jgreco
Resident Grinch
- Joined
- May 29, 2011
- Messages
- 18,680
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/21/the_cloud_that_goes_puff_seagate_central_home_nas_woes/
I'm sure that many of you here get tasked with "IT support" for your families. This is a perfect example of how bad it can get. Not only is the storage nonredundant, leaving you open to the possibility of data loss due to drive failure, but apparently the Seagate Central Home NAS also uses some rather unusual Linuxisms that make it difficult to recover the data off the device even when hooked up to a standard Linux box. And having to rip apart the entire unit in order to get at the drive?
There are lots of other units out there that have great features, can mirror drives, and are still dirt cheap:
$80. Cheap enough you can buy two so you have a second unit that you can even rsync to.
I have spent far too many years explaining to people why their data is unretrievable because they had no backups and trusted a single magic disk.
On a related-but-different gripe, a quote from TheReg article: "The cloud has its problems, but you are less likely to lose data on OneDrive or DropBox than to wake up and discover that your home NAS has gone clunk in the night."
Oh, really? I don't know. I've got data I've been carting around since at least the '80's... I don't and can't trust services that were effectively just invented yesterday to have a business model and be profitable tomorrow. Look at the demise of AltaVista, MySpace, HP Upline, Canonical Ubuntu One, Iron Mountain, Apple MobileMe, etc.
The magic mix is probably to do a little of both: a high(er) availability solution for the home combined with a cloud service or remote NAS for disaster recovery. Sure, what I suggest isn't anywhere near as cheap as a Seagate Central 4TB ($175, so that's only around $30 more than a bare HDD!) ... but if you're going to store data, don't you want to be able to retrieve it?
I'm sure that many of you here get tasked with "IT support" for your families. This is a perfect example of how bad it can get. Not only is the storage nonredundant, leaving you open to the possibility of data loss due to drive failure, but apparently the Seagate Central Home NAS also uses some rather unusual Linuxisms that make it difficult to recover the data off the device even when hooked up to a standard Linux box. And having to rip apart the entire unit in order to get at the drive?
There are lots of other units out there that have great features, can mirror drives, and are still dirt cheap:
$80. Cheap enough you can buy two so you have a second unit that you can even rsync to.
I have spent far too many years explaining to people why their data is unretrievable because they had no backups and trusted a single magic disk.
On a related-but-different gripe, a quote from TheReg article: "The cloud has its problems, but you are less likely to lose data on OneDrive or DropBox than to wake up and discover that your home NAS has gone clunk in the night."
Oh, really? I don't know. I've got data I've been carting around since at least the '80's... I don't and can't trust services that were effectively just invented yesterday to have a business model and be profitable tomorrow. Look at the demise of AltaVista, MySpace, HP Upline, Canonical Ubuntu One, Iron Mountain, Apple MobileMe, etc.
The magic mix is probably to do a little of both: a high(er) availability solution for the home combined with a cloud service or remote NAS for disaster recovery. Sure, what I suggest isn't anywhere near as cheap as a Seagate Central 4TB ($175, so that's only around $30 more than a bare HDD!) ... but if you're going to store data, don't you want to be able to retrieve it?