[talk] Climate Mirror

[Isaac (.ike) Levy]

> On Dec 14, 2016, at 2:46 PM, Assaf Rutenberg <assaf at eml.cc> wrote:
> 
> 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. 
> 
> -assaf

That is spectacular.  If you already have the gear down there, I say just set it up and start siphoning down data sets!  Hit list if you hit snags…

Rocket-
.ike



> 
> On December 14, 2016 2:31:48 PM GMT-05:00, Pete Wright <pete at nomadlogic.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> On 12/14/16 11:28 AM, Isaac (.ike) Levy
> wrote:
> 
> 
>  On Dec 14, 2016,
> at 2:23 PM, Pete Wright <pete at nomadlogic.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> 
>  On 12/14/16 11:15 AM, Thomas Levine wrote:
>  The data don't
> need to be online; save them to a redundant bunch of
> 
>  cheap hard
> drives (or maybe tapes), and distribute them among lots of
> 
> 
> bookshelves. They can even be slow and small hard drives pulled from
> old
> 
>  computers; we need to write to each one only once, we might
> need to read
> 
>  from each one once, and we otherwise only need to
> turn them on once
> 
>  every couple years to
> make sure that they're still intact. Maintain a
> 
>  website with a
> list of the datasets, the datasets' checksums, and the
> 
>  contact
> information for the people with the hard drives on their
> 
> 
> bookshelves.
> 
> 
>  Note that this is my opinion only on how this
> project could be
> 
>  implemented. I don't know enough about the
> datasets or the likely
> 
>  effects of geopolitics on their
> implementation in order to comment as to
> 
>  whether I think the
> project should be implemented.
> 
> 
> 
>  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.
> 
> 
>  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.
> 
> 
>  Hrm.  You may have put the silver bullet in my previous post.
> 
>  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?
> 
>  I mean, one crappy way to test this is to just do it and wait a year :P
> 
> tbh - i'd be most concerned about mechanical issues on magnetic HDD's.
> 
> Unlike a tape where I can physically forward the tape to a new sector if 
> I run into a problem (something i've had to do!) I have seen my fair 
> share of drives sit idle for a period of time only to refuse to spin-up 
> when i tried to revive/recycle them.
> 
> -p
> 
> 
> -- 
> Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.