I work in a niche inside a niche. I deal with terabytes of storage, massive servers, a variety of storage tech, and I’ve been in interested in computers in general for… Around 40 years. (Yeah, I’m old.)
I have my own single person company and have worked in 40+ US states, done assignments in the UK, Norway.
AMA.
Do you see a movement for more works in the public domain? Many museums and NASA are sharing much of their collections, but media at large does not have reliable repositories for many , even niche, important works.
Again, that’s a little outside my realm of expertise, because I’m archiving digital records for companies and organizations – so there’s no question about ownership or copyright, it’s about legal and regulatory compliance (how long you’re allowed to keep a document, etc.).
Personally speaking, I profoundly dislike the idea that works are protected for longer than a human lifetime. It’s hard for society and technology to progress if ideas are locked up by copyright, patents, trademarks, and other intellectual property laws. There are patents that have been registered for which no product has been created for decades – preventing someone from trying to make an idea a tangible thing, and that’s dumb.
If you make a hit song, and you profit from 10 or 20 years of popularity, shouldn’t that be enough? Shouldn’t we encourage people to do more than coast for 20 years on one idea? Shouldn’t the public benefit from that work falling into the public domain? Anyway, we’re way off topic here. :)
What are your feelings on tape backups?
Most people in the industries I’ve worked in (mainly SMB, MSP… Sysadnin roles), seem to think that tape is an archaic method of doing backups, and anyone using tape is living in the past.
Additionally, for archival/backup software, what’s the go to for you? Both paid and Foss, if you have options for both, I’d like to hear it. What makes it the go to software?
Thanks.
Tape is awesome. Relatively inexpensive at scale, huge storage volumes, consumes almost no power compared to what it stores. But it has its time and place. That place is archival and long-term offsite backups that are very infrequently accessed. People aren’t using it for what it’s best at doing.
The backup/archive software I use for work is enterprise grade - Tivoli Storage Manager a.k.a. Spectrum Protect. In my office, I use Time Machine on the Macs, and simply ‘tar’ on Linux to back up specific important directories. Windows machines are backed up by their owners with various tools that I don’t tend to concern myself with.
For the enterprise stuff, what makes it great is that it gives you a huge amount of control and flexibility and storage options. I love the idea of TSM/SP’s ‘incremental forever’ backup methodology. It means you can roll back to any backup at any point in time, as long as you’re storing enough historical versions of the files. The device support is also amazing, and I’ve built systems that can scale to be petabytes large with it.
For my office, I just use what I know is built in and reliable. I know every Linux system has tar, and every Mac has Time Machine. For my NAS device, I make copies of it with rsync to a USB-SATA enclosure with 5 drives, usually every 90 days or so, less if I’ve made a lot of changes.
In your opinion what would be the best archival format for storing photos and videos of the family. Without relying on a ZFS server running for 20 plus years, but a “hard” copy like Blueray M etc
So no suggestions? dealing with data yourself you must have your own best storage go to? no?
Honestly, I’m “storage agnostic” – in my office I have Hard drives, SSDs, NAS, servers with various types of RAID, Linux boxes with disks in LVM, magneto optical platters, and various tapes.
It’s less about the media and more about the process. As I described elsewhere, I have a large NAS, an onsite copy, and an offsite copy on tapes. It’s the process of keeping offsite copies, regularly updating them, and verifying the copies that protects me, not some sticker on a box that says “100 YEAR STORAGE LIFE” from a company that might not exist next month.
What kind of upcoming tech do you see coming out in the next little while that could make a big difference in your field?
The migration to cloud is a big deal. Learning about cloud storage is straightforward, but there’s a huge number of new services offerings that don’t nearly fit into the way the existing tech was built 25+ years ago. I’m “scaroused” at the idea of having to learn how all this works.
My organization is moving a bunch of on prem stuff to the cloud over the next few years and its been interesting to see how things are changing, Azure has a TON of features but is overwhelming when I look at my deployment now and where I want to get to in the future. But I will get there, one piece at a time.
Yeah, given that the software I specialize in is proprietary and built on a very limited number of supported configs (OS / DB / Storage Management) it’s unlikely to be affected by so many cloud changes, but I can see how it might enable a HUGE number of competitors to build something similar just by clicking together cloud services like a box of lego blocks.
Can you get in touch with me? I work in archives, in IT, and have a nasty situation I’m looking for advice on from someone with experience in exactly this. Can we dm? Not sure how that works here.
Sadly, no… My niche is so very, very small that it’s unlikely I can help your specific situation. It’s also a self-preservation thing – giving professional advice for free without contracts in place is a liability issue.