On 15.01.19 10:22, Chris Albertson wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 14, 2019 at 4:36 PM Erik Christiansen <[email protected]>
> wrote:
...
> >
> > In reality, there's always more than one way to eat an elephant, so
> > there's no real need to complicate life by making backups a growing
> > agglomeration of deltas¹. The nifty and very *nixy rsync utility solves
> > the write corruption problem directly. Rsync always verifies that each
> > transferred file was correctly reconstructed on the receiving side,
>
> You missed the point. The scenario is like this.. You have a file in
> the text editor window and you save it but unknown to you only there are
> 100 lines missing from the center of the file. Perhaps you ment to delete
> a word but accidentally deleted 100 lines. Perhaps the editor has a bug
> but in any case the file is corrupted on your main hard drive.
Perhaps not. The problem with writing only deltas is that one corrupted
delta, whether from media deterioration or any other cause, corrupts all
archives after that. (As Jon has also pointed out.)
Worth realising is that the problem of making a mistake while editing is
not a backup issue, but a versioning issue, so recovery comes
conveniently from the version control system. That has tagged versions.
The backup melange does not. Rummaging back to a specific version in the
backup media would be a very clumsy way to attempt to address a version
recovery.
I have experienced media decay, but in 40 years no serious loss of data
due to editor fumbles - and that despite 30 of those years spent as a
professional software developer.
...
>
> Funny how all the self-invented methods are EXACTLY what the professions
> did in the 1970's It works but a human operator has to "do stuff" the
> chance of human error or forgetting something is large. Now days it is
> set up with a few mouse clicks and "just works" and runs for years with not
> effort.
I _am_ a professional from the 1970's¹, and the methods which preserved
the code of many international software developments, powering
telecommunications products, still work fine here, just scaled down.
No need for the latest clicky-mousey interference with a good simple CLI
experience.
Erik
¹ 1978. Most of my methods are more 1990s - just no GUI crap, thanks.
--
The meta-problem here is that the configuration wizard does all the approved
rituals (GUI with standardized clicky buttons, help popping up in a browser,
etc. etc.) but doesn't have the central attribute these are supposed to achieve:
discoverability. That is, the quality that every point in the interface has
prompts and actions attached to it from which you can learn what to do next.
- Eric Raymond, in "The Luxury of Ignorance."
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