I work in a niche inside a niche. I deal with terabytes of storage, massive servers, a variety of storage tech, and I’ve been in interested in computers in general for… Around 40 years. (Yeah, I’m old.)
I have my own single person company and have worked in 40+ US states, done assignments in the UK, Norway.
AMA.
What is the best filesystem for archive ? BTRFS, ZFS, ReFS?
How will quantum computer affect your field ?
What is the 2023 bottleneck ?
IMHO , it’s permanent storage . I remember in 2005 up to 2010, we all wanted the fastest CPU , more GHz , more cores ,etc. the industry gives us that . Then during the last decade , we all wanted a more powerful GPU, more core ,more memory ,more Mhz. We also craved faster internet connection ,now we have optical fiber with 3.5Gb/sec in home for 120$/month .(impossible to think in 2014)
Nowadays , I have the impression that permanent storage is lagging behind . With the new medias being in 8K, video games storing average 100Gb and what not, we regularly move around dozens of Gb, even as casual users .
I’m only familiar with ZFS, but only in my lab, not in production… ZFS is great because it can self-heal files / re-allocate blocks. I tried it on SMR drives, and it’s terrible, I advise against it. :)
ZFS is very good, but OFFSITE, TESTED BACKUPS are critical. There’s ‘reliable’ storage (storage that can deal with a failure) and then there’s backups. All the parity in the world won’t save your data from a fire.
In my small office, I have about 100TB of data that’s important to me, so I have a local copy, a backup in my office, and a stack of tapes at home about 1km away. Anything that affects both locations is outside my threat model, as I’ll have bigger issues.