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Something like this with Steam happened to my friend not too long ago. It was very saddening because he literally lost years of files (including personal projec

by Xylemon 12y ago

Something like this with Steam happened to my friend not too long ago. It was very saddening because he literally lost years of files (including personal projects) and salvaged what he could. That was with the Steam Beta and I caught Steam doing this myself (after he told me what happened). I was lucky to stop the script and switched out of the beta. At the time he reported this to Valve themselves and said they were "investigating the issue and knew of it". Seems to still be here, sigh. I know the morale here is keep your files backed up but come on, this is a ridiculous issue Valve still hasn't fixed.

justizin 12y ago
That is quite frustrating, and consumer vendors should be mindful of creating life-changing experiences. Also: backups. I know it sounds cliche, but look, if it has a mechanical hard drive, the manufacturer could have slightly mis-calibrated one of the mechanical assemblies, and this could have happened because the nature of digital storage is that it is essentially ephemeral. Protect yourself from things outside your control. You don't need the most sophisticated solution, just an external usb drive.
- moe 12y ago
  Or if you're on a Mac you don't even need any extra hardware. Just ARQ and an AWS Account [or google drive, or dreamobjects, or SFTP, or...]. Your backup is client side encrypted and completely painless. Take half an hour to set it up and then just forget it till it saves your ass. Not affiliated, just a fan: http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/ http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/
- Chattered 12y ago
  But if that external usb drive is mounted at the time (as in the case of the user this thread is about), then all data on that drive will be deleted. For this reason, the recommened way to use things like rsnapshot is to have your backup directories owned by root and with permissions masked to something like rwxr--r--. If you then want to read your backups easily, you do things like mount it under NFS as read-only.
  - Latty 12y ago
    A (RAID6) fileserver running ZFS with filesystem-level snapshotting. It's really, really good.
    - cmurf 12y ago
      Btrfs snapshots, and then cp --reflink from the snapshot to the current tree whatever files or directories are missing; i.e. no need to rollback to a snapshot.
FeeTinesAMady 12y ago
I think Valve should be sued over this, and lose. Sure, there will be clauses in their EULA stating that they aren't liable, but morally, those clauses should not be valid in any licensing agreement. Their commercial software caused damage to people, and they should pay through the nose for it.
- stonogo 12y ago
  There are several problems with your ideas. The most important one is that programmers only call themselves engineers until it comes time to take legal responsibility for their work; then suddenly they're artists creating works for hire. Programmers have worked very hard through the years to create the current liability-free environment; people die because of health care programming bugs, pilots crash because of avionics bugs, and people lose fortunes -- or welfare checks -- because of finance programming errors, but programmers just throw up their hands, and say that programming is hard. The other problem here is the concept that commercial software should be held to some higher standard of liability than noncommercial software. If some random group of strangers build a bridge, which then collapses and kills someone, they're still very much open to lawsuits. So far, the programmers of the world have fended this off by shouting in all-caps about warranties express or implied -- but eventually (I hope) the world will get sick of their shit and hold them accountable for failure. When that happens, whether or not the software is sold should have nothing to do with damage liability (outside of any sale contracts that my apply). A man can dream.
  - click170 12y ago
    There's just no sense in telling a hobbyist what to do with his personal time. That means its no longer a hobby, it's a charity exercise. I think the problem is EULAs. Foss Eula's are pretty straight forward - no warranty: use at your own risk. Corporate software takes the same approach, and I think that's cowardly and underhanded because they are a profit driven entity which, if not incentivized properly, would literally rob you blind. Corporations are profit driven. No profit, no corporation. If your going to profit off of selling me something which then burns my house down because it was cheaper for the vendor to not build to standards (best practices), shouldn't they be held liable? If someone made a lamp for themselves that wasn't up to standard, and then left it out on the curb for garbage pickup when you came along and took it home, plugged it in, and burned down your house, who's fault is that? They didn't sell it to you. There was no purchase.

by Xylemon 12y ago

justizin 12y ago

That is quite frustrating, and consumer vendors should be mindful of creating life-changing experiences. Also: backups. I know it sounds cliche, but look, if it has a mechanical hard drive, the manufacturer could have slightly mis-calibrated one of the mechanical assemblies, and this could have happened because the nature of digital storage is that it is essentially ephemeral. Protect yourself from things outside your control. You don't need the most sophisticated solution, just an external usb drive.

moe 12y ago
Or if you're on a Mac you don't even need any extra hardware. Just ARQ and an AWS Account [or google drive, or dreamobjects, or SFTP, or...]. Your backup is client side encrypted and completely painless. Take half an hour to set it up and then just forget it till it saves your ass. Not affiliated, just a fan: http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/ http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/
Chattered 12y ago
But if that external usb drive is mounted at the time (as in the case of the user this thread is about), then all data on that drive will be deleted. For this reason, the recommened way to use things like rsnapshot is to have your backup directories owned by root and with permissions masked to something like rwxr--r--. If you then want to read your backups easily, you do things like mount it under NFS as read-only.
- Latty 12y ago
  A (RAID6) fileserver running ZFS with filesystem-level snapshotting. It's really, really good.
  - cmurf 12y ago
    Btrfs snapshots, and then cp --reflink from the snapshot to the current tree whatever files or directories are missing; i.e. no need to rollback to a snapshot.

FeeTinesAMady 12y ago

I think Valve should be sued over this, and lose. Sure, there will be clauses in their EULA stating that they aren't liable, but morally, those clauses should not be valid in any licensing agreement. Their commercial software caused damage to people, and they should pay through the nose for it.

stonogo 12y ago
There are several problems with your ideas. The most important one is that programmers only call themselves engineers until it comes time to take legal responsibility for their work; then suddenly they're artists creating works for hire. Programmers have worked very hard through the years to create the current liability-free environment; people die because of health care programming bugs, pilots crash because of avionics bugs, and people lose fortunes -- or welfare checks -- because of finance programming errors, but programmers just throw up their hands, and say that programming is hard. The other problem here is the concept that commercial software should be held to some higher standard of liability than noncommercial software. If some random group of strangers build a bridge, which then collapses and kills someone, they're still very much open to lawsuits. So far, the programmers of the world have fended this off by shouting in all-caps about warranties express or implied -- but eventually (I hope) the world will get sick of their shit and hold them accountable for failure. When that happens, whether or not the software is sold should have nothing to do with damage liability (outside of any sale contracts that my apply). A man can dream.
- click170 12y ago
  There's just no sense in telling a hobbyist what to do with his personal time. That means its no longer a hobby, it's a charity exercise. I think the problem is EULAs. Foss Eula's are pretty straight forward - no warranty: use at your own risk. Corporate software takes the same approach, and I think that's cowardly and underhanded because they are a profit driven entity which, if not incentivized properly, would literally rob you blind. Corporations are profit driven. No profit, no corporation. If your going to profit off of selling me something which then burns my house down because it was cheaper for the vendor to not build to standards (best practices), shouldn't they be held liable? If someone made a lamp for themselves that wasn't up to standard, and then left it out on the curb for garbage pickup when you came along and took it home, plugged it in, and burned down your house, who's fault is that? They didn't sell it to you. There was no purchase.