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bob1029 a day ago

> the single best thing you can do to preserve your data is add redundancy.

The single best thing you can do to preserve the information is to put your data in the hands of a full time engineering team with redundant, on-call support whose sole purpose is to make sure that no bits are ever lost or flipped.

An ability to allocate even 40 hours a week to maintaining a highly durable DIY NAS solution doesn't even show up next to this. Any perception to the contrary is merely an ego trip. Control != durability. Do not conflate these things.

The problem with these extremely unlikely events is that it's really hard to reason about them because we don't have a lot of samples to draw from. My handful of personal samples tell me that lightning is the ultimate equalizer and that otherwise hard drives are mostly immortal. Clearly this is not an accurate depiction of the actual statistical distribution, but it's all I can come up with having N ~= 100. Backblaze and Amazon have owned way more hard drives than I can even imagine. They can get much closer to modeling actual reality.

I understand for certain classes of data (every anime show ever produced by Japan), you might not want to actually pay for the kind of durability guarantees that a big provider can offer. However, what about your other documents? Tax and legal forms? Are we comfortable storing this in the same way across 2 different residential sites?