Re: KDE is now broken (Fwd: Heads-up: KDE4 hitting testing tonight (UTC) )

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 09:42:57AM -0400, Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
If your backup/archive hardware won't connect to the new computer, then
you'll need to migrate the data to new archive hardware first, then
migrate the computer to new hardware.

Yes, but then you might have overlooked something ... And hardware is
only a part of the problem.

2.) I'm not so much talking about migration as about keeping data
readable. Keep it on your disks or put it aside on some removable
storage medium, then after 15 or 30 years, try to read it. Having used
a mysql database to store the data doesn't make it easier to read it
after 15 or 30 years.

As far as I know, the only digital media that is designed to last that
long on the shelf without data loss is tape. Since tape technology
moves apace, you should probably archive a couple of tape drives along
with the data.

Well, I used to have some tape drives when the disks were smaller, but
I haven't looked into them for years. I always bought them used, and
they were still rather expensive.

Can you get a reliable tape drive, incl. some tapes, that stores at
least 1TB per tape, for max. $200 now?

Who would keep all the old hardware? And for what? And it's nothing
you could rely on.

Actually, I need old hardware. Newer hardware gives my wife headaches.

Why is that? It limits her to very slow hardware which could be a
problem sooner or later because the old hardware isn't up to the task
anymore. It depends on what she wants to do, of course ...

controller. What I really need is an old 100 MHz or slower SMP server
with scsi. Or, at least, an ISA scsi card.

You can still get that --- but for how long?


How do you maintain 15 or 30 year old hardware?

Carefully. Memory is still available for my 486. The biggest problem
for me is hard drives; they die and aren't made small anymore. Scsi
fixes that (since there are no bios issues with scsi).

Yeah, SCSI is great, but it's not affordable anymore. What's the price
for a 1TB SCSI disk now? Like $1500? And I'd need two because I don't
put data on disks that aren't at least RAID1. I've seen too many disks
failing for that.

And look at the cables and terminators. You end up paying about $100
just to connect a few SCSI disks. I still have the controller and
disks, but the cables got lost when moving. They'd be nice to have,
though rather loud, but I didn't want to spend all the money on
cables. You can get 1TB SATA disks for the price of the SCSI cables
and the terminators ...


In your case, you could have the computer for your wife boot over the
network and run it without any disks. Put the sever for that at some
place where it doesn't bother her.

Choose hardware in the first place that allows upgrade. E.g. scsi
drives instead of IDE.

SCSI doesn't allow upgrades anymore because it's too expensive.

Also, do you really need the data to sit on a shelf for 30 years, or can
it be cycled to new media every 5 years?

I keep it on the disks. I don't have a solution for making backups
anymore. I'm going to need new disks soon, and I'm also going to need
a second set for backups (still better than none) --- but I don't have
the money for that atm.

There's something to be said for tarring to a raw disk partition (so
there's no filesystem to be corrupted), and putting the same data to
three different drives. Then using some data comparision utility
(there's a deb available, I forget the name) to choose the correct block
for every block of the data. This is far more reliable given three
partially corrupted data sets than e.g. raid where if a certain number
of blocks fail, the whole disk is marked bad.

You want to buy 8 sets of 3 disks each for your dayly and monthly
backups and an SATA controller that can do hotplug? That's about
$2500 --- maybe you can get a tape drive for that kind of money.


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