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Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com experience "100% Data Loss"

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Re: Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com experience "100% Data Loss"

#161

Post by nettdata »

viraptor wrote: post #124
mcantelon wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but if you pay for a mission critical service and never bother testing it, you've pretty much passively decided to fail.

Joining the chorus of other people saying "WRONG". Reason 1: I pay for my bank account one way or another. It's bank's responsibility to keep the system running and secure, not mine. Sometimes we just can't do everything ourselves and have to rely on others. Reason 2: Many of us host something somewhere. How many do backups? How many of us check the backups? How many do check the backups checking process? (enter infi…

You have the perfect right to just point and say "you were supposed to do that", while losing all of your data.

The rest of us will be quite happy to ensure that what we think is happening, actually is.

It's akin to a pedestrian getting hit by a car and then saying "I had the right of way". Yeah, maybe so, but now you're in the hospital breathing through a tube.

Those of us who checked for traffic before crossing the street are at home watching TV.

Re: Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com experience "100% Data Loss"

#162

Post by vsync »

pvg wrote: post #66
nollidge wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're thinking of Daily WTF. Jeff's blog is/was just a programming blog. He also frequently said he was the world's worst coder, so...

Well, he did make sure to tell us to shut up, stop what we're doing and make a back-up. Because he knows things, you see: http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:2HHNAk2SB6EJ:www.codingh...

Amusingly, he also quoted jwz as saying "The universe tends toward maximum irony. Don't push it." This incident appears to be proof positive of that.

Re: Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com experience "100% Data Loss"

#163

Post by cperciva »

jrockway wrote: post #71
mechanical_fish wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also tarsnap, run by HN's very own cperciva.

And Duplicity, which cperciva claims is theoretically less secure, but which seems to work pretty well for me. (Who cares if the NSA can decrypt my blog backups? They are already available unencrypted...)

Who cares if the NSA can decrypt my blog backups

Confidentiality is only one aspect of security. Authenticity is also important in some cases: You might care if the NSA edits your backups so that after restoring them it looks like you said something you didn't really say.

Re: Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com experience "100% Data Loss"

#164

Post by telemachos »

lukifer wrote: post #113
scott_s wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, I often confused Jeff's blog with Daily WTF. Jeff might be self-effacing, but at the same time he also dispenses a lot of programming and software development advice.

Conferring advice does not imply a claim of authority. If I give someone directions to a coffee shop in New York, the recipient should not infer that I am an expert on New York, traffic grids, coffee, etc.

If we are describing formal logic, then fine. (Although actually, not even fine there, really. There is a fairly powerful theory of "conversational implicature" that I studied once upon a time: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/implicature/ It tries to tease out some of what makes conversation (which is gappy and missing a lot logically speaking) as effective as it is.)

If we are describing human conversation, then - um - I call bullshit. If you give advice, you most certainly imply (for a suitably non-formal definition of 'imply') authority, knowledge, etc. about the matter you give advice on.

Your example - or the way you spin it out - is very odd. If you give directions to some coffee shop, we should be able to assume that you know where the coffee shop is. I suppose at the very least we should be able to assume that you believe that you know where the coffee shop is. The guy gave advice on backing up - he passed along someone else's advice, and said he it was essential advice. The relevant switch for your analogy would be asking him to be able to describe the code in rsync or dd or whatever. Nobody is doing that. They're simply pointing out that he didn't practice what he preached (with various degrees of unfortunate serves-him-right schadenfreude, but never mind that for the moment).

Answering a question implies a claim of authority. Offering advice on the internet (unsolicited) is the equivalent of building a freaking billboard with directions to the coffee shop.

Re: Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com experience "100% Data Loss"

#166

Post by andrewvc »

viraptor wrote: post #124
mcantelon wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but if you pay for a mission critical service and never bother testing it, you've pretty much passively decided to fail.

Joining the chorus of other people saying "WRONG". Reason 1: I pay for my bank account one way or another. It's bank's responsibility to keep the system running and secure, not mine. Sometimes we just can't do everything ourselves and have to rely on others. Reason 2: Many of us host something somewhere. How many do backups? How many of us check the backups? How many do check the backups checking process? (enter infi…

1. Banks are more reliable than hosting providers. 2. For a small personal site you don't need anything fancy, just make sure you've SFTP'd the files to your disk and snapshotted the DB once every couple months. My personal site is backed up by Rackspace cloud, but I still do an occasional rsync just in case they fuck up.

Re: Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com experience "100% Data Loss"

#167

Post by jacquesm »

viraptor wrote: post #124
mcantelon wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but if you pay for a mission critical service and never bother testing it, you've pretty much passively decided to fail.

Joining the chorus of other people saying "WRONG". Reason 1: I pay for my bank account one way or another. It's bank's responsibility to keep the system running and secure, not mine. Sometimes we just can't do everything ourselves and have to rely on others. Reason 2: Many of us host something somewhere. How many do backups? How many of us check the backups? How many do check the backups checking process? (enter infi…

It's interesting that you should mention banks. Banks routinely go under, and in almost all cases your deposits are only 'safe' up to a certain amount. Most data stores are worth well in excess of that amount, so if you could not reasonably expect a bank to hold on to a very large amount of data it stands to reason that you should not trust some service provider with data that has serious value without a secondary system in place.

After all, their liability will almost certainly be less than the value of your data, in which case there are two reasons to keep extra copies, both business continuity reasons and direct economic ones.

Re: Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com experience "100% Data Loss"

#168

Post by _phred »

blasdel wrote: post #138
radu_floricica wrote: post #50

Just my 2 cents here: I encrypt my daily sql backup before sending it in a couple of places. This way I can store it pretty much everywhere - one place is actually on a client's server. Aescrypt for encryption, ssh with expect for actual transfer. Oh, and watch out for expect timing out - it was a fun moment when backups grew beyond the default timeout and expect started truncating them. Yup, backups should be checke…

Do not use SSH with Expect. Do not use them here or there. You will not use them anywhere. Not just because of how much expect sucks: SSH tools leave out a --password option for a reason! Use passphrase-less RSA keys with a restricted account.

Also, because expect(1) defeats the entire "remote shell" aspect of SSH, which lets me do this from my workstation:

  ssh server tar zc /srv/http > http-backup.tar.gz
Yes, that's a remote command whose output is piped to a local file. With imagination, ssh, and shell-fu, one can get very far with backup automation and testing.

Re: Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com experience "100% Data Loss"

#169

Post by jodrellblank »

When people forget to save a document and close the program, among the "ha ha I'm so superior" replies are a few people advocating unpopular niche systems which are nice enough to autosave.

When people make mistakes and save them over the top, there among the smug laughter are a few people on the user's side reminiscing about long forgotten systems of old which have versioning filesystems by default so recovery is only a moment away.

I haven't seen any replies in this thread along those lines - everyone is putting it firmly on the system administrator or the user. Would it be so hard during an install for a program to say "and now enter an encryption password and an ssh server address where I can backup to nightly"? If it's so simple you can script it yourself in a few minutes, isn't it so simple that many/most systems should come with that themselves?

It's long past the time where "computer lost my data" "well you've only yourself to blame" should be considered an old fashioned attitude.

Re: Coding Horror and blogs.stackoverflow.com experience "100% Data Loss"

#170

Post by michaelneale »

viraptor wrote: post #124
mcantelon wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but if you pay for a mission critical service and never bother testing it, you've pretty much passively decided to fail.

Joining the chorus of other people saying "WRONG". Reason 1: I pay for my bank account one way or another. It's bank's responsibility to keep the system running and secure, not mine. Sometimes we just can't do everything ourselves and have to rely on others. Reason 2: Many of us host something somewhere. How many do backups? How many of us check the backups? How many do check the backups checking process? (enter infi…

I think there analogies for both sides of the argument. In the case of bank accounts (or bank security) I don't test it by trying to break in, check how it works with id theft etc ;)

But for backups, at least in this (early) era of manage hosting/cloud, its probably not too onerous to test your plans etc...

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