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So you've tested whether your toaster has proper grounding and other safety precautions, in case it shortcircuits? Nope. I have a fully paid and verified home

by brk 17y ago

So you've tested whether your toaster has proper grounding and other safety precautions, in case it shortcircuits? Nope. I have a fully paid and verified home owners insurance policy though that covers any probable loss from a toaster fire. It's sort of like having an offsite backup of my important personal stuff. Your example is really not a parallel to a data backup. It's difficult to fully test all of the toasters failure modes in a non-destructive way. It's easy to setup an automated backup to a remote location. Given the gmail storage limits, you could tar and gzip your files and email your gmail account with the backup data. A better example in a "homeowner" realm is the flood pans that you can buy to put under your water heater or washing machine. You'd like to be able to trust that the manufacturer made a waterproof device, but at the same time it's cheap and easy to insure yourself against the most common failure modes. The sound bite is not stupid. People who believe you can outsource all the messyness of keeping a website alive are continually bitten in the ass by EC2, Rackspace, etc. failures.

sailormoon 17y ago
An insurance policy is equivalent to an offsite backup? So you don't have any personal items of any intrinsic value at all; you could lose it all, get a cheque in return, and be happy? Wow. Well, awesome, but I doubt that is common. And look, I agree with you in many ways - people need to take responsibility for their own backups, sure. But there is a division of responsibility. I mean, even if all my backups are 100% perfect, I am still trusting the hosting provider to, well, keep the power on. Pay the peering bill. Keep the server temp down. Not go bankrupt tomorrow. You can just follow this chain as far as you want. Whether you like it or not, you're utterly dependent on the DNS root server admins. There is nothing at all you can do to prepare yourself for their failure. I bet you can't generate your own electricity or grow your own food, either. All of civilisation is built on co-dependency and delegation of responsibility. It's the only way to do anything complex. At some point, you must delegate. Atwood should have checked - but he was paying his host to do it. That's like having an employee whose job it is to do backups. At some point, you just have to let go and trust them. Otherwise you can never really do anything; you're caught up in checking minutia; I can give examples of this kind of leadership failure until my keyboard breaks.

by brk 17y ago

sailormoon 17y ago

An insurance policy is equivalent to an offsite backup? So you don't have any personal items of any intrinsic value at all; you could lose it all, get a cheque in return, and be happy? Wow. Well, awesome, but I doubt that is common. And look, I agree with you in many ways - people need to take responsibility for their own backups, sure. But there is a division of responsibility. I mean, even if all my backups are 100% perfect, I am still trusting the hosting provider to, well, keep the power on. Pay the peering bill. Keep the server temp down. Not go bankrupt tomorrow. You can just follow this chain as far as you want. Whether you like it or not, you're utterly dependent on the DNS root server admins. There is nothing at all you can do to prepare yourself for their failure. I bet you can't generate your own electricity or grow your own food, either. All of civilisation is built on co-dependency and delegation of responsibility. It's the only way to do anything complex. At some point, you must delegate. Atwood should have checked - but he was paying his host to do it. That's like having an employee whose job it is to do backups. At some point, you just have to let go and trust them. Otherwise you can never really do anything; you're caught up in checking minutia; I can give examples of this kind of leadership failure until my keyboard breaks.