4 ms·

This is because most of the non-technical retail customers don't value reliability too much. They want more capacity and good speed at the lowest price point. H

by nine_k 2y ago

This is because most of the non-technical retail customers don't value reliability too much. They want more capacity and good speed at the lowest price point. Hence the proliferation of QLC / MLC NVMe drives with a small SLC write cache. It's not very stable, and it can only keep the write speed high for small files, but hey, you can get a terabyte for $50, and it loads the latest game real fast! Similarly, many users don't have much valuable, unique data on their computers. The most important stuff very often lives completely in the cloud, where it's properly backed up, etc. Also, the most ubiquitous computing device now is a smartphone. It has all the automatic backup stuff built in, you can put an SD card into it, and it will transparently extend the free space, without hassle. Even on PCs, MS and Apple nudge the users very prominently to use OneDrive and Apple Cloud for backing up their desktops / laptops. But past certain size, it costs money though, hence many people opt out of that. Again, because most people value the lowest price, and just hope for the best; because what could ever happen? Silent data corruption can still be an issue, but, frankly, malware is a much bigger threat for a typical non-technical user. Technical people have no trouble setting up all that: mount your disks under LVM, run ZFS on top of it, set up multiple backups, set up their own "magic wormhole" to share files with stranger easily. But they know why they are doing that. Educating users about IT hygiene is key for improving it, much like educating people about the dangers of not washing hands, or of eating unhealthy stuff, helped improve their health.

rietta 2y ago
And without care. Everyone's precious photo albums will go with them to the grave. We live in a time where the books and data we write are likely to vanish long before any previous period. We don't leave behind books, codexes, or scrolls, or stone tablets anymore. Scholars will have more clue about life in 4th century via the Oxyrhynchus Papyri collection than 21st century Terra Haute, Indiana.
- bloomingeek 2y ago
  Absolutely! Cell phone are a great example. Most people love taking pics, but rarely give much thought about storing them for the future. Why? It's kind of difficult, from the angle of categorizing the subject matter. Most of us on this website, I'm guessing, enjoy this sort of activity. But I'm guessing most people would rather go to the dentist then sort through photos and decide the best place to put them, both folders and storage.
  - autoexec 2y ago
    > But I'm guessing most people would rather go to the dentist then sort through photos and decide the best place to put them, both folders and storage. Most people tend to love going through their old photos, thinking of the people and places depicted, and sorting them. For an extremely long time this was entirely the norm and it took place mostly using large cumbersome physical books where meta data was recorded by hand by writing on the back of the photo. It's become much easier now that files are digital, only slightly offset by the fact that digital has enabled us to take many more photos than in the past. What I see more often are people who have no idea when the photos on their phones are actually stored at all (what's a file system?), let alone how to copy them off their phone and onto something more appropriate besides resorting to something like emailing photos to themselves which has all the problems of adding and successfully transferring large file attachments. It's a chore because companies really don't want people to have access to their own files unless it's on the company's terms and using their cloud servers.
- throw0101a 2y ago
  > And without care. Everyone's precious photo albums will go with them to the grave. If you're in the Apple ecosystem, please set up a recovery key so that your loved ones can access your photos and other things in case something unexpected should happen: * https://support.apple.com/en-ca/109345 https://support.apple.com/en-ca/109345 More generally: open Notepad (or whatever) and put the URL, username, and password for e-mail† account and bank/credit card accounts (and phone PIN), print it out, and put the paper in a sealed envelope and show its location (on top of fridge?) to a trusted friend/family. † If someone can access your e-mail / SMS, they can probably reset any other account(s).
  - rietta 2y ago
    This needs to be published by everyone who has a blog and shared with friends and family everywhere. I know first hand the mess from my friend who died of cancer at 38 leaving behind a wife and daughter with not only only accounts being locked out but a sprawling home lab that they did not understand. Even things like smart lights became a stumbling block when they could not control them. The router was a virtual machine on a rack mounted server in the basement. Had to unwind a lot.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      >Even things like smart lights became a stumbling block when they could not control them. The router was a virtual machine on a rack mounted server in the basement. Had to unwind a lot. A possibly unpopular opinion is that people should think long and hard about things like smart lights so that they can have cool mood lighting or whatever. I'm needing to have a lot of electrical redone because of a kitchen fire--microwave offed itself in the middle of the night, scary--and I told my electrician "no smart stuff." Which he was totally on-board with. I honestly think it's pretty much a gimmick for most people.
  - autoexec 2y ago
    A safe deposit box isn't expensive and can store a hard copy of your passwords and other personal information.
- account42 2y ago
  I don't think that's true really. Yes most of the data recorded today will be lost but there is just so much being recorded that what remains is still much more than what we have of previous centuries. What we have of the 4th century is limited to a subset of what people specifically chose to write down. What will remain of this century includes that plus much more incidental information like the backdrop of a selfie that could turn out much more interesting to future historians than what you think is important now.
acdha 2y ago
> This is because most of the non-technical retail customers don't value reliability too much. … Similarly, many users don't have much valuable, unique data on their computers. The most important stuff very often lives completely in the cloud, where it's properly backed up, etc. There’s a contradiction here which I think is worth fully considering. People definitely do value their data – data recovery services have been getting revenue for decades from people who lost things they care about – but there’s been a market failure where operating system vendors left the users to fend for themselves, everyone agreed that was hard, and the majority of users quite rationally decided that cloud services were better than learning to be unpaid sysadmins. What we should be asking is why this is all so hard. Local file systems with strong integrity checks and seamless replication onto attached storage should be so basic that people can just assume it’ll work without them having to spend time on it.
- wtallis 2y ago
  > Local file systems with strong integrity checks and seamless replication onto attached storage should be so basic that people can just assume it’ll work without them having to spend time on it. What you're asking for is basically a bug-free btrfs plus a bit of automation on top (unless you also want a smart caching layer, which we already know is a Hard Problem). That automation is simple enough that it would definitely exist by now if there was a bug-free btrfs for it to manage. But that turns out to be a hard problem, so anyone who wants to run their system with automatic add and remove and rebalance is looking for trouble. (ZFS has a better reputation on the reliability front, but is too inflexible for a consumer-grade pooling of arbitrary storage devices.)
  - acdha 2y ago
    Right - when I heard the ZFS announcement at Usenix I assumed it’d become standard a decade later when consumer hardware could handle the extra work, but it seems to have been sandbagged by the rise of cloud storage and the switch to SSDs reducing the frequency where people get corrupted data instead of all-or-nothing failures. Apple claims that their hardware makes it unnecessary for APFS but I’m skeptical and the last time I looked the Time Machine situation was still pretty clunky. I haven’t checked Windows recently since I only use Linux and macOS.
account42 2y ago
> Silent data corruption can still be an issue, but, frankly, malware is a much bigger threat for a typical non-technical user. Complete BS. Cryptolockers and similar are not a concern for regular users while disk failure is something pretty much everyone gets to experience over their lifetime.

by nine_k 2y ago

rietta 2y ago

And without care. Everyone's precious photo albums will go with them to the grave. We live in a time where the books and data we write are likely to vanish long before any previous period. We don't leave behind books, codexes, or scrolls, or stone tablets anymore. Scholars will have more clue about life in 4th century via the Oxyrhynchus Papyri collection than 21st century Terra Haute, Indiana.

bloomingeek 2y ago
Absolutely! Cell phone are a great example. Most people love taking pics, but rarely give much thought about storing them for the future. Why? It's kind of difficult, from the angle of categorizing the subject matter. Most of us on this website, I'm guessing, enjoy this sort of activity. But I'm guessing most people would rather go to the dentist then sort through photos and decide the best place to put them, both folders and storage.
- autoexec 2y ago
  > But I'm guessing most people would rather go to the dentist then sort through photos and decide the best place to put them, both folders and storage. Most people tend to love going through their old photos, thinking of the people and places depicted, and sorting them. For an extremely long time this was entirely the norm and it took place mostly using large cumbersome physical books where meta data was recorded by hand by writing on the back of the photo. It's become much easier now that files are digital, only slightly offset by the fact that digital has enabled us to take many more photos than in the past. What I see more often are people who have no idea when the photos on their phones are actually stored at all (what's a file system?), let alone how to copy them off their phone and onto something more appropriate besides resorting to something like emailing photos to themselves which has all the problems of adding and successfully transferring large file attachments. It's a chore because companies really don't want people to have access to their own files unless it's on the company's terms and using their cloud servers.
throw0101a 2y ago
> And without care. Everyone's precious photo albums will go with them to the grave. If you're in the Apple ecosystem, please set up a recovery key so that your loved ones can access your photos and other things in case something unexpected should happen: * https://support.apple.com/en-ca/109345 https://support.apple.com/en-ca/109345 More generally: open Notepad (or whatever) and put the URL, username, and password for e-mail† account and bank/credit card accounts (and phone PIN), print it out, and put the paper in a sealed envelope and show its location (on top of fridge?) to a trusted friend/family. † If someone can access your e-mail / SMS, they can probably reset any other account(s).
- rietta 2y ago
  This needs to be published by everyone who has a blog and shared with friends and family everywhere. I know first hand the mess from my friend who died of cancer at 38 leaving behind a wife and daughter with not only only accounts being locked out but a sprawling home lab that they did not understand. Even things like smart lights became a stumbling block when they could not control them. The router was a virtual machine on a rack mounted server in the basement. Had to unwind a lot.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    >Even things like smart lights became a stumbling block when they could not control them. The router was a virtual machine on a rack mounted server in the basement. Had to unwind a lot. A possibly unpopular opinion is that people should think long and hard about things like smart lights so that they can have cool mood lighting or whatever. I'm needing to have a lot of electrical redone because of a kitchen fire--microwave offed itself in the middle of the night, scary--and I told my electrician "no smart stuff." Which he was totally on-board with. I honestly think it's pretty much a gimmick for most people.
- autoexec 2y ago
  A safe deposit box isn't expensive and can store a hard copy of your passwords and other personal information.
account42 2y ago
I don't think that's true really. Yes most of the data recorded today will be lost but there is just so much being recorded that what remains is still much more than what we have of previous centuries. What we have of the 4th century is limited to a subset of what people specifically chose to write down. What will remain of this century includes that plus much more incidental information like the backdrop of a selfie that could turn out much more interesting to future historians than what you think is important now.

acdha 2y ago

> This is because most of the non-technical retail customers don't value reliability too much. … Similarly, many users don't have much valuable, unique data on their computers. The most important stuff very often lives completely in the cloud, where it's properly backed up, etc. There’s a contradiction here which I think is worth fully considering. People definitely do value their data – data recovery services have been getting revenue for decades from people who lost things they care about – but there’s been a market failure where operating system vendors left the users to fend for themselves, everyone agreed that was hard, and the majority of users quite rationally decided that cloud services were better than learning to be unpaid sysadmins. What we should be asking is why this is all so hard. Local file systems with strong integrity checks and seamless replication onto attached storage should be so basic that people can just assume it’ll work without them having to spend time on it.

wtallis 2y ago
> Local file systems with strong integrity checks and seamless replication onto attached storage should be so basic that people can just assume it’ll work without them having to spend time on it. What you're asking for is basically a bug-free btrfs plus a bit of automation on top (unless you also want a smart caching layer, which we already know is a Hard Problem). That automation is simple enough that it would definitely exist by now if there was a bug-free btrfs for it to manage. But that turns out to be a hard problem, so anyone who wants to run their system with automatic add and remove and rebalance is looking for trouble. (ZFS has a better reputation on the reliability front, but is too inflexible for a consumer-grade pooling of arbitrary storage devices.)
- acdha 2y ago
  Right - when I heard the ZFS announcement at Usenix I assumed it’d become standard a decade later when consumer hardware could handle the extra work, but it seems to have been sandbagged by the rise of cloud storage and the switch to SSDs reducing the frequency where people get corrupted data instead of all-or-nothing failures. Apple claims that their hardware makes it unnecessary for APFS but I’m skeptical and the last time I looked the Time Machine situation was still pretty clunky. I haven’t checked Windows recently since I only use Linux and macOS.

account42 2y ago

> Silent data corruption can still be an issue, but, frankly, malware is a much bigger threat for a typical non-technical user. Complete BS. Cryptolockers and similar are not a concern for regular users while disk failure is something pretty much everyone gets to experience over their lifetime.