<html><head></head><body>As far as maintaining a non US mirror or storage space, i am in the midst of moving to Ecuador and can reliably maintain a NAS/Server down there, albeit with the slower connections afforded in South America, if someone can help me set one up. I think i even have a box of 4TB drives packed away that i could use. I'll be back in the States early in January for a month or two and will make it to the next nyc-bug meetup to see if there is any way i can be of help. <br>
<br>
-assaf<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On December 14, 2016 2:31:48 PM GMT-05:00, Pete Wright <pete@nomadlogic.org> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<pre class="k9mail"><br /><br />On 12/14/16 11:28 AM, Isaac (.ike) Levy
wrote:<br /><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 1ex
0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid #729fcf; padding-left: 1ex;"><br
/><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex;
border-left: 1px solid #ad7fa8; padding-left: 1ex;"> On Dec 14, 2016,
at 2:23 PM, Pete Wright <pete@nomadlogic.org> wrote:<br /><br
/><br /><br /> On 12/14/16 11:15 AM, Thomas Levine wrote:<br
/><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex;
border-left: 1px solid #8ae234; padding-left: 1ex;"> The data don't
need to be online; save them to a redundant bunch of<br /> cheap hard
drives (or maybe tapes), and distribute them among lots of<br />
bookshelves. They can even be slow and small hard drives pulled from
old<br /> computers; we need to write to each one only once, we might
need to read<br /> from each one once, and we otherwise only need to
turn them on once<br /> every couple years to
make sure that they're still intact. Maintain a<br /> website with a
list of the datasets, the datasets' checksums, and the<br /> contact
information for the people with the hard drives on their<br />
bookshelves.<br /><br /> Note that this is my opinion only on how this
project could be<br /> implemented. I don't know enough about the
datasets or the likely<br /> effects of geopolitics on their
implementation in order to comment as to<br /> whether I think the
project should be implemented.</blockquote><br /><br /> not to nit-pick
but i would strongly recommend *against* using HDD's in this manner
(magnetic spinning ones, or SSD ones). Drives are not designed to
reliably store data cold like this mechanically or electrically. This
is why tapes are still in use to this day - they *are* designed for
cold store. And if you do hit a bad sector it is quite possible to
skip that sector and continue reading data.<br /><br /> This is coming
from quite a bit first-hand experience where
I've lost data-sets which were in cold-storage on HDD's for about a year that were totally lost, versus data on tapes which were in cold-store for around 5-7years where we had few problems recovering our assets.<br /></blockquote><br /> Hrm. You may have put the silver bullet in my previous post.<br /><br /> Pete: any thoughts on mitigating this effect by using ZFS mirrors? Perhaps even increasing the block mirror count across disks, so even on one of the mirrored disks there are 2 mirrored blocks?<br /><br /> I mean, one crappy way to test this is to just do it and wait a year :P<br /></blockquote><br />tbh - i'd be most concerned about mechanical issues on magnetic HDD's.<br /><br />Unlike a tape where I can physically forward the tape to a new sector if <br />I run into a problem (something i've had to do!) I have seen my fair <br />share of drives sit idle for a period of time only to refuse to spin-up <br />when i tried to revive/recycle them.<br /><br />-p<br /><br
/></pre></blockquote></div><br>
-- <br>
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.</body></html>