Re: [SAGE] Long lived, cheap data storage

[Brad Knowles <brad@shub-internet.org>]

On 10/8/07, Sam Johnston wrote:

>  I agree completely that nothing is ever 100% perfect, but I think it's
>  fair to assume that loss of personal data or archives does not
>  typically result in loss of life (as do failures in the examples you
>  cite).

Loss of life, no.  But loss of mass quantities of irreplaceable 
personal data, yes.

>  People lose irreplaceable data every day because there is no
>  ubiquitous, cheap and transparent backup solution that is 'good
>  enough'; I would argue that archiving to S3 is 'good enough' for most
>  people and that the paranoid could supplement this with a more
>  traditional approach (like mailing a DVD back to the family).

We're talking terabytes, not just a few measly megabytes.  That's why 
network backup solutions will never work, and cannot possibly work, 
until and unless we get a *hell* of a lot more bandwidth available to 
us at much lower latency (due to the bandwidth/latency product nature 
of TCP/IP).

Mailing backup DVDs isn't going to work, either.  Backup Blu-Ray or 
HD-DVDs wouldn't cut it.  You'd have to mail entire backup drive 
arrays, because even a single 1TB drive wouldn't be enough.


I know a guy here locally in Austin that had his personal RAID array 
get blown away in a storm a while back.  Most of what was stored 
there was not copies of DVDs that he'd loaded, or video he'd 
downloaded from the 'net, it was mostly his personal video, pictures, 
and other data that he'd taken himself.  And due to the amount and 
size of the data he had, there was no other viable backup option 
available to him.

>  Here's hoping consumers' increasing storage needs will be better met
>  by the coming generations of technology (for example by seamlessly &
>  securely mirroring home directories to web based storage)...

Somehow, as long as the telecoms companies have a stranglehold on our 
bandwidth, this kind of thing simply cannot possibly happen.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad@shub-internet.org>
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>