Re: iPod authorization

On Tue, 3 Jan 2006 13:27:15 -0800, Richard E Maine <nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> G.T. <getnews1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> Because filesystems and RAID do fail.
>
> Been there. Done that. *EVERYTHING* fails. A strategy based on "this
> setup can't fail" is based on a false premise, no matter what the setup
> is - even one that includes multiple off-site backups.

For the record, I never claimed it could never fail. It's just music,
FFS. If the perfect-storm of hardware failures happens all at the same
time, I get to shove a couple hundred CDs back into the Mac to rip stuff
in the background while I'm doing other stuff. Not a biggie.


In other words, I'm concentrating on risks which are more likely and
have more implications should they fail. Music from CDs that I have?
No big deal. Digital photos that can't be retaken? Of course, those
are media in two different locations, _and_ on spinning drives in
another two.

> All such things are more properly a matter of cost/benefit
> tradeoffs more along the line of "the odds of this failing are low
> enough that the costs of doing better aren't worth the return." Now that
> tradeoff might well give the answer that Dave's approach is fine for his
> needs - in fact, I'd suspect that it is so, so this isn't meant as a
> criticism of Dave's choice.

Oh, don't worry, I'm comfortable with my choice regardless of who does
or doesn't agree with it. But yeah - in the 1:1000 or so chance of data
loss, oh well, I get to exert minimal effort to undo it.

> RAIDs protect against only a few specific kinds of failures. They are
> quite vulnerable to several other "common mode failures". Ones I have
> personally seen include:
>
> 1. Yes, the system was on an UPS, but the UPS failed in a way that put
> through a huge power spike and took out multiple drives. :-(

Seen that once in, what, 10 years that RAID has been common. So yeah,
it happpens. That was a source code repository, which unsurprisingly,
was backed up.

> 2. Fire in the computer room. Yep, that one caused a building evacuation
> at work, and I still recall the white face on the hardware maintenance
> guy when he looked up and saw the smoke comming from the computer room
> window and realized that, not only was this not a drill or false alarm,
> but that it was his computer burning. :-(

They don't like it when the magic smoke leaks out. But, my media is in
a fireproof room, which is where the raid array isn't.

> 3. And then, of course, there all the classic cases of human error. If
> some human accidentally goes in and deletes everything, overriding all
> the security settings, and thinking he is doing something else, that
> RAID system will "nicely" propogate his mistake to as many copies as it
> maintains. I've seen variants of that one multiple times. :-(

You bet. Now add a nice SAN replication, which then transmits your
error to the offsite online copies quite happily. Again, if critical,
it's on tape.
Music isn't critical.

> A bit of a pet peeve of mine... as I've listened to vendors try to sell
> their systems based on a claim that they "can't fail" and thus don't
> need backups...

Repeat after me: "Get the hell out of my office." One of my favorite
questions, which I got to ask a vendor again today, is this: "OK, so
what happens when your company does the dot-bomb thing, and the hardware
you sold me catches fire? How do I get to my data?" Some of 'em squirm
rather uncomfortably.

> This is for some high-value data at work - data
> that cost literally hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire, so we
> are actually a bit picky about it. Not quite the same situation as my
> music collection.
>

Sounds like we understand each other completely.

Dave Hinz

.

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