Try running a business on that basis - where do the restores come from? 8)
We charge our customers for backup storage by volume and that includes an annual demonstration of recovery. We fire up some or all of their systems on our gear in isolation and show that they are reasonably functional.
Your teacher's comment is riffing on the well trod lines of: "heights don't kill people, it's depths that kill people", which is all about perspective. This is is not related to "guns don't kill people ..." which is about agency.
It is true that very few people proactively care about backups. It’s like flossing. People know they’re supposed to do it, but in the moment it feels like a waste of time and energy, when there are more important things to do.
When data is lost, or decay takes over, the value can skyrocket. Depending on what is lost, someone may be willing to pay 100x when they would have spent on backup in order to get their data back, this is why data recovery services can basically charge whatever they want.
My assumption is the Venn diagram between people who pass the marshmallow test, and those who proactively backup their systems, has a lot of overlap.
Running a business on that basis would look like the white(ish)-hat version of ransomware. "Oh, your data is gone? How much is it really worth to you?"
It is a special sensation when you go to your hand rolled backup "solution" to make some simple recoveries and start finding problems. It is a complex mix of not dread but disgust, sick to your stomach, self-anger, and loss. I can only image what that's like with like all of your children's baby pictures being the lost material. Borg and restic are fantastic, it still seems like some sort of dummy proof mode might be desirable, all the features in the world and they have some some reasonably sane policy or something that includes verifications.
On the flip side of that though, really and truly, I've restored a laptop from a timemachine backup and it came back damn nearly identical and that was magical.
I needed to temporarily move off 20TB from my NAS and bought a Hetzner storage box.
I wanted to encrypt the data before sending it so i went with the borg ssh mount. Long story short, borg failed a couple of times due to https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/issues/7672, i resumed it per documentation and got 2gb of silently corrupted data. There was no way to do data integrity checks due to broken pipes and there was no option to resume the job from the previous point either. I couldn't afford to go with the s3, backblaze wasn't an option due to placing trust into their proprietary client doing the encryption and i got majorly screwed in the end.
That issue happens when the repo is corrupted? That's not the cause of the failure then.
Also you must have been unaware of Backblaze B2? It doesn't have a proprietary client, and it launched 11 years ago only a couple months after attic was forked to create borg.
The usual thing is to point at China because China is a huge place with a huge population and so as it industrialized it uses a lot of power and emits lots of CO2.
This made plenty of sense ten years ago, when for a smaller country you could compare their entire CO2 footprint to China's annual growth and ask why bother. But increasingly while China is still huge these comparisons look worse for even medium-sized countries unless they're actually on a sensible path. China is growing more slowly and importantly mostly by using more renewables and electrifying, so the comparison looks more uncomfortable.
The comparison with China was never very good, as thinking in terms of emissions per country is useless. Per capita emissions would be much more relevant, and even then you'd have to take into account that Chinese factories produce their goods mainly for Western markets.
Per captia emissions is the most useless stat and by the way China's per captia emissions are high now so update that talking point. As for the western market argument, governments are responsible for managing their emissions not private companies. The reason China makes goods for the western market is because the western markets introduced legislation to try and reduce emissions while China did not.
Disclaiming its your site matters not on the site, but when you post on HN. Disclosing your bias is good manners here. And using HN for promotion is bad manners, your submissions are almost nothing but your own site, once per week.
It's as if the author, having come across a fairly interesting topic, decided to see how poorly hen could write about it.
People complain a lot about AI written articles, but is this any better? I don't think so, I don't care who authors it but I don't want discursions and distractions.
Some blog posts could have just been a link to the related wikipedia page[1] and some are just clearly a re-written version of that (goes for "content" on YT from some of the better known history ones).
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