Stan Brown wrote:
As we all know, offsite storage of backups is an important component
of a secure backup strategy.

I have two portable drives, non-SSD type, with their own sealed
enclosures. Every week I do a full backup on one, take it to work,
and bring the other home, where I do the same full backup. But I'm
retiring now, so that's no longer an option. Uploading about 40 MB to
cloud storage, at the roughly 1 MB/s speed I get, would take almost
12 hours.

There's always safety deposit boxes, though they're not close by and
there's a cost. But since I have a detached garage, I wondered about
just storing the "off site" drive in the garage. The garage isn't
climate controlled, so the drive would be out of the weather but
subject to temperature fluctuations from 0°F to the 90s -- probably
not in the same day. :-)

Any likelihood that would cause problems? I know of course to let the
drive come to indoor temperature before using it.


The enclosure is not sealed.

Each drive has a breather hole.

As the temperature changes, the drive "breathes in and out".
A high humidity environment will eventually ruin the platters.

If you're going to do that, use an air tight enclosure,
and include desiccant packs inside the housing.

*******

The new Helium drives are available in 3.5" size. They
start at perhaps 4TB or so, and go up to 14TB. Those
are sealed, and the Helium is guaranteed to stay in
for 5 years. That's an example of a drive I would put
in the garage. Although, I would not know what to
expect at the 5 year mark. It's not a given that
all the Helium would leave at 4 years 364 days. The
drive might last longer than that, but until we have
statistics, we won't know.

The seals on the Helium drives are metal to metal,
with a deep adhesive seam between the metals. It is
the attempts to pass through the deep adhesive seal,
which gives the five year life. The device may have a
"welded lid" on top, but that could be the "second cover".
And I think *if* the lid is welded, it's welded as
mechanical protection.

I don't own any of these, but they are heading down to
the lower capacity end, so some day, a large percentage
of 3.5" drive offerings will be He based.

Some other interesting data points, are that the He
drive does not have extended specs. I was hoping to
see that the "air-breather" drive 10,000 foot limit
had been lifted to say, 40,000 feet. Yet, the companies
have not extended the specs like that. The specs for
Helium drives remain the same as for air breathing
drives. Which includes the low temp spec. You would
think a Helium drive, with absolutely dry gas inside,
would work well at below 0C temps (no condensation
inside). Only the controller board might have condensation.

*******

Find a storage space with better climate controls.

Paul