Didn't know the 3 person rule was that recent, but they can always spread it across multiple years. Like Heisenberg, Dirac, and Schrödinger all got it for pretty much the same thing (inventing quantum mechanics) but in 1932 (Heisenberg) and 1933 (the other two). They could have gotten 6 people into the 2 years if it came to that. They also sometimes come up with reasons to give someone the prize. Like Einstein was world famous for relativity theory, but for some reason they didn't want to award the prize for that, so they gave it to him for his less famous work on the photoelectric effect.
The $/TiB storage cost currently creates weird choices in backup media... even making some older media formats economical again. Just finished a consumer storage option survey yesterday.
Even if you account for consumer drive+spare cost, a 8TB HDD is still the best JBOD option. For under several dozen 25GB projects, the BD-R disc drive is currently the cheapest media backup option (about 35% cheaper than HDD above 12TiB). Note 50G and 100G BD EOL media are actually equal to or a worse deal than HDD.
Also, HPE LTO9 18GB Tapes are currently around 5 to 15 times cheaper than HDD and SSD in terms of data storage cost, but the fixed cost of tape auto-loaders and drives don't always make sense until you have a significant amount of backup data. Tapes may also create a single point of failure in use... so incremental backups are a non-zero risk, and triple redundant hardware is required (old hardware gets hard to find.)
The classic joke is still true: "Fast, cheap, or good.. choose any two..."
I looked in to the bluray thing and concluded it just doesn't make sense at any level. You have to buy a bluray writer which will become increasingly rare, and then you are limited to 25GB disks where you have to factor in a chunk of that will go unused as each project won't fit on exactly 25gb.
For the effort you are expending, just getting a hard drive makes way more sense even if the $/gb is technically a little worse. The utility of hard drives is much better.
Blu-ray, or any non-rewritable optical media, guarantees that it hasn't been tampered with. If I were attacked by malware, I like the confidence that the Blu-ray backup is absolutely guaranteed to be the same as on the date it was written. A hard disk used for backup might have been reattached to the network at some point after the initial backup and gotten infected/corrupted/altered.
> Blu-ray, or any non-rewritable optical media, guarantees that it hasn't been tampered with.
In terms of external tampering, I think that need is better-served by encrypting everything, which you probably want to do anyway. Or at least using some sort of checksum signed by a key.
However if the focus is "what if the backup process is compromised", then yes, having some date which is beyond its writing-reach may be useful. Another aspect of this might be a remote-backup system where one set of credential is enough for daily backups and restore, while another is needed in order to access a set of older duplicates that are remotely maintained as ransomware-protection.
That depends on your threat model. If the attacker can swap the Blu-ray disc to a similar looking one, but with content they control, that absolute guarantee becomes moot.
>I looked in to the bluray thing and concluded it just doesn't make sense at any level.
I mostly agree, but the 25GB M-Disc EOL media format is fairly interesting for archival purposes. The gamble actually made sense in this rare instance as each active project folder still fit on one disc, and the $120USD omnidrive firmware drives should keep the retro-equipment running for a few more years. These are relatively inexpensive even with a spare unit in the box.
>just getting a hard drive makes way more sense
In many cases this can be true, but the 3 years of HDD flight time compared to the 7+ year SSD wear life is also fairly close. It is weird, but the cost of higher capacity 18TB/24TB HDD also no longer make sense for JBOD either... unless you are hitting rack space constraints. =3
Depending on the amount of data you have, might it not be less expensive than build the tape drive?
An LTO drive is easily $10.000. You can restore a lot of S3 data for that amount of money. Sadly getting cheaper tape options is not really possible anymore.
It isn't too expensive for my use case – per month, I retrieve about 500GB a month from Glacier Instant Retrieval to verify, which costs ~$15. Combined with other costs, my monthly bill is ~$50.
I used to use Backblaze B2, which had cheaper egress at the cost of slightly more expensive storage (I think ~$5/TB/mo, with free egress up to 3x all current storage?) So I paid $20. But at some point AWS opened a datacenter near me, and I couldn't ignore how much faster data transfers got.
AWS is an option up to 30TiB, but also feeds into the over-provisioned data-center market pressures. The recent "rclone --gui" solution does bestow rsync/sshfs like features for Windows users now, and remote mounts are easier/cleaner to bring up. =3
Just bought an LTO drive yesterday (after failing to cool its predecessor properly - dont be like me). They got more expensive more or less in line with HDDs :(
Used Tape drives often had the write heads service hours go well past its recommended limits. Mission critical IT systems don't get "upgraded" off schedule very often. ymmv
Anecdotally, I have seen Tape sets fail in production settings, as a remote office location admin was doing incremental backups... and the sick tape drive kept silently damaging each daily roll-back attempt. They may fail ungracefully in an archival context.
I do not deny a janky BD-R drive option is situation specific, but for small projects I am fine with a 25GB disc $25.80/TiB solution with the occasional big file $62.42/TiB hit for 100G/128G EOL discs.
HDD are less hassle, still hit below $34.63/TiB, and last a few years. Not a bad fall back option if you still have old inventory. =3
I worked for a small manufacturing company some years back, and depending on what you're doing it's easy to rack up some huge file storage usage and big databases without being in the business of video, photography or music. The database that only ran our manufacturing, not inclusive of HR, accounting, etc., was about 1TB. The design files that went to the plant (most of which were just text, you could open them with Notepad) were another 3 or 4 TB worth. Maybe another 1TB or so for various collateral bits of data related to jobs, mostly PDFs.
The company has, I'm sure, probably tripled all that by now. In their case it compressed really well, but still.
I mentioned org-publish late in the post, I do have my own personal blog built atop of it (and nix as well), this current setup with Gleam is more like an experiment and I get a lot of stuff for free that took me a while to get it working in my personal blog (like syntax highlighting, rss, etc), and I'd still argue that my templating system in pure elisp + crappy html sucks.
This is a pretty interesting article. Firefox shows the first paragraph for a second and then blanks it, but lynx -dump manages to get the text. There's an audio too but I ignored that.
I don't feel likely to get much out of typing (+ 2 2) and getting 4 in a web REPL. What I want is a 1-page writeup with basics about the implementation: Lisp dialect, implementation strategy, special features and limitations, how the concurrency works, resource requirements, source code SLOC, stuff like that. It's ok for the writeup to assume I'm familiar with Lisp. I looked at the web site for a few seconds and the home page was almost entirely uninformative. I didn't try reading the documentation but might look at it later.
The home page of ulisp.com isn't exactly what I want either, but it's a lot closer.
I expect typical smart cards like the one in your credit card are harder to crack than the raspberry pi was. Those cards are (or were) also used in TV set-top boxes and back in the day, there was a decades-long arms race between the chip makers and cable TV pirates. The TV pirates were also willing to make large expenditures to crack the chips so they could clone them and sell the clones. There's more about this in Ross Anderson's book "Security Engineering".
I've also heard that the Google Titan security enclave chip (used in Pixel phones) is very hard to crack. Apple has something similar for Iphones, I believe.
A Yubikey is basically a single chip and a bunch of plastic. At their $50 price point, there's plenty of room for some chip manufacturer to skim off a couple of dollars per chip to add an additional metal layer for a tamper protection mesh, and some other gizmos.
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