hey it's that time again.
do you have data? that you like? is it backed up? do you have automatic backups you've checked are actually happening?
in multiple locations?
have you done a test restore to make sure the backups work?
*even an extra copy on a flash drive is better than no backups*
@bob_zim there was no intent behind it perhaps but i can't help but think about how much data vital to computing history was recovered just because someone found a shoebox full of hard drives
if someone finds a box of m2 drives in 40 years they will just be unreadable e-waste
like if you chart the amount of "unintentionally preserved history" over time it will just plummet in a corresponding line to the adoption of flash storage.
that's kind of sad :(
@gloriouscow Most current hard drives will also be bricks over that time span. And most tapes. Outliers will exist, but that’s survivorship bias.
I think the prevalence of encryption is also likely to reduce the recoverable data from today.
the miniscribe hard drive in this IBM 5170 I bought spun right up and I was able to read this guy's creepy letters about his ex wife.
actually this is not a good argument for data preservation i'm sorry
@dalias @gloriouscow Even tapes don’t survive well unattended. The base gets brittle over time and fails. They last better than flash or spinning drives, but not *that much* better. I’ve been asked to digitize 30-year-old VHS and reel-to-reel tapes which just crumbled when I tried to examine them.
Long-term data preservation takes active work. If you want something to last decades, you need to build it to be fault-tolerant, you need to test it regularly to catch failures before they exceed the fault tolerance, and you need to fix the failures.
@dalias @gloriouscow SSDs stored in a controlled climate will generally also also retain data for decades. My point is the data loss concern for unattended flash is overblown (much like concern about flash wear), and other media types are also risky to leave unattended.
Basically anything but burnable optical media will last at least two years stored in a climate which doesn’t kill people. Store it with climate control, and it’ll last a decade, maybe two. Tape might last twice as long as an SSD, but it won’t reliably make it to the next bracket up.
@gloriouscow It's still, what? Like plug it in every ten years or so for a few minutes?
I see a lot of fear mongering, but flash RAM doesn't degrade as quickly or as easily as people seem to think. It's not infinite by any means, but it really does take a lot longer to degrade than the claims going around much of the Internet.
Nothing is infinite. Magnetic drives lose magnetism over time and capacitors and such in each can degrade. Optical discs make claims of 100 years for good ones, 300 for super archive discs, but they need to be burned at a low speed in a high quality burner and stored very well. In 100+ years will they be able to read an optical disc though? (I mean, presumably whatever tech people have could adapt to it, but will people have it in their homes? Probably not.)
if you are put together enough and organized enough to have some sort of yearly flash-device-powering holiday (that implies you can even find what boxes they are all in) then I salute you on being someone who's brain I would basically find incomprehensible
@gloriouscow I didn't say yearly. It takes a whole heck of a lot longer than a year... That's my point. I forget how often you need to do it, but it's crazy high. Like five years to be super safe, probably 10+ to be realistic.
A couple of months ago I dug a MP3 player out that I last used in something like 2012, just before I switched to a smartphone instead. The old full sized SD flash card in it still was 100% readable with zero errors as was the internal flash (including its firmware of course.)
(As a side note, fun fact, but somehow the battery wasn't wrecked despite being below a safe voltage for who knows how many years... It's probably like 60% of what it once was, but it still holds a decent charge. Not bad for a player I bought in something like 2008...)
for some reason i find your singular anecdote completely convincing and retract all my arguments
@gloriouscow Then look up the whitesheets and etc if you like... I don't see what the rudeness has achieved.
All I'm saying is that it does last longer than just a few years as people seem to have gotten the idea and fearmongering that flash media is doomed to die horribly and quickly won't help anyone. As the OP says, a flash backup is better than no backup.
nobody is fearmongering, i'm making a point about decades, you're talking years. we're talking past each other, i'm just noticing it and choosing not to continue
so your solution is that everyone on earth keep track of every single flash device and power it on once a decade and this somehow makes my original statement worth objecting to
@gloriouscow You're seriously throwing a lot of hyperbole in there. My solution is "that drive with some important backups in the fire safe should be plugged in for a few minutes once in a while." That is not complicated.
My objection is to the claim that flash drives are useless for storage beyond a few years. I won't claim they'll last 100+ years. I will claim they'll last long enough to do really basic backup tasks. Enough so that someone shouldn't just give up on having backups because the Internet as a whole has been passing around claims that flash drives die really fast in storage but they don't have any M-discs handy.
man all i said was that they aren't long term storage. this does not need to be a whole thing
i am going to go solder some pins to some stuff and then probably post pictures about it
@nazokiyoubinbou @gloriouscow Mostly agreed, but simply powering an SSD doesn’t help for the majority of devices. They’re not refreshed like DRAM. Instead, SSDs made since roughly the advent of wear leveling store data with some error correction data. As blocks are read, the controller measures how much of the error correction capacity is used to clean them up. Above a certain threshold, the data is rewritten (probably to a different page, as decided by wear leveling).
*Some* SSDs have a sort of patrol scrub which reads the whole drive in the background over the span of a few days. Most don’t do this.
@freya @NanoRaptor i have on my personal pc ~500GB i chose that only 10GB of which are backed up with an exclude pattern: games, films, downloads or logs.
Look up if there is more important stuff in there and treat it with more special care 
@NanoRaptor I've got a daily backup to a USB external drive, a weekly backup to a NAS, a monthly-ish backup to a second external drive that's disconnected and stored in a more secure corner of the house when not being written to, and a once or twice a year backup to *another* external drive that I store at the house of a relative who lives in a different town. Plus another two full copies of my system on external drives intended less as a backup and more as a way of having the ability to get at anything I could possibly need while on my laptop, and another 2-3 portable SSDs with select items.
It's actually kind of a problem...
@NanoRaptor I actually have not!
...but during my university days I worked part-time in the wing of the IT department that offered tech support to students, and that campus was rough on laptop hard drives.
@lusrangifer Oh that's grand then!
I lost everything in 2000, and only got it (mostly) back more than a decade later.
Still have The Fear!
@NanoRaptor Answering my own question now that I understand the topic a bit better: The closest number to what I had in mind is UBER, Uncorrectable Bit Error Rate and for most modern HDDs and SSD is somewhere between 10^-13 and 10^-16. In practice the actual Raw Bit Error Rate on operations can be as low as 1/1000, but SSDs use a bunch of Error Correction Codes to validate and fix data as they read it, so you end up with the UBER number.
As a fun extra. the question as posed is kinda invalid: SSD longevity, even under ideal circumstances is heavily reliant on the load of read/write operations, so basically the amount of ops translates to SSD age, unlike HDDs.
Refs used:
* Data Longevity and Compatibility
* Data Retention in MLC NAND Flash Memory: Characterization, Optimization, and Recovery
https://web.ece.ucsb.edu/~parhami/pubs_folder/parh19f-ebdt-data-longevity-compatib.pdf
https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~omutlu/pub/flash-memory-data-retention_hpca15.pdf
This and other things about SSDs here: https://www.alkoclick.space/things-i-learned-about-ssds
These are the correct questions in a nutshell.
@NanoRaptor I store all my critical data* in the Fediverse!
*cat memes
Four mirrored RAID arrays, everything copied to an internal disk, an external USB drive, and a NAS, plus cloud backup. Yes, I'm paranoid. 😆
@NanoRaptor Glad when I switched the last bastion of Windows, my home desktop, to Fedora recently, I did so while doing a storage upgrade/expansion.
Installing Fedora on #ZFS was a challenge, but thanks to ZFSBootMenu it worked after figuring stuff out, and thanks to syncoid/sanoid I now have incremental and full backups that get synced daily.
Still have to find a solution for offsite part of the 3-2-1 rule that does not break the bank.
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