“Among new NAS buyers, and perhaps even older users too, RAID is one of the most misunderstood aspects of network storage. In a multi-drive setup, you have RAID in place, so you are covered in case one of the drives dies. That’s the promise RAID sells, and it delivers on that very specific promise as well. The problem starts when you expect it to do more than it’s supposed to. It is not a safety net for everything. The sooner we realise that, the better it will be. If you wait until the last moment or until an incident occurs, it will be too late to correct course. While RAID may be good for one thing, it just cannot protect you from many of the things that actually cause data loss in the real world. Here are some examples.”

An article well worth reading before diving into buying a RAID setup, especially as a RAID setup often costs lot more money than two three drives doing rsync backups.

A RAID is good for real-time redundancy. If a drive fails, the other/s carry on going without issues. You can replace that failed drive, and just rebuild the RAID. But RAID drives also all work hard as they are all constantly being written to.

There is something to be said for having a second drive, and just doing a daily rsync backup to that drive. That second drive only needs to spin up once a day to receive updated or new files, and delete removed files. This not only extends that drive’s life, but you can restore any mistakenly deleted files too. When your primary drive fails (anything up top around 5 or 6 years) you can actually use the backup drive as the primary drive. It just takes a bit more configuration effort to point to it (but that could be about 5 minutes of effort). I’ve had to do this once, so I know it is fully possible.

See xda-developers.com/raid-is-not…
#Blog, #backups, #RAID, #selfhosting, #technology

There's one subject I haven't seen photographers talk about

The subject of photo archive management
It's not as easy as you may think.

Many people, especially in this last decade, grab an Android, grab a toy camera, as I call the small yet much handier cameras from camera brands like Fuji Nikon and Canon then point at the scene, often don't even know what the difference is between proper lighting and inverse lighting, then shoot their photograph.

Most end users don't even realize that they need an infrastructure to properly archive their photographs whatever the quality maybe.

The last time I lost data was in the floppy disk years; after that I never lost anything I archived on magnetic 🧲 media.
That case was a dirty read write head on a floppy drive which scratched my master and my backup disc on surface one.

I mitigated that error by using two floppy drives. One FDD specifically for the master disc after I cleaned the heads, one drive specifically for the backup disc after I cleaned those heads.

In the harddisk era I never lost any data. I use tried and tested procedures which are documented in request for comments RFC. You will find many, just search for them. Even those using tar -cvfz are good

At a certain point in time I switched from film to DSLR. The question was immediate
With my negatives I print what I need and since film 🎥 lasts {almost} forever I had no backup issues since everything was analog.

My digital DSLR body comes with two SD card slots. 8 GB per slot giving me 16 GB of storage. I usually shoot one card full then go to the other. I use my analog method of shooting only proper scenes. I don't use the camera as a machine gun and then sort out through all the mess which photographs are fair. Quality above quantity. I have a couple of hard drives where i stored the backups and the data Is never Lost. Sounds easy right?

When another DSLR or Point & Shoot body comes in the mix you know need to manage the backups of two devices. Another point and shoot comes in the mix and another DSLR comes in the mix.
Backing up all these devices to the hard drives that I use is risky if one drive fails. The file system I use is EXT4 a tried and tested stable file system.

I mitigated that problem by doubling the amount of hard drives. Now the amount of hard drives start to grow in such a manner that they do not fit in one case anymore. That means another machine had to be built to spread the amount of hard drives. There are significant costs, you need a motherboard a processor, memory, video output, a power supply, another case and you need to pay for electricity to power the new system.

You're starting to see the pattern and the risks involved when you don't want to lose data. When Android phones started to come in the mix it became really interesting.

You can use your Google account to store the images but you'll soon realize that even though they seem to give you a lot of space photographs fill it up exponentially fast.

Also you're storing it on somebody else's computer, who will abuse your data.

There has never been, there shall never be any cloud.

Soon you're faced with the fact that you need a network attached storage system NAS, where you can add drives and still use at the most two or three of those systems to manage your photographic data.

Without realizing it you've become a librarian, without the proper training and study which takes about 2 years!

If you have the computing & Database experience like me, it is easy to set up a plan to do proper archival storage.

The proper plan can include ZFS as a file system, which you will run natively in freeBSD or any other flavor. You can also choose HAMMER2 as your file system running in DragonFlyBSD, which has a very light footprint and a massive robustness built in, just like ZFS

For most people the financial factor will be a bottleneck, when you need to manage eight to twelve to even twenty-four camera devices, when you have stored photographs digitally for decades, starting from the beginning of DSLR camera bodies.

^Z

#OpenSource #Photography #DSLR #SLR #camera #storage #technology #tar #tape #HDD #SSD #EXT4 #ZFS #HAMMER2 #RAID

💥 WD SMR 硬碟重大缺陷曝光！NAS RAID 重建災難、性能暴跌、集體訴訟全面解析 💥
2020 年，Western Digital（WD）因在 WD Red NAS 硬碟 中悄悄採用 SMR（疊瓦式磁記錄） 技術，卻未明確告知消費者，導致大規模使用者資料損毀、RAID 重建失敗的災難。

📉 根據專業媒體 ServeTheHome 實測：

RAID 重建時間：SMR 高達 120 小時以上（CMR 約 24 小時）

隨機寫入性能：SMR 僅 0.3 MB/s，比 CMR 慢 75%+

這些問題讓 NAS 用戶面臨 性能崩潰、重建失敗與資料遺失 的嚴重風險。
📄 詳細解析（含法院文件與實測數據）：
👉 WD SMR 硬碟嚴重缺陷導致集體訴訟：NAS 性能災難與 RAID 重建失敗完全解析
2025.data-recover.com.tw/news/…
⚠️ 請大家馬上檢查自己的 NAS 或桌上型硬碟！
如果你使用 WD Red、WD Blue、或同型號 SMR 機種，請立即備份資料 ⚡預防資料遺失才是最好的防禦！

#WD #WesternDigital #SMR #CMR #NAS #RAID #DataLoss #Storage #Backup #TechNews#WD硬碟 #SMR問題 #NAS災難 #資料備份 #集體訴訟 #資料救援 #硬碟警報 #備份很重要#データ損失 #WD #ハードディスク #SMR問題 #NASトラブル #RAID再構築失敗 #バックアップ #注意喚起#Fediverse #Misskey #Mastodon #ActivityPub #Tech #StorageAlert #DataRecovery #news