Reliable storage support

The primary storage support for an archive should be as resilient as possible. Traditional hard drives are the best choice as they are slower, but more robust and much cheaper than modern solid-state drives (SSD). The NAS-specific types (e.g., Western Digital Red series) are especially designed for slower but more reliable operation.

A RAID configuration of multiple disks, for who can afford it, protects against data corruption or loss when one of the disks fails. It does not protect against human errors or software bugs.

Thumb drives are to be absolutely avoided to store master files, except for a temporary transfer where a better option is not available. In that case, a fixity check (see below) before uploading the files to the thumb drive and after downloading them is strongly recommended. Thumb drives are notoriously unreliable and can fail at any time, or silently corrupt data. They are however very useful for distributing presentation files that can be regenerated automatically in case of loss.

This is also a choice mostly unrelated to Pocket Archive. The only restriction that Pocket Archive imposes is on the primary storage, the only one directly controlled by Pocket Archive, which must be mountable on the local file system. It may be a remote volume (however that would slow things down significantly). If a good replication setup is employed (see below), one can bind-mount the database (which is relatively small but very frequently accessed) to a SSD, and the bulk of the data (i.e., the files) to a hard disk. This can be done with common UNIX tools.

[TODO add recipe for basic bind-mount setup for split storage]