Computer question: Online Storage

[Kiwon]

With the exclusion of Web-based email, do you currently store your personal data (photos, financial and personal documents) online?

If so, why? As a backup to your computer's hard drive or just to save space?

Any security concerns?

[SkinBasket]

Physical storage is about as cheap as dirt and I know where it is and who has access to it. You can buy additional internal drives, USB drives, dual layer DVDs, blu ray discs, or just bust out the old tape drive. I don't see any reason why I would want to store anything - particularly anything personal or important - on a supposedly secure internet server. I could see where it would be useful if my house burned down, but then I'll have bigger worries than what electronic data I lost.

[Partial]

What happens when your local drive dies? Backing up on a redundant machine is a great idea.

[digitaldean]

I use Amazon S3 to back up periodically for my freelance work.

But I do NOT like the idea that Google has. They essentially want people to access a remote disk from anywhere (aka cloud computing). Thus negating the need for a computer hard drive. It sounds great at first glance, but any and all personal info you enter in is stored on Google's servers.

I like Google for all my searching tasks, but this REALLY wreaks of big brother. I'd just as soon have the computer in my own home/office and then if something goes wrong, I can deal with it on my own end. Google is just getting a little too pervasive, IMO.

Here's the article link if you want to glance through it:

http://tinyurl.com/d7d5lt

[Jimx29]

I have about 88gb upped at rapidshare

[Kiwon]

I have about 88gb upped at rapidshare

May I ask the reason why?

Backup for yourself or file sharing for family and friends? Both?

[Kiwon]

I use Amazon S3 to back up periodically for my freelance work.

What happens when you stop using their service?

What guarantees or safeguards are there that your intellectual property remains yours alone?

I'm obviously a novice. I'm just asking out of curiosity.

[SkinBasket]

What happens when your local drive dies?

You use one of the several back-up means I already listed that are safe, secure, easy-to-use, don't rely on your internet connection, and cheap.

And if you protect your machine from electrical surge with a $7 spike bar and don't have a poorly constructed hackintosh, the chances of HD failure are pretty slim.

[Partial]

What happens when your local drive dies?

You use one of the several back-up means I already listed that are safe, secure, easy-to-use, don't rely on your internet connection, and cheap.

And if you protect your machine from electrical surge with a $7 spike bar and don't have a poorly constructed hackintosh, the chances of HD failure are pretty slim.

Actually, if you read tech news, the chances of hard drive failure is pretty great. How big is the Seagate recall going on? Massive. Drives fail all the time. All media has a finite amount of read/writes to it. That's why organizing data before storing it is so crucial (thus, one of the reasons why new file systems are always coming out). Flash and optical have a very low number of read/writes before they fail. I've had countless hard drives get old and fade away over the past 10 years.

With that said, that is a really ignorant attitude. One lightning strike or car crash into an electrical pole and it's just a matter of chance whether you stuff gets fried or not. Having worked at best buy, I have heard some horror stories. Those 7 dollar bars as you claim don't do a whole lot.

With that said, I know that if Google or Amazon has my data, it's being professional maintained and backed-up. That's a much better option than even a simple redundant raid in my home.

[Zool]

What happens when your local drive dies?

You use one of the several back-up means I already listed that are safe, secure, easy-to-use, don't rely on your internet connection, and cheap.

And if you protect your machine from electrical surge with a $7 spike bar and don't have a poorly constructed hackintosh, the chances of HD failure are pretty slim.

Actually, if you read tech news, the chances of hard drive failure is pretty great. How big is the Seagate recall going on? Massive. Drives fail all the time. All media has a finite amount of read/writes to it. That's why organizing data before storing it is so crucial (thus, one of the reasons why new file systems are always coming out). Flash and optical have a very low number of read/writes before they fail. I've had countless hard drives get old and fade away over the past 10 years.

With that said, that is a really ignorant attitude. One lightning strike or car crash into an electrical pole and it's just a matter of chance whether you stuff gets fried or not. Having worked at best buy, I have heard some horror stories. Those 7 dollar bars as you claim don't do a whole lot.

With that said, I know that if Google or Amazon has my data, it's being professional maintained and backed-up. That's a much better option than even a simple redundant raid in my home.

Industry standard HD failure in the first 5 years of a drive is ~5%. WD almost went under when I worked there when they hit 15%. Its not nearly as bad as P makes it out to be, his Best Buy exp aside.

The power strip argument is trash however. That protects your power supply not your drive(s). Hard drives are designed to fail much like a car. They could produce ones that last twice as long, but it would cost 10 times as much to produce. If you're using a HD that is 3+ years old replace it. The bad sectors start stacking up over time and they only allot you so much for remapping. Once the remap area is full data starts going.

I personally replace my storage about once a year. Its so ridiculously cheap to buy 2 SATA3 drives now that its dumb not to if you have things you dont want to lose. Pretty much every motherboard worth a crap in the last 3-4 years has RAID 0 and 1 built right on.

Also buy a DVD burner for backup. 4g per disc.

[Partial]

5% is high. I'm surprised its that high even. I would have guessed closer to 1-2%. Right now Seagate is dealing with a MASSIVE recall over drive failure, probably higher than that as its an epidemic from what I'm reading.

DVD media is alright for short term backups, but one drop and its scratched, and they also don't last very long if you're reading them over and over.

Like Zbreazy said, go with a redundant set-up of some sort.

[SkinBasket]

With that said, that is a really ignorant attitude. One lightning strike or car crash into an electrical pole and it's just a matter of chance whether you stuff gets fried or not. Having worked at best buy, I have heard some horror stories. Those 7 dollar bars as you claim don't do a whole lot.

And if my stuff is fried, guess what?!?! I use one of the cheap on-site backup means I've mentioned twice now to restore what little data is actually irreplaceable on our system. A couple hundred text files, a few thousand jpegs, a bakers dozen gigs worth of video. I have no idea why you would be constantly reading your back-up media on such a regular basis that you would wear out the optical disc. I know I typically don't restore my emergency back-up data thousands of times.

Having worked at Best Buy, I know that listening to anything a guy working at Best Buy tells you is stupid. In most cases you're better off knowing nothing than knowing what Best Buy employees will tell you. Were you a good little company man and sold a lot of $100 Monster surge protectors with all your horror stories Partial?

I have to believe Zool's experience, since it's pretty first hand unless he's lying like he usually does. In my experience however, I maintained around 150 computers which were used for 12-18 hours a day 7 days a week for over 4 years. The only hard drive I had fail was an ancient 700MB drive some old bitty was using in the basement of a university building on a data entry machine.

One question Zool: Are you saying a surge will be stopped at the PSU? I was under the impression a surge would blow the PSU, then proceed through the rest of the machine however it wanted.

[Partial]

The PSU is going to fry and it will f the rest of the s up. I had a buddy who didn't put the mobo on risers, and he started it up on a metal case, and fried the psu, the mobo, and the drives connected. Oddly enough the video card was ok.

Skin, hell no would I sell that shit. I'm frugal, I don't believe in purchasing things like that or ripping people off. I'd sell the 20 dollar dynex power strips, and would have heard of probably 10 computers getting fried from power surge in my year at BB, and almost all had them hooked up to power strips.

Like Zool said, drives can only have read/write operations performed a finite amount of time.

It really just comes down to luck. If there's a hell of a lot of amperage coming down it's going to destroy the surge protector.

[SkinBasket]

I once fried a modem by installing it with a computer on. I kept getting this strange tingling shock-like feeling in my fingers as I was pushing it into the slot. Turns out that shock feeling was electricity and that they're serious when they tell you to power down your machine before installing components. I was just so excited to get that 14.4K modem in there and surf the web at blazing speeds - almost double the stock 9.6k, I couldn't help myself.

[Zool]

With that said, that is a really ignorant attitude. One lightning strike or car crash into an electrical pole and it's just a matter of chance whether you stuff gets fried or not. Having worked at best buy, I have heard some horror stories. Those 7 dollar bars as you claim don't do a whole lot.

And if my stuff is fried, guess what?!?! I use one of the cheap on-site backup means I've mentioned twice now to restore what little data is actually irreplaceable on our system. A couple hundred text files, a few thousand jpegs, a bakers dozen gigs worth of video. I have no idea why you would be constantly reading your back-up media on such a regular basis that you would wear out the optical disc. I know I typically don't restore my emergency back-up data thousands of times.

Having worked at Best Buy, I know that listening to anything a guy working at Best Buy tells you is stupid. In most cases you're better off knowing nothing than knowing what Best Buy employees will tell you. Were you a good little company man and sold a lot of $100 Monster surge protectors with all your horror stories Partial?

I have to believe Zool's experience, since it's pretty first hand unless he's lying like he usually does. In my experience however, I maintained around 150 computers which were used for 12-18 hours a day 7 days a week for over 4 years. The only hard drive I had fail was an ancient 700MB drive some old bitty was using in the basement of a university building on a data entry machine.

One question Zool: Are you saying a surge will be stopped at the PSU? I was under the impression a surge would blow the PSU, then proceed through the rest of the machine however it wanted.

That is an awesome string of good luck Skin. Your drive apocalypse is nigh.

Its rare for a HD to have an electrical failure from a surge or anything else. Modems, vid cards and NIC's are way more susceptible to power spikes. Hard drive failures are mechanical in nature. They have that motor spinning platters at 5400 or 7200 RPM with a servo head flying above platters at less than the height of a smoke particle. A genius design, but destined to fail over time.

Leaving your drives running actually prolongs their life. The hardest thing on the heads and motors is the startup sequence. The heads actually touch down onto the platters once the drive spins down. The fluid on the platters will make the heads stick if they are left off long enough. I've seen hundreds of heads that are ripped off the actuators on startup. Before WD I worked at IBM manufacturing and testing SCSI drives. More solidly built actuators on SCSI drives, but they also cost 2-3 times as much.

I guess maybe I'm jaded having worked in drives so long, but it really sucks when you have a drive go. I've seen some crazy shit that people do to their drives also. One guy was told to clean his drive before he sent it for replacement. Guy put it in a pot of boiling water, then left for the weekend. That was a hard drive briquette by the time he scraped if off the bottom of the pan. He was shocked when his RMA request was denied.

Backup your stuff people. Data recovery services can retrieve all of your data from a bad drive, but it will start at $1000.