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https://www.iafrikan.com/2020/06/30/do-we-really-own-our-digital-possessions/
During 2019, Microsoft announced that it will close the books category of its digital store. While other software and apps will still be available via the virtual shop front, and on purchasers' consoles and devices, the closure of the eBook store takes with it customers' eBook libraries. Any digital books bought through the service – even those bought many years ago – will no longer be readable after July 2019. While the company has promised to provide a full refund for all eBook purchases, this decision raises important questions of ownership.
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We Don't Really Own the Digital Possessions That We Buy Online
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You are a fluke of the universe; you have no right to be here.
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Wednesday July 01 2020, @05:32PM (2 children)
For tape backups LTO-4 drives are the sweet spot for price per Gb. I bought an IBM LTO-4 drive for $35 on eBay. Its a fiber channel interface and those cards and cables are dirt cheap too. They don't fit very well in desktop cases but who cares. If you keep an eye out you can snag new tapes for $10 each. That's 800Gb of long term stable storage.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday July 01 2020, @08:42PM (1 child)
Even at those prices, I don't know why you'd bother unless you're really hording a lot of data. You can get a 4-5TB USB-connected backup HD for under $100 now, and with that you can plug it into any computer (there's no way for me to connect a fibre channel drive to my laptop), and you can access files randomly whenever you want to restore something, or just back up a few things, or do a sync, or whatever.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 02 2020, @12:40PM
One of the reasons why HDD are a great choice is that on top of just overwriting the parts of the backup that might have changed, you can easily verify the integrity of all the files on the disk. It can take some time to do, but the process is more or less automatic if you've got decent software. You can also choose which filesystem you use, I personally like ZFS for backups as it at least has the ability to verify that any file writes were completed. Good luck using any similar filesystem with tape.
For some things, I also prefer to use WORM technology of some sort, yes, you have to rewrite the entire thing if something happens, but you're safe from the most common source of data destruction, fat fingers.
That being said, I prefer to have my backups handled offsite and replicated across multiple geographic regions. It's just super nice to have a backup copy on site where it can be quickly restored in the most common cases of user error.