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Patch reliability is unclear. Unless you have an immediate, pressing need to install a specific patch, don't do it. |
I’m thinking of creating & storing a system image on One Drive, in my Personal Vault. It has 2FA, as opposed to storing on an external hard drive – which I can do – but hardware fails. I believe One Drive Personal Vault is secure – security would be my primary concern. Are there any other concerns I’m not thinking of? Would like to know what you think – good idea or bad? thanks.
How much space do you have on One Drive. Those images can be quite large (GBs).
IMO, not a good idea. System images are large files (multi-GB) and will take an extremely long time to upload.
Then, how do you propose to use the file if you need to restore a system? Yes, an external hard drive can fail but you should test the image after creating it.
--Joe
I would think local drives would be the best solution, especially if you rotate a couple of drives to cover the hardware failure aspect.
That eliminates the internet issues with multi-GB image files, and the need to place the backup image onto a local drive before attempting any restore process.
Ideally you would secure one copy of your image and place it offsite in a secure location, such as at a friend or family’s home, your office, or safe deposit box. This would cover you in the event of a fire, flood, theft, etc.
Windows 10 Pro 22H2
The chance of your external disk failing at the same time as you needing to restore would be extremely small. More likely to lose both in a burglary or fire.
If you are feeling extra paranoid a second copy of the external disk stored off site would be better methinks.
cheers, Paul
For a solid image and/or file backup strategy, here’s one:
Regarding the frequency of #2, I would recommend to do it more often than quarterly or yearly. But this would be an individual requirement based on how often there are significant changes to the OS, applications, and or hardware.
Obviously, user data and docs can be easily backed up to a cloud storage service on a daily basis, so really no need to haul them offsite to protect them.
Windows 10 Pro 22H2
Just a word of caution regarding flash drives or SSDs. I think that depending on the type of memory cell, they can degrade quite fast when not plugged for a while, so to me using a mechanical hard disk seems like a better idea if you are going to leave the unit many months in storage.
That is a very interesting point about flash/SSD that I don’t believe I have seen much discussion about!
I do use 1TB and 2TB external spinning drives for my image backups and other archived data. Mostly due to the cost factor of price/GB.
I have also thought that for long term archival of static data, you should rotate/copy to new media occasionally to prevent having a bunch of old drives that you can no longer read someday. 
Windows 10 Pro 22H2
That is a very interesting point about flash/SSD that I don’t believe I have seen much discussion about!
I *have* mentioned that old-style SSDs had integrated backup batteries… because their data retention while powered off was even shorter. Some were really SSHDs, with integrated spinning HDD for long-term retention… and enough battery to commit all data to that.
That was back when one of those with 16 GB capacity had a 6-digit price tag in dollars and required its own rackmount enclosure.
I have also thought that for long term archival of static data, you should rotate/copy to new media occasionally to prevent having a bunch of old drives that you can no longer read someday.
Exactly – this is a very widely applying general rule, and the interval varies by technology.
Or media production batch in some cases – some writable CD/DVD media would go bad in less than 3 years from writing.
The whole topic of long term data retention is very interesting to me and I have a hard time finding complete reliable information about it.
For example, I wanted to maybe use 2 SSDs in mirror instead of HDs on my next station using ReFS, but I am not sure to understand clearly what happens if one drive starts to have issues when those are SSDs. Also, is the data is periodically refreshed (rewritten to) to prevent the discharge just by being plugged in or being active, does the OS has anything to do with it? Maybe ReFS detects the issues with SSDs for cells that haven’t been written for a long time and rewrite them on the fly when it detects inconsistencies during a read, thus making an SSD only setup viable. At this point, with just a quick research on the subject, I don’t know if an SSD only setup with ReFS is a good idea vs mechanical HDs, but I was really looking forward eliminating mechanical HDs and their sometimes very slow wake up time from sleep. Maybe I should just setup that NAS and leave the data there probably, but I liked the idea of an autonomous station because convincing people to have a separate NAS unit is not easy.
My priority is long term data storage, in and outside the PC. I have a lot of static data in the PC that I never rewrite. I like to use some PCs for 10-15 years when possible and I don’t mind having to replace a failing drive unit as long as the data remains safe. It is not clear to me what happens when a ReFS drive fails. Can you read the other drive by itself to copy data or do you need to add a new drive first to rebuild? Can you rebuild on another station if the original one fails? I once move a drive to a different station and it was seen as raw, so unreadable, but maybe it was because of a different ReFS version…
I used LTOs and DAT but the problem is you need a backward compatible unit that is still working to read them, so time ends up destroying everything at some point. You have a good media, but you can’t read it.
M-discs seems a pretty good solution, but the capacity is not great. Also, the future for blue-ray readers doesn’t seem very bright.
I image my system SSD daily, and my two SATA internal DATA data partitions weekly, onto a pair of spinning USB drives. So I know that data is refreshed on a regular basis.
It’s the old 1TB spinning drives that I keep archived offline, containing old digital photo archives, and backups from old PCs where I did not migrate all of the existing data to the new systems. Plus a few images from PCs that have been retired.
I wonder how long it’s safe to keep them lying around. A couple of them are actually mirrors (copies), so if one of them fails, I am still good.
Windows 10 Pro 22H2
Lost data (bit rot) can only be detected by regular checks, meaning your data needs to be on a live system. Scheduled data scrubbing is the usual method.
You could consider ZFS instead of ReFS. It’s standard on Ubuntu, FreeNAS, XigmaNAS etc. Then you don’t have to rely on MS and Windows.
cheers, Paul
SSDs come in many kinds, some of them do keep better if power is on… others don’t.
Lost data (bit rot) can only be detected by regular checks,
Well it’d be more accurate to say that it can only be detected after the fact, but would usually be gradual so detecting it after only very little has rotted would be beneficial. While you still have other copies of it 
Bitrot detection on a single disk is the best that many traditional systems could do even with a checksum-enabled RAID/mirror, but modern systems may have checksum-enabled copies of blocks or files on a single disk so might even be able to recover from that. ZFS and Btrfs at least – ReFS has checksums but I’m not sure if it does multiple copies per device?
Also open source vs MS proprietary and
There are no tools to repair or recover a ReFS filesystem. Third party tools are dependent on reverse engineering the system and (as of 2014) few of these exist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFS#Stability_and_known_problems
In 2014, there were no repair or recovery tools for ReFS.
We’re nearing the end of 2019; we have third-party tools in addition to those provided by Microsoft.
When NTFS was first introduced, there were no third-party tools for it either.
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