

Do you need tape? Do you really need that much data? Archival grade DVDs can store a few GB (an order of magnitude less than the TBs you asked for!), and probably easier to find/source.


Do you need tape? Do you really need that much data? Archival grade DVDs can store a few GB (an order of magnitude less than the TBs you asked for!), and probably easier to find/source.


Large companies still use tape for their large data sets. Tape has some useful advantages that make it worth it in very specific situations.
The first is when you have a lot of data - if you have several hundred of even thousands tapes (likely including duplicates!) then the quantity of data you have backed up is large enough the tapes are the cheapest.
The second - as hinted above - is duplicates. If you don’t want the data lost a tape is a good answer to have several copies. While a disk might be cheaper, they are fragile and computers are not designed to swap disks that often. Even USB which is designed for swapping isn’t that good: the connector will physically wear out a lot faster than you would expect making the costs much higher to manage this. Plus the labor to plug/unplug a lot of drives will get you.
Third, some tapes come in a write once form. If you have data that (often for legal reasons) you need to store such that it cannot be modified later then tape is often you best answer to ensure the data really wasn’t changed. (either by an executive hiding their tracks, or an attacker trying to put ransomware on you).
That said, for most reading this, a few disks in a NAS is better than about 98% of people have and if you have snapshots on the NAS probably good enough for everything (your only risk is fire or theft of the NAS - if you cannot live with this get a second NAS elsewhere, or a cloud backup), similar cost, and has enough other useful features that you want it anyway.


Not what you are asking for, but maybe what you want: https://invidious.io/ is a youtube front end with some features that might or might not make it what you want.
Even hand coded projects need more than 6 months before I’ll replace anything in my stacks. Too many projects start with great intention but then the founder gets bored (life gets in the way?) and they go unmaintained. Really I’m looking for projects that enough developers have got involved in that I can be confident it won’t go stagnant. I could be one of those developers, but I don’t have enough time to contribute to all the different projects I use (I barely have time to contribute to the one project I maintain)
Get lucky - just as this was starting I saw a failed disk notification on my NAS so I ordered a new drive just before they went up. Then I realized it was a stale notification for the drive I replaced a year ago so I have a spare should one fail.
somebody is going to want cash in
Maybe. The hard drive makers have long experience with boom-bust cycles. They are likely trying to figure out if this is real, or just a blip and in a two years (when the new factory opens!) demand drops again.
If there is new capacity in the future my guess (guess!) is that this is a case of a new factory to replace the old, and they just keep running the old for another year instead of scrapping it right away.
Start with a problem. What you trying to solve. Hosting music is different from backing up your computer. That is different from a home dashboard.
Because I have no idea if the questioner is going to do that beforehand


Yamaha is a bad example as they are in too many non-overlapping industries. It works for them, and can work for you, but in general it is best to focus more than they do. Of course as you get large you have more experts and so you can expand. Just because pianos have nothing in common with ATVs doesn’t mean Yamaha shouldn’t be in both, but if you are not as large as they are the lack of overlap means you can’t personally be a deep expert in both.


Companies you should diversify what they do within the area of their expertise. You don’t want to go diversifying in areas that are too far outside your expertise because then you you can’t leverage the excess you already have to do things, but if you’re within your expertise, that means that if the one thing doesn’t work out because the economy is down, maybe that other part is working well and you can still make money.
When IPv6 was first created, the dream was that your machine would get a new IP address any time the whole network felt some need for that. The idea was, as someone added a network, we may need to change the way your systems are numbered in order to make the backbone routing a lot easier to fit in memory. This hasn’t seemed to work out, but that was the dream.
I assume your ZFS system has plenty of redundancy. Thus, I would enable snapshots and do a regular rotation because ZFS snapshots are so easy to recover from for most disasters. What that leaves is the catastrophic losses from, say, your house burning down. So you still need something off-site, but the ZFS will cover most of your backup needs.


I did the monthly arch upgrade and had to reboot to get some service to come up. Took an extra 5 minutes this month.


It might be but it is risky - if anything goes wrong there goes that data.
The problem is people don’t want a focused community. They want a broad community so when they have a question they can ask and find an expert - but not so broad that the noise means they can’t follow anything. We do focused communities because the world (or even internet) has too many people and so the noise of all the discussions is too much. However that isn’t what we want.
Unfortunately downvote is the standard response to ‘i disagree to this insightful comment’. They really should just track total votes as a ‘this is how important others feel your coment is’. There is value in downvote for ‘not bad enough for a reasonable mod to delete but still bad’. (.ml is not a reasonable mod - they delete anything)


There are several people who work on linux who live in California who thus are subject to California laws. There are people who don’t live in California who sometimes travel to California and thus could be subject to those laws at times (see a lawyer)


Many projects are doing the “not for use in California” thing. I’d set the birthday to yesterday - it is the safest. This is only useful as a do-not-track, and kids get the best protection there. For anything else - kids are well able to change their birthday on the computer, so if you want to protect kids from harmful content (whatever that is - no two people agree if you dig deep enough) you need something that is stronger than a claimed age.
I use grocy for chore /task management. Then home assistant to put it on a dashboard that looks nice. I’m not totally happy but it is the best I’ve found.
Yes, but not as an out of the box solution. Tape drives use standard sizes, and standard interfaces (often serial attached SCSI). You can buy a tape drive and a USB encloser that lets you put your own drive in it and the tape drive will work. You need to make sure the USB encloser provides enough power, is big enough, and has the correct interface, but it will “just work” if you select the right parts and plug them in. Do make sure you read the spec - some cheaper enclosers may not support USB3 data rates which you tape drive may need to work well.
The USB designers made the decision back in the day that they would not design a protocol for CDrom (then important), tape, or other such things. Instead they designed a “here is how to transmit SCSI over USB”, which makes it cheap to design USB to SCSI adapters and that is what has been done.