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Comment on Syncthing Backup w Raspberry Pi

I agree with everything except the offsite, offline, external drive.

In my experience, cold drives fail more often than live drives, and you get no warning when this happens.

Drives weren’t engineered to be offline but to be powered on continuously. Things like lubricants in the spindle, but especially the read heads pivot were designed around this. How anybody us have heard the click of death - that’s the read head having issues moving.

Plus external drives have heat dissipation problems. They’re good for short, intermittent reads, but when initially copying data to them they can get quite hot. I regularly recover and rebuild drives for family and friends and have registered these things at 120° F+, so I keep an old case fan on them during recovery.

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IronKrill@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
So no one else has to look it up, 120°F is 49°C

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fizzle@quokk.au ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Hmm. An interesting point and a good consideration - maybe a reason not to make this recommendation to others. In my own case I’m not concerned.

I’m using 1tb SSDs. They’re pretty cheap now. I don’t think they suffer from any of the problems you’ve described?

I couldn’t find any information about longevity offline vs online. In daily use SSDs do seem to be more reliable than HDDs, particularly as they get older.

The other thing is my strategy is something like 4-3-2, so the offline is an additional final hail mary. The chances that I would require it and it would have failed in the month or so since I updated it are infinitessimal.

Finally there are practical considerations. My offline copy resides in a physical safe in our house, and is unencrypted. If I were to die suddenly, this would be the most accessible copy of important documents, family photos, et cetera.

It’s not a perfect system but it’s “pretty good” and I’m hoping I don’t die suddenly so there’s that LOL.

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