Why real data durability needs more than cloud promises, You might not need to worry so much about “nines”
Data durability has become a big topic of conversation as more businesses move important data to the cloud and hybrid environments. Cloud providers often use flashy numbers—11 nines, 12 nines, or more—to say that their services offer almost perfect protection. But even the most durable storage platforms are still at risk of one thing that can’t be avoided: human error, no matter how good the marketing is.
At Epis Technology, we help businesses look beyond the numbers and create data protection plans that are both practical and strong using Synology infrastructure. These plans work in the real world, not just in theory.
Knowing the Difference Between Availability and Durability
Cloud providers often mix two very different ideas into one conversation:
Data durability is the chance that data that is stored will stay intact and uncorrupted over time, even if there are hardware failures, bit rot, or disk errors. For instance, if you store 10 million objects, 11 nines of durability means that you could lose one object every 10,000 years.
On the other hand, service availability measures uptime. A 99.99% availability SLA still lets you be down for almost an hour a year.
It’s easy to figure out how long something will last, but it’s not easy to figure out how long something will be available. This is where marketing often goes too far.
Why “Nines” Alone Don’t Tell the Whole Story
There is no one formula that everyone agrees on for figuring out how long something will last. Most of the time, the industry uses probability models that are based on three main factors:
- AFR (Annualized Failure Rate): The number of drives that are expected to fail each year
- Mean Time to Repair (MTTR): How long it takes to fix broken parts
- Erasure Coding (EC): How to spread out data and parity fragments so that failures don’t happen.
These variables affect each other in complicated ways, especially in big systems where failures happen all the time. Drives that are installed at the same time often fail close together. That’s why Epis Technology focuses on architecture, configuration, and operational discipline, not just the advertised durability numbers.
How Synology Figures Out Durability and Why It Matters
Synology C2 Object Storage uses a Poisson distribution model to figure out how long things will last. This method sees drive failures as ongoing, linked events instead of one-time events, which is a better way to describe how things work in the real world.
Currently, Synology C2 uses a 12+3 erasure coding scheme, which gives it about 9 nines of durability. Ongoing improvements in AFR and MTTR have already made things more reliable. Synology plans to switch to a 16+4 EC layout, which makes things much more durable without making them less efficient.
We keep a close eye on these Synology updates at Epis Technology and make sure our customers get the most out of them by properly deploying, tuning, and integrating them. We don’t just assume that durability means protection.
Failures in the Real World Show Why Architecture Is Important
In a real Synology C2 expansion, six drives failed in three weeks, and two of those failures affected the same object. The data stayed safe not because of marketing claims, but because of how well the design worked.
This is why Epis Technology strongly suggests using RAID 6 or better for multi-drive volumes, especially in business settings. Single-parity protection isn’t enough anymore when volumes go over six drives.
The Most Dangerous Thing Isn’t Hardware: It’s People Making Mistakes
Industry data shows that two-thirds of the time, data loss is caused by people making mistakes, not hardware breaking. No matter how high the number, “nines” can’t stop accidental deletions, ransomware, misconfigurations, or overwrites.
Epis Technology’s approach is different because we design systems with the idea that mistakes will happen and make sure recovery is quick, reliable, and tested.
How Epis Technology Helps Make Synology More Durable Real
Epis Technology connects Synology’s powerful storage technology with the needs of businesses. We make sure that claims about durability turn into real data resilience by giving:
- Architecture planning that follows Synology’s best practices
- RAID, erasure coding, and memory settings that are best for lowering risk
- Using the 3-2-1 strategy for hybrid backup designs
- Synology C2 for off-site protection
- Continuous testing, monitoring, and recovery validation
Epis Technology doesn’t just use one platform or durability metric. Instead, they make layered protection models that can handle hardware failures, human mistakes, and operational problems.
Hedge Your Bets: Backup + Durability = Real Protection
A good data protection plan is worth more than a lot of nines. The 3-2-1 backup rule is still the safest way to go:
- Three copies of your information
- Stored on two different types of media
- With one copy off-site
Synology gives you the tools. Epis Technology makes sure that they are set up correctly, kept up, and tested on a regular basis.
By combining Synology’s cutting-edge storage technology with Epis Technology’s real-world deployment experience, businesses get protection that works when it matters most, not just when the numbers look good.