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Is data really so heterogeneous? How many files in your home directory are generic, with bit-exact duplicates existing in the home directories of many other use
by atdt 12y ago
Is data really so heterogeneous? How many files in your home directory are generic, with bit-exact duplicates existing in the home directories of many other users? And the remaining files, which are uniquely yours -- what percent of each of them consists of generic data, like file headers?
- lmm 12y agoI have 100gb of gaming screencaptures. That data exists nowhere else (some people may have copies of the final cuts on youtube, but that's tiny in comparison); if you could store it as input data + game code you could compress it by a lot, but I highly doubt Amazon's that far ahead of mainline video encoding technology. Other than that, I think the big culprit will be photos; everyone's family photos are different (the JPEG header is a tiny proportion of a modern 5MB photo) and that's one of the most popular things for people to back up on these kind of services. Plenty of data is generic in the way you say, but plenty of it isn't. So I don't think there's any free lunch here.