On 14 Oct 99, at 18:37, Jukka Santala wrote:
> Personally, I think the big problem with regards to this is not people
> quitting so much as the possibility of major hard-drive failure etc. on the
> testers. I doubt many of them keep good backups
NO EXCUSE! A Zip drive or a CD-R is inexpensive and effective; one
will service many networked systems, they don't all have to be
running the same OS.
> (And the client is supposed to run undisturbed, anyway)
?
I thought the client was designed to run in the background to the
user's normal activity. To me, that includes running backups. In any
case, I can't see what harm there is to the client in copying the
save files (also results.txt and the various ini & log files). The
client usually doesn't have these files open. If you have a save file
open for copying at the instant the client tries to write it then the
file rename will fail & you'll lose writing the save file on that
particular occasion. It's unlikely, but you _might_ lose an extra
half hour's work if your system happens to go belly up in the
interval before it tries to write the save files again.
> and with a test taking anywhere from year to two
> it's bound to become an increasily common experience for somebody's
> hard-drive to give up the ghost, or an error/virus wipe the drive clean, and
> the person running the test not only lose the work but probably take their
> anger out on PrimeNet once they learn there's no way to recover the work.
I get the impression that hard drives are becoming increasingly
reliable. And virus infestations are very often not as destructive as
all that, it's usually possible to recover data. The most frequent
cause of data loss, by far, is the user accidentally deleting their
own data.
If this happened to me, and I didn't have a backup, I'd have only
myself to blame. And, personally, I'd be more concerned about lost
data that I couldn't recompute in _any_ finite time.
If it _really_ worries us that PrimeNet might get "blamed" for data
loss, let's put a clause in the PrimeNet "rules" to the effect that
users are personally responsible for the security and integrity of
GIMPS/PrimeNet data on which they're working.
Regards
Brian Beesley
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