulnerable to wearing out, lightning, malware and system failures. I did recover a HDD once where PSU failed and bits physically blew of most chips. I had a same model with too many errors and working PCB, but that won't work with all drives.
An off-line HDD can easily last 50 years. But the issue is that the interface can become unavailable. SATA-IDE adaptors seem to work, SCSI cards still exist, though cable adaptors may be required. But I've had HDD that look like IDE and are not. Also good luck trying to read IBM XT HDD (MFM dual ribbons). So from time to time you need newer media with newer interfaces while you can still read the old media.
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Yep, though for now USB is looking pretty good, and these days is more than fast enough (heck, even USB2 is often fast enough if the backup program compresses and deduplicates well enough). We just have to hope they don't change the connector yet again.
Of course you have *some* backup devices that are disconnected at any given time, but that doesn't mean you have to have them all disconnected at any point. My current backup scheme involves one always-connected drive which gets all backups (3-hourly homedirs, daily everything-but-big-stuff, weekly everything) and one which only gets the weekly backups, which is periodically swapped out for an offsite drive. If the machine is hit by lightning or ransomware wipes all attached block devices I lose the machine and two of the backup drives, but the offsite drive preserves everything since the last swap: so I lose some data, but only a month or so. That's bad, but not awful. I lose a month or two of data out of decades of it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
You can't keep helium in or out. The 200 years is probably a lie. Old CRTs even get poisoned by helium because with vacuum inside and 1 atmosphere outside it alone of all gasses seeps through the glass.
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Wow! There's almost no helium in the atmosphere, so I'm surprised that's ever an issue except in areas where helium is in use for other reasons.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
Well, how time delayed is the Ransomware? The clever stuff encrypts the backup and decrypts it when you restore on the same machine, till it goes off.
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In the general case you're right, but in mine, it's quite unlikely! Unless it got onto my machines ten years ago (and somehow survived undetected all that time), the old backups preserve uninfected state: bup is damn good at deduplication and I haven't yet had to throw any old backups away. I suppose it's *barely* possible it's smart enough to rewrite all the backups and infect them too (it would take days, minimum, since this is based on git so changing old content involves changing a *lot* of other stuff in the Merkle tree to compensate, but the drive is always connected so it's *possible*).
But if this hypothetical ransomware can do that it must have been updated to cope with changes in bup over time as well, in which case it was almost certainly written by one of three people (and since those are also the people who write bup I'm in real trouble! I mean they don't even need ransomware, their code runs as root on my machine every three hours in any case.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
You can't have a true disaster recovery plan without at least one spare PC offsite anyway.
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Why would it need to be offsite? Are you postulating some sort of viral ransomware which infects everything on the local net now?