A 1 on 1 diskcopy is a backup in the simplest sense thinkable. Backups should protect you against more than just disk failure.
Let's list a few scenarios in order from more likely to less likely:
1. User error (this may be personal but I've lost more data to inadvertent deletes than to any other events) 2. Software error (corrupted files) 3. Hardware breakdown (disk failure) 4. Total catastrophy (like your house burning down)
The exact disk copy protects you from scenario 3 and scenario 1 & 2 provided you find out about your problem before another copy was made which is by no means guaranteed.
I would at very minimum advise to use a snapshot type of system (google for rsnapshots). On a relatively static dataset snapshots don't take huge amounts of space, but they protect you fully against scenarios 1, 2 & 3.
Use rsnapshot on an off site (colo?) box to protect you fully from all four scenarios. There are even commercial parties that offer online backup capacity.
These days where we store most of our memories (Digital photos and movies) on digital media I consider a solution like this to be almost a necessity. The chances of your house burning down may be slim but they're big enough to take measures.
If you're more disciplined than me you may get by with regular DVD backups but I know myself, if I don't automate things it's a disaster waiting to happen...
X.
PS: I don't backup any HTPC files, I'm prepared to lose those.
Yes, the old traffic deaths argument. Beaten to death already.
In my country it took just one movie maker being killed to cause many opinion makers to be scared out of voicing their opinions.
The whole point of terrorism is that the effects are much more serious than the deaths of the people involved. Also, the relatively low number of people killed in attacks may be low in the west, but that is undoubtedly partially because of the paranoid security that some people like to laugh about.
You, my friend, are just a different type of sheep. Lots of those about these days, they pretend to be better than the others.
That's exactly what I would have used, of course. The cryptographic difficulties are further simplified because we only require a symmetrical encryption algorithm like Blowfish or Rijndael. The other side should *not* be able to decrypt, so key distribution is no issue.
Funny, I've been thinking of doing the same. P2P encrypted backups. Shouldn't be too difficult. I have a healthy suspicion towards systems that try to be too smart. I don't want my pieces scattered over various systems.
For me a system that alows me and a buddy to backup each other's data without getting access to it would be ideal. Too much work to do myself, though, and apparently you weren't going to do it for me, so I got myself a colo machine instead and use it as an rsnapshot server as well as an openvpn hub.
It's an idea whose time has come, although ADSL upload speeds get somewhat in the way, my rsnapshots seem to work fine as long as I don't suddenly decide to move my entire music of photo trees to a different location.;)
I tried freenet once, it felt like going back to the times of 14.4k modems:(
Oh yes, the PC interfaces suck;) AFIAC I'd rather see a normal disk device.
The idea is that when the two devices are combined you are motivated to keep at least one of them charged. When I switched from a PDA and a seperate phone to a combination device (Nokia 9300, mp3 sucks on that one), the end result was that my pda was always charged.
1. A decent phone battery should have no problems playing mp3's. 2. Having to keep one device charged up is vastly superior to two. 3. There's no reason why a phone couldn't have a decent mp3 playing interface.
Of course. This is total nonsense. If there's anything mobile phones are destined to do it's take over the role of the MP3 player. The manufacturers have had some problems getting the interfaces right, but why on earth would you want a seperate device to do what a phone can do easily?
Mobile phones are already taking over the digicam market, while there's still (and probably alway will be) a strong case for dedicated camera's. Good optics will probably always require space that you don't have in a phone.
There's no such argument to be made for mp3 playing phones. It's just that I'm one of those minority people who want to carry along their whole collection which for me requires a 40GB harddisk model. That's still a little hard to do on a phone, but I've no doubt that that time will come. I remenmber I once paid $500 for a 10MB flash card...
I've been doing this for years on my Nokia 9300. In Holland real-time traffic maps are provided by the road club (ANWB). The pages are huge and overfilled with ads and stuff. I scrape the maps off the site with a PHP script, crop exactly the part I need (I have some standard routes) so the map and text information fits on the screen nicely.
The 9300 is in a cradle (not a lame one against the windshield) and the php page auto refreshes every five minutes so it's all quite safe. Saves me a lot of hassle because I know when things are bad enough to take an alternative route and when not.
Interesting thing is that no-one I've ever shown it to was really impressed or interested. Guess I should've shown it to Google;)
If these things actually come down to consumer levels in size and cost we can at last have a usable digital zoom. Perhaps we can do away with optical zoom altogether and have really good compact digicams.
To me A dongle is something that dangles off your pc.
It may well be a hardware license protection device, but the shape and the attachment to your PC are the real criteria. It must have that distinguishable dongly shape...
And Google gives 12.600 hits for 'software dongle';)
But what if you want more than 6GB to store your collection on? I have an iRiver H40 (with Rockbox) that I like a lot, but iRiver stopped making players >10 GB. If you need a lot of space you don't have much choice these days...
No one *wants* DRM, but most everyone will accept it under reasonable terms. Apple's terms are more than reasonable.
What's reasonable about the fact that I can't play ITMS purchased songs on my 4 wonderful whole house music-players because of licensing issues? ( http://slimdevices.com/ )
Perhaps it would be acceptable if these tracks were sold at bargain prices, but they're not. I get to pay dearly for lossy compressed copies of the original that I can't play on my iRiver & Squeezebox players.
That is completely unreasonable in my book.
Good thing there are alternatives. Why anyone would want to shop at ITMS is beyond me.
And, yes: People *are* unreasonably modding Apple-critical comments down.
A Tivo very un-userfriendly in the sense that I can't buy one or its matching EPG service in Europe.
That's why I'm so happy with my 3-tuner MythTV setup. OK, so it's a bit of a hassle to get running, but after that it just keeps running and my GF has no problems operating it.
That's because people can send you a Vcard with a funny message/picture if you've let your phone be visible. Some imaginative soul has named this 'bluejacking' and now suddenly everyone is scared to death of BT.
Of course, anything that requires real security would apply it's own encryption/identity management on top of BT, which makes this point moot.
I'm not complaining about them kicking me off (one less forum to waste time on) but about the policy and only because it's relevant to the topic.
You're certainly right that I was asking for it. I actually exchanged a few mails with the administrators which resulted in them promising to unban me, which then never happened. This was about 2 years ago.
That is, I thought it hadn't happened until I just tried it from a banned IP. The unban finally got through. I think I'll keep banning them, though. That'll teach 'm;)
You're right in the sense that I shouldn't visit the site if I don't agree with the policy. Guess what, I don't (even though my IP has changed since then).
But I still reserve the right to complain about this kind of policy. Just as I reserve the right to fast forward through adverts on TV. What I do with my PVR hardware and what content my web browser shows me and what content it withholds should be my business and mine only.
Sites like Tweakers and Slashdot get their appeal because users actually create most the content that sells the ads. It's very bad manners to treat your customers in such a way IMHO.
The successful Dutch Tweakers.net site has a policy like this. After they ran a particularly annoying advertorial I (a regular visitor) announced in a forum that I would be running an ad-blocker from now on. My account was immediately blocked and my IP addresses were banned and remain banned to this day.
I'm pleased to see that I'm not the only one who thinks this is a highly questionable policy.
I don't run an ad-blocker on slashdot, just the FF plugin that stops endless animated images from running more than once, and I'm not against ads at all, but I think that websites should use less intrusive advertizing techniques, rather than using draconian measures against users.
And that's exactly what he's doing. Killing his own software. I love Djbdns and I put it on all my servers as a local cache (don't worry, it's on 127.0.0.1) but DJB's stubborn unwillingness to do the normal OS thing is killing his software.
Qmail is great in many ways and I've been running it for years, but to make it acceptable in today's spam & virus-filled world requires an ever growing amount of patches. Some of which won't work together any more.
As a result I switched to Postfix on many of my installs.
For my purposes incremental nigthly backups (something like encrypted rsyncs) would be just perfect.
I think this is a great idea, but I think I'll just wait for the Google offering before I start on writing my incremental encrypted backup Perl script.
Slashdot Mirror
A 1 on 1 diskcopy is a backup in the simplest sense thinkable.
Backups should protect you against more than just disk failure.
Let's list a few scenarios in order from more likely to less likely:
1. User error (this may be personal but I've lost more data to inadvertent deletes than to any other events)
2. Software error (corrupted files)
3. Hardware breakdown (disk failure)
4. Total catastrophy (like your house burning down)
The exact disk copy protects you from scenario 3 and scenario 1 & 2 provided you find out about your problem before another copy was made which is by no means guaranteed.
I would at very minimum advise to use a snapshot type of system (google for rsnapshots). On a relatively static dataset snapshots don't take huge amounts of space, but they protect you fully against scenarios 1, 2 & 3.
Use rsnapshot on an off site (colo?) box to protect you fully from all four scenarios. There are even commercial parties that offer online backup capacity.
These days where we store most of our memories (Digital photos and movies) on digital media I consider a solution like this to be almost a necessity. The chances of your house burning down may be slim but they're big enough to take measures.
If you're more disciplined than me you may get by with regular DVD backups but I know myself, if I don't automate things it's a disaster waiting to happen...
X.
PS: I don't backup any HTPC files, I'm prepared to lose those.
Yes, the old traffic deaths argument. Beaten to death already.
;)
In my country it took just one movie maker being killed to cause many opinion makers to be scared out of voicing their opinions.
The whole point of terrorism is that the effects are much more serious than the deaths of the people involved. Also, the relatively low number of people killed in attacks may be low in the west, but that is undoubtedly partially because of the paranoid security that some people like to laugh about.
You, my friend, are just a different type of sheep.
Lots of those about these days, they pretend to be better than the others.
Who else do you think modded you up?
X.
That's exactly the method I use in my upload confirmation messages:
Channel: 1691 (TEST)
Upload object: 1820 (Test AH)
Time of upload: 24-05-2006 14:12:41
Size of file: 65298 bytes
Uploader: doe (John Doe)
File received as: report.doc
File stored as: doe.doc
File SHA1 digest: e9dd2b06972aac8ef63a5b33e75775ad88d84556
File MD5 digest: df914e41a7d85d4bfd897d368a052f8b
Well it's so easy to get one letter wrong:
;)
http://www.openssh.org/
That's what makes programming such a hassle
X.
I get it, you're trying to insult me into writing it ;)
:(
That strategy has worked with me before, but sorry, not this time. I have too many jobs already.
X.
That's exactly what I would have used, of course. The cryptographic difficulties are further simplified because we only require a symmetrical encryption algorithm like Blowfish or Rijndael. The other side should *not* be able to decrypt, so key distribution is no issue.
X.
Funny, I've been thinking of doing the same. P2P encrypted backups. Shouldn't be too difficult. I have a healthy suspicion towards systems that try to be too smart. I don't want my pieces scattered over various systems.
;)
:(
For me a system that alows me and a buddy to backup each other's data without getting access to it would be ideal. Too much work to do myself, though, and apparently you weren't going to do it for me, so I got myself a colo machine instead and use it as an rsnapshot server as well as an openvpn hub.
It's an idea whose time has come, although ADSL upload speeds get somewhat in the way, my rsnapshots seem to work fine as long as I don't suddenly decide to move my entire music of photo trees to a different location.
I tried freenet once, it felt like going back to the times of 14.4k modems
X.
I get nervous when things world gets so tense that some people don't recognise a joke like this anymore...
X.
Oh yes, the PC interfaces suck ;)
AFIAC I'd rather see a normal disk device.
The idea is that when the two devices are combined you are motivated to keep at least one of them charged. When I switched from a PDA and a seperate phone to a combination device (Nokia 9300, mp3 sucks on that one), the end result was that my pda was always charged.
X.
1. A decent phone battery should have no problems playing mp3's.
2. Having to keep one device charged up is vastly superior to two.
3. There's no reason why a phone couldn't have a decent mp3 playing interface.
X.
Of course. This is total nonsense. If there's anything mobile phones are destined to do it's take over the role of the MP3 player. The manufacturers have had some problems getting the interfaces right, but why on earth would you want a seperate device to do what a phone can do easily?
Mobile phones are already taking over the digicam market, while there's still (and probably alway will be) a strong case for dedicated camera's. Good optics will probably always require space that you don't have in a phone.
There's no such argument to be made for mp3 playing phones. It's just that I'm one of those minority people who want to carry along their whole collection which for me requires a 40GB harddisk model. That's still a little hard to do on a phone, but I've no doubt that that time will come. I remenmber I once paid $500 for a 10MB flash card...
X.
How the h*ll does a repeat of a joke that was already made in the article itself get modded up as +5 Funny? Instant replay?
Shall I repeat it again to increase my karma?
X (puzzled)
I've been doing this for years on my Nokia 9300. In Holland real-time traffic maps are provided by the road club (ANWB). The pages are huge and overfilled with ads and stuff. I scrape the maps off the site with a PHP script, crop exactly the part I need (I have some standard routes) so the map and text information fits on the screen nicely.
;)
The 9300 is in a cradle (not a lame one against the windshield) and the php page auto refreshes every five minutes so it's all quite safe. Saves me a lot of hassle because I know when things are bad enough to take an alternative route and when not.
Interesting thing is that no-one I've ever shown it to was really impressed or interested. Guess I should've shown it to Google
X.
If these things actually come down to consumer levels in size and cost we can at last have a usable digital zoom. Perhaps we can do away with optical zoom altogether and have really good compact digicams.
X.
To me A dongle is something that dangles off your pc.
;)
It may well be a hardware license protection device, but the shape and the attachment to your PC are the real criteria. It must have that distinguishable dongly shape...
And Google gives 12.600 hits for 'software dongle'
X.
But what if you want more than 6GB to store your collection on? I have an iRiver H40 (with Rockbox) that I like a lot, but iRiver stopped making players >10 GB. If you need a lot of space you don't have much choice these days...
No one *wants* DRM, but most everyone will accept it under reasonable terms. Apple's terms are more than reasonable.
What's reasonable about the fact that I can't play ITMS purchased songs on my 4 wonderful whole house music-players because of licensing issues? ( http://slimdevices.com/ )
Perhaps it would be acceptable if these tracks were sold at bargain prices, but they're not. I get to pay dearly for lossy compressed copies of the original that I can't play on my iRiver & Squeezebox players.
That is completely unreasonable in my book.
Good thing there are alternatives. Why anyone would want to shop at ITMS is beyond me.
And, yes: People *are* unreasonably modding Apple-critical comments down.
X.
A Tivo very un-userfriendly in the sense that I can't buy one or its matching EPG service in Europe.
That's why I'm so happy with my 3-tuner MythTV setup. OK, so it's a bit of a hassle to get running, but after that it just keeps running and my GF has no problems operating it.
X.
That's because people can send you a Vcard with a funny message/picture if you've let your phone be visible. Some imaginative soul has named this 'bluejacking' and now suddenly everyone is scared to death of BT.
Of course, anything that requires real security would apply it's own encryption/identity management on top of BT, which makes this point moot.
X.
Same here. One Linux media server running MythTV (3 tuners) and SlimServer, 4 Squeezeboxes v3 & 4 TV sets.
Nothing else needed. I don't have a CD or DVD player left in the house (apart from the ones in my PC's).
Outside of the house we use an iRiver H40 and an H10.
X.
I'm not complaining about them kicking me off (one less forum to waste time on) but about the policy and only because it's relevant to the topic.
;)
You're certainly right that I was asking for it. I actually exchanged a few mails with the administrators which resulted in them promising to unban me, which then never happened. This was about 2 years ago.
That is, I thought it hadn't happened until I just tried it from a banned IP. The unban finally got through. I think I'll keep banning them, though. That'll teach 'm
X.
You're right in the sense that I shouldn't visit the site if I don't agree with the policy. Guess what, I don't (even though my IP has changed since then).
But I still reserve the right to complain about this kind of policy. Just as I reserve the right to fast forward through adverts on TV. What I do with my PVR hardware and what content my web browser shows me and what content it withholds should be my business and mine only.
Sites like Tweakers and Slashdot get their appeal because users actually create most the content that sells the ads. It's very bad manners to treat your customers in such a way IMHO.
X.
The successful Dutch Tweakers.net site has a policy like this. After they ran a particularly annoying advertorial I (a regular visitor) announced in a forum that I would be running an ad-blocker from now on. My account was immediately blocked and my IP addresses were banned and remain banned to this day.
I'm pleased to see that I'm not the only one who thinks this is a highly questionable policy.
I don't run an ad-blocker on slashdot, just the FF plugin that stops endless animated images from running more than once, and I'm not against ads at all, but I think that websites should use less intrusive advertizing techniques, rather than using draconian measures against users.
X.
And that's exactly what he's doing. Killing his own software. I love Djbdns and I put it on all my servers as a local cache (don't worry, it's on 127.0.0.1) but DJB's stubborn unwillingness to do the normal OS thing is killing his software.
Qmail is great in many ways and I've been running it for years, but to make it acceptable in today's spam & virus-filled world requires an ever growing amount of patches. Some of which won't work together any more.
As a result I switched to Postfix on many of my installs.
Pity, though...
X.
For my purposes incremental nigthly backups (something like encrypted rsyncs) would be just perfect.
I think this is a great idea, but I think I'll just wait for the Google offering before I start on writing my incremental encrypted backup Perl script.
X.