On redundancy (and a bit of a gripe)
Mar. 19th, 2011 11:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumGuys,
I understand the urge to help, but the thing about my not being able to find those files is the oddity of it. I am pretty good (none of us is perfect) at not losing data. I don't have a printer set up in the house, for doing anything other than photos. So for my classes, I send documents to myself in two formats, so that should the format the computers on campus decide to not work, I can put the other into plaintext and reconstruct it from, if nothing else, google docs.
I have a stack of drives, and two of them have duplicate copies of all the rest of my photos.
So it's not that I don't back things up. It's not even that I don't back them up redundantly. The thing which makes this so painful is that when I got the latest drive (a 2TB) for consolidation (the old 1TB has enough space to hold everything, for the moment, but the duplication was on two lesser drives) I spent I don't know how many hours trying to avoid either overduplication (there were other files on some of those drives, which I wanted to keep, but didn't need in with the photos), or accidental deletion. I've still not purged all the tertiary copies of things.
So telling someone, who is complaining that somehow the files he expected to find in either the primary location, or the back up, that you know how to do it, or that he needs to do it better?
Well good on you. I hope nothing like this ever happens to you.
As to doing it better? Sure, Obviously. If I'd done it better I'd not be bitching about it now.
(n.b. I've looked at "online storage" and don't like the idea. It costs more, requires various levels of connection/time, and feels invasive. How easy is it for me to limit the things they record? How vulnerable are they to data thieves? What levels of subpoena power does that leave me vulnerable to [there is a guy Sony accuses of fostering piracy. They allege he got donations of support in this via PayPal, they just got access to his entire PayPal account, which I trust they will mine for other people they can throw lawsuits at. That's just one of the reasons I don't buy Sony products, and haven't since they put rootkits on their CDs).
I understand the urge to help, but the thing about my not being able to find those files is the oddity of it. I am pretty good (none of us is perfect) at not losing data. I don't have a printer set up in the house, for doing anything other than photos. So for my classes, I send documents to myself in two formats, so that should the format the computers on campus decide to not work, I can put the other into plaintext and reconstruct it from, if nothing else, google docs.
I have a stack of drives, and two of them have duplicate copies of all the rest of my photos.
So it's not that I don't back things up. It's not even that I don't back them up redundantly. The thing which makes this so painful is that when I got the latest drive (a 2TB) for consolidation (the old 1TB has enough space to hold everything, for the moment, but the duplication was on two lesser drives) I spent I don't know how many hours trying to avoid either overduplication (there were other files on some of those drives, which I wanted to keep, but didn't need in with the photos), or accidental deletion. I've still not purged all the tertiary copies of things.
So telling someone, who is complaining that somehow the files he expected to find in either the primary location, or the back up, that you know how to do it, or that he needs to do it better?
Well good on you. I hope nothing like this ever happens to you.
As to doing it better? Sure, Obviously. If I'd done it better I'd not be bitching about it now.
(n.b. I've looked at "online storage" and don't like the idea. It costs more, requires various levels of connection/time, and feels invasive. How easy is it for me to limit the things they record? How vulnerable are they to data thieves? What levels of subpoena power does that leave me vulnerable to [there is a guy Sony accuses of fostering piracy. They allege he got donations of support in this via PayPal, they just got access to his entire PayPal account, which I trust they will mine for other people they can throw lawsuits at. That's just one of the reasons I don't buy Sony products, and haven't since they put rootkits on their CDs).
