cloudy thoughts

I was reading a post a few days ago about what and where to save things into the Cloud. This idea that all of our data can be secured in a vast database in the sky.

Like many, I do use the Cloud in its various forms for some things. Much of my music collection is stashed away in it and some of my videos, too.

But it's all stuff that is commercially available and relocatable.

I still back up my own stuff to my own system. Now I realise I'm probably extreme compared with many who might just take an occasional hard drive copy of their work in progress.

Here at rashbre central we've got spinning RAID arrays with redundant disk drives, so that if one fails then everything still works. On the backup system if two disks fail then it still works.

My first disk drives many years ago were when two hard drives might have held 30 Megabytes of data. That's less than a CD's worth of MP3 music nowadays. I seem to remember it seemed vast at the time, on TRS80 LDOS.

I'm told that the 26 million books of the US Library of Congress are about 10 Terabytes of data, so we've come a long way.

Today, as I replace a defective drive in one of the rashbre central RAIDs, I notice that it is designated as capable of holding around 6 Terabytes of data. That'd be over half the Library of Congress then?

But not really, of course.

This particular RAID has 5 of these 6 Terabyte units which could be a theoretical 30 Terabytes. With the safety duplication etc, I get about 16 Terabytes of storage from it and currently use about 40%. Forget about world libraries, that's just rashbre central.

True that this is just a backup unit and there's another one like it with the Active data on it.

Rebuilding the 30 Terabyte RAID whilst it was still running took about 25 hours. It was still fully usable, although the various flashing lights on it could be a little unsettling.

It's why I still prefer to keep my own data on my own systems.

Putting it out to the cloud and then needing to do some sort of recovery could be interesting.

I've no idea how long it would take or whether there would be some distant help desk telling me that I've used the wrong software or something. A bit like they attempt to do sometimes when I say I'm using a Mac.

So yes I'll use cloud, but somewhat carefully.