The beauty of the Nubbin (as it is officially known) is that you can easily manipulate the mouse without taking your figures from the home row.
Bingo!
Hint for new users: set your mouse pointer speed to the maximum (it then requires less force to move the pointer over larger distances and requires you to use a lighter touch).
Since I code for a living, a trackpoint/nubbin suits me very well. It's "just right" for the small amount of the time that I have to move a cursor to click on a screen widget.
If you touch-type, odds are that you would be well served by getting used to a nubby-style cursor. And it's not even an all-or-nothing deal, as you can easily hook up an external USB mouse. Most systems then let you control the mouse cursor using *either* pointer device at the same time.
So, when you're coding... use the trackpoint.
Doing a bit of graphical layout? Grab the external USB mouse.
(The trackpoint is also a darned sight more handy when taking mass-transit. When the train is rattling around underneath you, a trackpad just doesn't cut it.)
QuickPar. Which would give you a larger recovery window before data is irretrievably lost. (A recovery window starts when you notice data loss and ends when there is no longer enough recovery blocks to repair what is broken.)
'nuff said
Well, okay... a bit more
For archival, staggered, multi-generational backup is the key. For instance, let's say you generate 1GB worth of archival material per month.
April - Write Jan-Apr to a disc
May - Write Feb-May to a disc
June - Write Mar-June to a disc
Basically, you record a path or multiple paths through the website. Then you setup multiple machines and threads to randomly walk those paths through the website. You'll want enough machines/connections to the network so that you can flood the web server's outbound connection.
Bonus points if you do log analysis prior and base your "paths" through the site to match the most frequent ones seen in the log files.
You can also do some extrapolation about upper-end, even if you only drive a particular component to 50% or 75% of maximum. We use this to find bottlenecks in our dynamic content, to find out where we need to focus on first (CPU usage or network usage).
Or has a finite amount of time to devote to sorting email.
Yep. I break my mail archives down as follows:
1. Junk mail (saved for training future spam filters)
2. Not-so-junk mail - ends up in a 'delete' folder and I archive it off annually
3. Work mail - gets moved to an annual archive folder
Less places to find stuff = easier to search. And the net result is usually that I can pull an item up faster then if I had sorted it out to infinite sub-folders.
I guess if I still had a monthly trip to NYC on the train (a 3-4 hour trip), I'd still have my 'sorting' time and my e-mails wouldn't be crammed into a yearly folder. But, since I don't travel monthly now, I no longer have that 'sorting' time.
I have about a 60% success rate with hard disks working more than a year
As other posters have said... you've got environmental issues if you're having drives die on a regular basis.
The #1 killer of drives is heat. Get some temp monitoring software (such as SpeedFan) and find out the operating temperatures of your system. If you're running HDs at more then 45C (40C would be better), you're going to be prone to killing them.
A lot of the newer case designs (Antec p160) place the hard drives in a special rack, with air gaps, and allow for the placement of a fan. It doesn't take much to cool a 7200rpm drive, but they do require just a bit of active airflow to remove any heat.
The other option, if you can't cool the drives with a fan and they're running hot, is to switch to 5400rpm drives. A 5400rpm drive typically runs 5-15C cooler then a 7200rpm drive.
The second killer of drives would be power issues. Either you've got dirty AC (solved with a line conditioning UPS) or a funky power-supply inside (never go cheap on a power-supply) that is screwing up voltages to your drives. This is usually the cause when folks complain about RAID arrays randomly dropping drives.
Lastly, always buy drives with 3 or 5 year warranties. Not only are they likely to last longer, but you can hold the manuf's feet to the fire if they fail. This generally means getting a new/refurb drive back from them within a week that is always at least as large as the original unit.
Antec Sonata case
Opteron 144 w/ Asus SK8V motherboard
Power Supply controls a 120mm fan up front
Auto-adjusting 120mm fan on the exhaust
Stock AMD cooler
FDB drives
As for the video card, maybe an GeForce FX 5900 XT (or if you can find one that is fanless in the ATI or NVIDIA series).
http://www.pcvsconsole.com/features/video/
Gives technical specs for almost every card on the market. At least it gives you an idea whether fanless video card X is fair/poor.
The Sonata cases do a nice job of quieting things down and my Opteron 144 typically runs at 45C under heavy load (25-30C ambient). The 120mm case fans probably help the most.
I use SpamBayes on my one work account with MS Outlook. It's probably 99.99% accurate. Plus, since it scores numerically, it can split spam into "ham", "might be", and "spam". The "spam" is stuff that's 99.999% certain to be spam, and I only have to look at the 2% of messages that fall into the "might be" folder.
One of these days I'm going to breakdown and figure out how to hook SpamBayes into Mozilla Mail.
Yep, I tend to find that the MS bashers have never spent time working with MSAccess long enough to understand its strengths and weaknesses. Instead, they have a knee jerk reaction and dismiss it out of hand.
Key strengths:
1) MSAccess files are self-contained. Which means that all of the queries, tables, forms, reports and other doodads are all in a single file which is easy for the user to keep track of.
2) Backups are easy for the user. They just drag a copy to another folder or another drive or removable media. Just like every other file that they're used to working with like documents or spreadsheets.
We keep our production database running on a real SQL server product. But all of the end-job analysis often gets done in Excel or Access (each job is usually quite different then the previous jobs, very little shareable).
I'll take a look at OO v2 when it comes out. The question is whether they've managed to package it all into an easy to use format like MSAccess.
I would say you need to either relocate your equipment to another room or get a real UPS, one that filters the AC signal and gives you a clean sine wave. (As in, a server-grade UPS with line conditioning.)
Agreed.
I own (3) Sonata cases. One is an Opteron 144 system, one is an Opteron 246 (dual) system, and the 3rd case is currently awaiting parts.
The Antec p160 cases are nice for server cases, one more bay then the Sonata, plus they have the interior case temp information. I own 3 of those cases as well, with a 4th one awaiting parts.
The trick with DVD is to assume that the disc will eventually go bad to the point that the built-in ECC on the disc will no longer correct the errors.
So what I do is set aside 5-25% of the DVD media for additional error recovery data (a.k.a. parity data created by QuickPar). Then, when the disc starts showing symptoms, I can rip the data off of the disc and use the PAR2 files to repair the damage prior to burning a new copy.
Works fine as long as the disc hasn't degraded so far that there are more errors then the PAR2 files can correct. (Known as the "recovery window".)
The weakness with the built-in ECC on DVD discs is that you don't get a warning that you've entered the recovery window. By the time you see errors on the screen, it's probably no longer to recover the data from the corrupted sector on the disc. It's great while it works, but it doesn't give you any warning that you're about to lose the data entirely.
CD to DVD is only about 6x, depending on whether you're talking 650MB or 700MB vs 4450MB.
BlueRay is 25GB, or about 5x (maybe 6x).
The holographic stuff is nice, but show me a working prototype. Or better, show me something where I can buy a drive for under $500 and media for less then $5. Until then, it's just all pie-in-the-sky and I refuse to get anxious about it.
EQ2 seems to be doing well out of the starting blocks. Something like 300k toons created already (and there's a limit of 4 per account, which means there are at least 75k subscribers and maybe 150k).
Will it be the runaway success that EQ1 is?/shrug
It's only the second week after launch. Most reviews and word-of-mouth are positive. So far it's been a pretty clean launch with only minor cosmetic bugs found in the game. The beta testers seem to have done a good job, at least with the starting content. They're on a daily patch cycle during the first few weeks, but I haven't seen anything major changed.
From what I'm hearing (not personal experience)... WoW and EQ2 are likely to appeal to slightly different demographics. One way it was put to me was that EQ2 seems to draw the more mature players.
The big reasons we pick Dell when ordering machines:
- 3 year warranty, with options for 4 hour service
(Useful for cases where I don't want to be the support tech for a particular person.)
- a website that lets me play with the configuration before ordering with transparent pricing
(A lot of companies get the website portion wrong. They'll let you configure your system, but won't tell you how much more/less the system will cost as you change a particular item. Dell's site does it properly, showing you that if you go from a 40GB drive to a 60GB drive it will cost you an additional $75, and if you trade down on the CPU you can save $50. You feel like you're in control of the configuration and not stuck with whatever packages that Dell marketing folks were willing to put together.)
All that being said, I'd love to buy a dual-Opteron system from Dell.
I've always just used my filesystem to organize my MP3s. It creates a nice hiearchy structure the way I wanted: Genre->Artist->Album. So Winamp's lack of media library support never bothered me. Even when they added it I never used it.
Same here. You have to do it that way if you use multiple systems to play your audio tracks ($DIETY bless M3U files!).
Every app I've ever seen that lets you "categorize" tracks makes the assumption that you only ever use a single machine to play those tracks.
What I do wish for is a music player that would analyze tempo and other musical characteristics and allow you to sort by beats-per-minute, dynamic range.
I tried CoolPlayer for a while. It was small, sleek, did the job (usually), and had some decent minimalist skins. But it was also buggy beyond belief. Might end up back with that one or not.
Foobar2000 - I might go back to them. Very powerful but really lacking in polish.
Pity, because WinAmp5 was actually rather decent (compared to the garbage that was v3, which caused me to go looking for other solutions).
Using this strategy has given me a great balance of inexpensive, well tested, and powerful machines with some serious longevity -- as I said, I'm still using that Pismo, and it's just fine for many applications.
Things have also begun to flatline instead of doubling in performance / size / capacity every 18-24 months.
Back in the 1990s, the upgrade cycle was 3 years on business computers, and those 3 year old machines were absolute *dogs*. My rule of thumb was that you needed to spend $1000 per year that you wanted to use the machine (e.g. a $2k PC would be worthless in about 2 years, $3k would get you a 3 year machine).
Now you can easily stretch a machine's life to 5-6 years, upgrading memory and possibly adding more disk at about the 3-4 year mark. Plus, everything is so much cheaper that a 3 year PC can easily be had for $1000. (We just went through all of our machines. Anything with more then 800Mhz got the absolute maximum possible memory added, most machines now have 512MB+, new machines are always ordered with 1GB. Now those machines can be used for another year or two.)
My laptop is already 2.5 years old, but with 1GB of RAM, it still works just fine. I'm planning on swapping out the 30GB drive for a slightly faster 60GB next week, then I should be good to go for another year or two. (I suspect the LCD will fade in about another year of use though... since I use the system 12 hours a day.)
A good monitor will easily last 6-7 years (I think I'm on my 3rd system using the same 19" CRT). It's finally showing enough wear and tear that I'm in the market for a new one (one of these years).
Printer? Finally retired my HP DJ 500 after about a decade. It still works, but I wanted the ability to print on CDs/DVDs.
The keyboard is from 2000 or so (IBM Model 80). Unless something breaks or they stop supporting PS/2 keyboards, I'll probably use that until 2010-2020.
Most of the time, my upgrade merely consists of a new CPU/MB/RAM about every other year, and a new video card on the off years.
Red data gets periodically snapshotted to DVD (with PAR2 parity information) and stored in the safe-deposit box downtown. Usually as part of my annual tax filing process and at a few other times of the year. Red data ends up stored on multiple snapshot discs over the years, increasing the odds that I'll be able to recover the state of my tax return as of Apr 14 2002.
In addition, Red data gets backed up daily to a removable drive (StarTech DRW115 series drive bays). Old versions and deleted files get moved to a 2nd trash folder where I keep multiple revisions of changes. Currently using Second Copy 2000 to do this, but plan on switching to rsync at some point. I own (3) removable drives (5400rpm 160GB) and swap them out weekly, with the latest being taken across town to another location. (Eventually, I'll move up to a 4th drive and keep 2 across town.)
Yellow data - Same idea. I use FTP to synchronize my software folder to a system in another state whenever I download new software. For other data that is inconvenient to recreate/redownload, I simply mirror it across to a disk on another server daily (or hourly).
Green data gets offloaded to optical media archives with 5-20% PAR2 data, stuck in a binder on a shelf, and I don't worry about it. If I lose the disc, I lose the disc, but I still can recover from minor corruption.
There's also been rumor of a PAR3 format in the works, which would not be deterministic, but would calculate roughly an order of magnitude faster. So if you have 10% PAR3 data, you *might* be able to repair up to 10% worth of damaged blocks, but it's not certain. And that's probably a flawed explanation of how PAR3 might work when it's finished.
Bit of a trade-off really, faster calculations or guaranteed recovery for a given number of bad blocks... giving that soon I'll be calculating PAR2 data for 20-24GB at a time (for BluRay discs), I may choose speed. (Prepping 10% PAR2 files for a DVD sized chunk already takes 20-40 minutes.)
You're confusing the purpose of optical media (and tape, to some extent).
The big advantages of optical media:
- write-once, no worries about accidental erasure (unless you buy RW media)
- the mechanics of the unit are seperated from the media, even if the drive breaks there are millions of other drives that you can use to read the media
Basically, optical media is ideal for archival storage, not day-to-day backups. Every few years, when the next-big-thing comes out, I migrate all of my old optical media archives to a newer larger format media. Takes me maybe a week or two, and then I put the old media in a cool dry room in another part of the house (or in another state). Plus, what used to take 5 shelves, now fits on a single shelf.
Do I still maintain multiple disks of backups? Yes. Including deleted files, older revisions, etc. But I still burn an archive set to disk every few months as a pretty permanent "snapshot" (complete with parity files using QuickPar). It's part of my tax filing ritual now.
Slashdot Mirror
The beauty of the Nubbin (as it is officially known) is that you can easily manipulate the mouse without taking your figures from the home row.
Bingo!
Hint for new users: set your mouse pointer speed to the maximum (it then requires less force to move the pointer over larger distances and requires you to use a lighter touch).
Since I code for a living, a trackpoint/nubbin suits me very well. It's "just right" for the small amount of the time that I have to move a cursor to click on a screen widget.
If you touch-type, odds are that you would be well served by getting used to a nubby-style cursor. And it's not even an all-or-nothing deal, as you can easily hook up an external USB mouse. Most systems then let you control the mouse cursor using *either* pointer device at the same time.
So, when you're coding... use the trackpoint.
Doing a bit of graphical layout? Grab the external USB mouse.
(The trackpoint is also a darned sight more handy when taking mass-transit. When the train is rattling around underneath you, a trackpad just doesn't cut it.)
QuickPar. Which would give you a larger recovery window before data is irretrievably lost. (A recovery window starts when you notice data loss and ends when there is no longer enough recovery blocks to repair what is broken.)
'nuff said
Well, okay... a bit more
For archival, staggered, multi-generational backup is the key. For instance, let's say you generate 1GB worth of archival material per month.
April - Write Jan-Apr to a disc
May - Write Feb-May to a disc
June - Write Mar-June to a disc
OpenSTA - A web server load testing tool.
Basically, you record a path or multiple paths through the website. Then you setup multiple machines and threads to randomly walk those paths through the website. You'll want enough machines/connections to the network so that you can flood the web server's outbound connection.
Bonus points if you do log analysis prior and base your "paths" through the site to match the most frequent ones seen in the log files.
You can also do some extrapolation about upper-end, even if you only drive a particular component to 50% or 75% of maximum. We use this to find bottlenecks in our dynamic content, to find out where we need to focus on first (CPU usage or network usage).
Or has a finite amount of time to devote to sorting email.
Yep. I break my mail archives down as follows:
1. Junk mail (saved for training future spam filters)
2. Not-so-junk mail - ends up in a 'delete' folder and I archive it off annually
3. Work mail - gets moved to an annual archive folder
Less places to find stuff = easier to search. And the net result is usually that I can pull an item up faster then if I had sorted it out to infinite sub-folders.
I guess if I still had a monthly trip to NYC on the train (a 3-4 hour trip), I'd still have my 'sorting' time and my e-mails wouldn't be crammed into a yearly folder. But, since I don't travel monthly now, I no longer have that 'sorting' time.
Could also be "Off the Mark", as that artist tends to do some very odd one-panel cartoons.
I have about a 60% success rate with hard disks working more than a year
As other posters have said... you've got environmental issues if you're having drives die on a regular basis.
The #1 killer of drives is heat. Get some temp monitoring software (such as SpeedFan) and find out the operating temperatures of your system. If you're running HDs at more then 45C (40C would be better), you're going to be prone to killing them.
A lot of the newer case designs (Antec p160) place the hard drives in a special rack, with air gaps, and allow for the placement of a fan. It doesn't take much to cool a 7200rpm drive, but they do require just a bit of active airflow to remove any heat.
The other option, if you can't cool the drives with a fan and they're running hot, is to switch to 5400rpm drives. A 5400rpm drive typically runs 5-15C cooler then a 7200rpm drive.
The second killer of drives would be power issues. Either you've got dirty AC (solved with a line conditioning UPS) or a funky power-supply inside (never go cheap on a power-supply) that is screwing up voltages to your drives. This is usually the cause when folks complain about RAID arrays randomly dropping drives.
Lastly, always buy drives with 3 or 5 year warranties. Not only are they likely to last longer, but you can hold the manuf's feet to the fire if they fail. This generally means getting a new/refurb drive back from them within a week that is always at least as large as the original unit.
I've managed it with city water (chlorinated) and a clean ceramic coffee mug.
It's not at all difficult to do (just put an extra 30 seconds on the timer), and you'll be a lot more careful in the future once you see it occur.
The usual recommendation is to drop a toothpick in before microwaving the water. (Or, switch back to boiling a kettle on the stove.)
Antec Sonata case
Opteron 144 w/ Asus SK8V motherboard
Power Supply controls a 120mm fan up front
Auto-adjusting 120mm fan on the exhaust
Stock AMD cooler
FDB drives
As for the video card, maybe an GeForce FX 5900 XT (or if you can find one that is fanless in the ATI or NVIDIA series).
http://www.pcvsconsole.com/features/video/
Gives technical specs for almost every card on the market. At least it gives you an idea whether fanless video card X is fair/poor.
The Sonata cases do a nice job of quieting things down and my Opteron 144 typically runs at 45C under heavy load (25-30C ambient). The 120mm case fans probably help the most.
Thunderbird is horrid.
I use SpamBayes on my one work account with MS Outlook. It's probably 99.99% accurate. Plus, since it scores numerically, it can split spam into "ham", "might be", and "spam". The "spam" is stuff that's 99.999% certain to be spam, and I only have to look at the 2% of messages that fall into the "might be" folder.
One of these days I'm going to breakdown and figure out how to hook SpamBayes into Mozilla Mail.
(My work account gets roughly 200 spam/day.)
Yep, I tend to find that the MS bashers have never spent time working with MSAccess long enough to understand its strengths and weaknesses. Instead, they have a knee jerk reaction and dismiss it out of hand.
Key strengths:
1) MSAccess files are self-contained. Which means that all of the queries, tables, forms, reports and other doodads are all in a single file which is easy for the user to keep track of.
2) Backups are easy for the user. They just drag a copy to another folder or another drive or removable media. Just like every other file that they're used to working with like documents or spreadsheets.
We keep our production database running on a real SQL server product. But all of the end-job analysis often gets done in Excel or Access (each job is usually quite different then the previous jobs, very little shareable).
I'll take a look at OO v2 when it comes out. The question is whether they've managed to package it all into an easy to use format like MSAccess.
I would say you need to either relocate your equipment to another room or get a real UPS, one that filters the AC signal and gives you a clean sine wave. (As in, a server-grade UPS with line conditioning.)
Agreed. I own (3) Sonata cases. One is an Opteron 144 system, one is an Opteron 246 (dual) system, and the 3rd case is currently awaiting parts. The Antec p160 cases are nice for server cases, one more bay then the Sonata, plus they have the interior case temp information. I own 3 of those cases as well, with a 4th one awaiting parts.
Archive them to both DV and DVD.
The trick with DVD is to assume that the disc will eventually go bad to the point that the built-in ECC on the disc will no longer correct the errors.
So what I do is set aside 5-25% of the DVD media for additional error recovery data (a.k.a. parity data created by QuickPar). Then, when the disc starts showing symptoms, I can rip the data off of the disc and use the PAR2 files to repair the damage prior to burning a new copy.
Works fine as long as the disc hasn't degraded so far that there are more errors then the PAR2 files can correct. (Known as the "recovery window".)
The weakness with the built-in ECC on DVD discs is that you don't get a warning that you've entered the recovery window. By the time you see errors on the screen, it's probably no longer to recover the data from the corrupted sector on the disc. It's great while it works, but it doesn't give you any warning that you're about to lose the data entirely.
CD to DVD is only about 6x, depending on whether you're talking 650MB or 700MB vs 4450MB.
BlueRay is 25GB, or about 5x (maybe 6x).
The holographic stuff is nice, but show me a working prototype. Or better, show me something where I can buy a drive for under $500 and media for less then $5. Until then, it's just all pie-in-the-sky and I refuse to get anxious about it.
EQ2 seems to be doing well out of the starting blocks. Something like 300k toons created already (and there's a limit of 4 per account, which means there are at least 75k subscribers and maybe 150k).
/shrug
Will it be the runaway success that EQ1 is?
It's only the second week after launch. Most reviews and word-of-mouth are positive. So far it's been a pretty clean launch with only minor cosmetic bugs found in the game. The beta testers seem to have done a good job, at least with the starting content. They're on a daily patch cycle during the first few weeks, but I haven't seen anything major changed.
I took a break of about 18 months between EQ1 and now... but since EQ2 came out first, I'm giving them a shot first.
It's definitely not EQ1, which is good... whether SOE ruins the game through the hijinks and mismanagement with EQ1 remains to be seen.
From what I'm hearing (not personal experience)... WoW and EQ2 are likely to appeal to slightly different demographics. One way it was put to me was that EQ2 seems to draw the more mature players.
Only time will tell if it's true.
The big reasons we pick Dell when ordering machines:
- 3 year warranty, with options for 4 hour service
(Useful for cases where I don't want to be the support tech for a particular person.)
- a website that lets me play with the configuration before ordering with transparent pricing
(A lot of companies get the website portion wrong. They'll let you configure your system, but won't tell you how much more/less the system will cost as you change a particular item. Dell's site does it properly, showing you that if you go from a 40GB drive to a 60GB drive it will cost you an additional $75, and if you trade down on the CPU you can save $50. You feel like you're in control of the configuration and not stuck with whatever packages that Dell marketing folks were willing to put together.)
All that being said, I'd love to buy a dual-Opteron system from Dell.
I've always just used my filesystem to organize my MP3s. It creates a nice hiearchy structure the way I wanted: Genre->Artist->Album. So Winamp's lack of media library support never bothered me. Even when they added it I never used it.
Same here. You have to do it that way if you use multiple systems to play your audio tracks ($DIETY bless M3U files!).
Every app I've ever seen that lets you "categorize" tracks makes the assumption that you only ever use a single machine to play those tracks.
What I do wish for is a music player that would analyze tempo and other musical characteristics and allow you to sort by beats-per-minute, dynamic range.
I tried CoolPlayer for a while. It was small, sleek, did the job (usually), and had some decent minimalist skins. But it was also buggy beyond belief. Might end up back with that one or not.
Foobar2000 - I might go back to them. Very powerful but really lacking in polish.
Pity, because WinAmp5 was actually rather decent (compared to the garbage that was v3, which caused me to go looking for other solutions).
Using this strategy has given me a great balance of inexpensive, well tested, and powerful machines with some serious longevity -- as I said, I'm still using that Pismo, and it's just fine for many applications.
Things have also begun to flatline instead of doubling in performance / size / capacity every 18-24 months.
Back in the 1990s, the upgrade cycle was 3 years on business computers, and those 3 year old machines were absolute *dogs*. My rule of thumb was that you needed to spend $1000 per year that you wanted to use the machine (e.g. a $2k PC would be worthless in about 2 years, $3k would get you a 3 year machine).
Now you can easily stretch a machine's life to 5-6 years, upgrading memory and possibly adding more disk at about the 3-4 year mark. Plus, everything is so much cheaper that a 3 year PC can easily be had for $1000. (We just went through all of our machines. Anything with more then 800Mhz got the absolute maximum possible memory added, most machines now have 512MB+, new machines are always ordered with 1GB. Now those machines can be used for another year or two.)
My laptop is already 2.5 years old, but with 1GB of RAM, it still works just fine. I'm planning on swapping out the 30GB drive for a slightly faster 60GB next week, then I should be good to go for another year or two. (I suspect the LCD will fade in about another year of use though... since I use the system 12 hours a day.)
The smart folks buy good quality peripherals.
A good monitor will easily last 6-7 years (I think I'm on my 3rd system using the same 19" CRT). It's finally showing enough wear and tear that I'm in the market for a new one (one of these years).
Printer? Finally retired my HP DJ 500 after about a decade. It still works, but I wanted the ability to print on CDs/DVDs.
The keyboard is from 2000 or so (IBM Model 80). Unless something breaks or they stop supporting PS/2 keyboards, I'll probably use that until 2010-2020.
Most of the time, my upgrade merely consists of a new CPU/MB/RAM about every other year, and a new video card on the off years.
Very similar to what I do.
Red data gets periodically snapshotted to DVD (with PAR2 parity information) and stored in the safe-deposit box downtown. Usually as part of my annual tax filing process and at a few other times of the year. Red data ends up stored on multiple snapshot discs over the years, increasing the odds that I'll be able to recover the state of my tax return as of Apr 14 2002.
In addition, Red data gets backed up daily to a removable drive (StarTech DRW115 series drive bays). Old versions and deleted files get moved to a 2nd trash folder where I keep multiple revisions of changes. Currently using Second Copy 2000 to do this, but plan on switching to rsync at some point. I own (3) removable drives (5400rpm 160GB) and swap them out weekly, with the latest being taken across town to another location. (Eventually, I'll move up to a 4th drive and keep 2 across town.)
Yellow data - Same idea. I use FTP to synchronize my software folder to a system in another state whenever I download new software. For other data that is inconvenient to recreate/redownload, I simply mirror it across to a disk on another server daily (or hourly).
Green data gets offloaded to optical media archives with 5-20% PAR2 data, stuck in a binder on a shelf, and I don't worry about it. If I lose the disc, I lose the disc, but I still can recover from minor corruption.
Does this make the case for parity archiving?
But of course! And for the windows folks, there's QuickPar which puts a nice pretty GUI shell on front of it.
There's also been rumor of a PAR3 format in the works, which would not be deterministic, but would calculate roughly an order of magnitude faster. So if you have 10% PAR3 data, you *might* be able to repair up to 10% worth of damaged blocks, but it's not certain. And that's probably a flawed explanation of how PAR3 might work when it's finished.
Bit of a trade-off really, faster calculations or guaranteed recovery for a given number of bad blocks... giving that soon I'll be calculating PAR2 data for 20-24GB at a time (for BluRay discs), I may choose speed. (Prepping 10% PAR2 files for a DVD sized chunk already takes 20-40 minutes.)
You're confusing the purpose of optical media (and tape, to some extent).
The big advantages of optical media:
- write-once, no worries about accidental erasure (unless you buy RW media)
- the mechanics of the unit are seperated from the media, even if the drive breaks there are millions of other drives that you can use to read the media
Basically, optical media is ideal for archival storage, not day-to-day backups. Every few years, when the next-big-thing comes out, I migrate all of my old optical media archives to a newer larger format media. Takes me maybe a week or two, and then I put the old media in a cool dry room in another part of the house (or in another state). Plus, what used to take 5 shelves, now fits on a single shelf.
Do I still maintain multiple disks of backups? Yes. Including deleted files, older revisions, etc. But I still burn an archive set to disk every few months as a pretty permanent "snapshot" (complete with parity files using QuickPar). It's part of my tax filing ritual now.