Re: Revision control for a large-scale LaTeX document preparation.

JohnF schrieb:
Mathias Lindner <mathias.lindner@xxxxxx> wrote:
JohnF schrieb:
Mathias Lindner <mathias.lindner@xxxxxx> wrote:
you can work independently from any network and server.
I have the repository on a USB stick.
Yikes! You probably rewrite data on that stick quite frequently.
Google "wear leveling" and then make sure you've got plenty of
backups. (Talk to professional photographers, e.g., sports,
who typically get one chance at a shot. They go through sdhc
cards like peanuts.)
Well, no problem to pull the tip into a local clone and push the changes onto the stick at the end of the day. All frequent work can be done on the hard drive.

That's what I do, too; think of flash drives like floppies.
And I also keep several copies. Mainly, though, I've switched
to hub-powered usb hard drives (specifically western digital
passport elites) for most backup purposes, and use flash memory
mostly for sneakernet purposes now. But I keep three (grandfathered)
wd passport's anyway, redundancy providing the only reliable safety
margin regardless of medium.

However, as far as I know the flash memory breaks at writing. Reading is always possible. Please correct me, if I'm wrong.

That's been my experience with several failed ones. But -- although
it apparently "breaks at writing", my linux box gives no error message
whatsoever. The write operation appears to complete successfully.
It's not until you try to read what you thought you'd written that
the problem manifests itself. My linux box gives an i/o error.
If an error appeared while trying and failing to write, I'd be
lots less concerned.

Oh, that's indeed a little bit critical. Never experienced i/o errors but you are right - they should raise them at writing too. Well, than the only way around is lot's of backups :)


And I never had problems with broken flash memory. My oldest stick is 7 years old.
BTW: I am a photographer with thousands of pictures per year... :)

What brand do you use? My PNY's are the ones that have given me
problems; Sandisk's haven't so far. Maybe one manufacturer's wear
leveling algorithm is better than another's, though I've had no luck
trying to google anything authoritative about that. And I use a
linux ext2 filesystems on mine; your camera may use one of those
filesystems specifically designed to minimize the problem (as per
the wikipedia page google puts near the top). Anyway, I did speak
with two semi-professional photographers whom I'm semi-acquainted
with, and they're both aware of the problem (though I didn't confirm
my "peanuts" remark with them).

Up to now I've only used SanDisk. And my USB sticks are from SanDisk and Kingston. I never bought the cheapest because of speed but now I can see a second advantage being reliability.
No idea about the file system. A did the formatting in the camera. But I am sure it's not ext2 since Windows can read them out-of-the-box as well. Maybe the camera is doing some clever data management too!?
However, my experience was always that I change the memory because of price, size and speed much earlier than any problem might occur.

Ok, so far. I thing this is getting a little bit off topic now - I just read that we are in a TeX-NG :D

Regards,
Mathias
.

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