Cold-Storage

The 3-2-1 backup guide on this site makes the case for an off-site copy without picking a specific home for it. That’s deliberate, because “off-site” covers everything from a hard drive at your parents’ house to a proper cloud object storage tier, and which one makes sense depends entirely on how you actually plan to use it. This article is the follow-up: assuming you’ve decided cloud is part of your off-site story, which service, and why. ...

Every data hoarder eventually hits the same wall: the array keeps growing, the electric bill for spinning a dozen drives 24/7 keeps growing with it, and the off-site backup story (see the 3-2-1 backup guide if you haven’t nailed that down yet) gets more expensive every time you add another few TB. At some point, usually somewhere past the 50-100TB mark, people start hearing the same suggestion from old-school sysadmins: buy a tape drive. It sounds like a joke. It isn’t. ...