Re: Cloud, please ?

bruce.sinclair@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Bruce Sinclair) wrote:

In article <sv1iq7l07oakvlefpngvcd64ei447q0lum@xxxxxxx>, hayesstw@xxxxxxxxx
wrote:


and when I connect to the Internet a copy will be made on the Dropbox
server without my having to ftp it there, and when I connect my other
computer, a copy will appear in my dropbox director without my having to
invoke and FTP program to get it there.

And this is a good thing ... why exactly ?

Because people who install DB want that behaviour? It provides completely
on-the-fly dynamic syncing between multiple platforms, all the time, not
just for specific files FTPed when you choose.

With 3 machines in use, I have 4 copies of each of these files. Three on
the local hard disks of each of the 3 machines, plus the cloud copy.

Obviously one has to make use of such a tool in a planned/sensible way.


It's not perfiect, and if my internet connection is broken, then I need
to be careful to only make changes to one copy of the document rather
than both until the connection is restored. But it does mean that if my
computer is stolen or my house burns down, I should still have a copy of
the document accessible.

As you would with a backup copy. Again I ask, why is the cloud useful ? :)

Because the backup process is continuous, for all files in the DB folder -
that's about 135,000 files in 25,000 sub-folders, here. Every time a file
changes a backup is made in the cloud AND the changed file is synced to any
other machines sharing the same DB account. You don't have to decide when
you're taking the next backup. And, DB keeps the last month's worth of
every single file so you can rollback to older versions if needed.

No-one is claiming that you couldn't roll your own solution to do some or
all of this yourself. But I certainly feel that having the bulk of the data
I use in sync on multiple machines AND backed-up in the cloud, with no
effort on my part, is useful. I didn't have to roll my own solution.


Also, previously I took backups on external USB hard disks... when I
remembered. And since the machines involved were a netbook, laptop, and
desktop machine, they were rarely all in the same place as the external
disks when I wanted to do a backup & had time to do it, so despite best
intentions backups were... iffy. Nowadays it makes no difference where any
machine is, provided it's got an internet connection every so often. They
don't need to have connections all the time, or even at the same times. I
do need to make sure each machine is turned on occasionally if it needs to
'catch up' with the state of the files on the other machines... but as the
machines need turned on for other reasons too (like installing patches)
that's no hardship.

I do still run backups on each individual machine, partly for data that's
not in Dropbox - some of the backups get put in Dropbox though. And partly
for data that changes too much for permanent Dropbox copying to be used (as
it's limited by the modest speeds of internet uploads).

I also run some backups (in some cases of DB data!) to other local disks...
because it's important to remember that the DB servers won't necessarily
have an uptodate copy of things if your internet connection is broken, or
too slow - though the dekstop clients do talk directly to other machines on
the LAN as well as to the cloud. I run nightly zipped backups, to local
disks, of eg my email & news files, but I also run a weekly backup of the
email/news files, uncompressed, to Dropbox. The latter are uncompressed
because DB only uploads 4K 'pages' whose checksums reveal that they haven't
already been uploaded; from one week to the next many of the news/mail files
won't have changed so DB won't re-upload them. If they'd been added to
compressed files then more data would fall on different 4K boundaries and
get uploaded needlessly.

--
Jeremy C B Nicoll - my opinions are my own.

Email sent to my from-address will be deleted. Instead, please reply
to newsreplyaaa@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx replacing "aaa" by "284".
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