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Keep Your Stuff, for Life

perkeep.org

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Re: Keep Your Stuff, for Life

#81

Post by generalk »

taneq wrote: post #76
CGamesPlay wrote: post #9

Wow, it was really hard to find out what this software does. I finally found a demo at the end of an hour-long talk from 2 years ago: https://youtu.be/PlAU_da_U4s?t=2687 So it seems to have a bunch of scripts to import data into its database from a variety of sources (including cloud services), and provides a search interface to navigate that historical data. And it has a lot of under-the-hood stuff about replication…

Does the first sentence not cover that fairly well? > Perkeep (née Camlistore) is a set of open source formats, protocols, and software for modeling, storing, searching, sharing and synchronizing data in the post-PC era. Data may be files or objects, tweets or 5TB videos, and you can access it via a phone, browser or FUSE filesystem. I checked archive.org and that text has been there for a couple of months at least.…

> Does the first sentence not cover that fairly well?

It does not.

The first sentence on the site ("Perkeep [...] is a set of open source formats...") describes literally what the thing is, but not at all what it _does_.

Not to slam on these cats, because marketing copy is _hard_. For project collaborators, or open-source dorks who live in this kind of world anyway, the sentence on the homepage is probably perfectly descriptive.

But I agree with my GP post. Reading the homepage I had no idea what Perkeep actually did.

Re: Keep Your Stuff, for Life

#83

Post by sukilot »

eexan wrote: post #79
mro_name wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no wonder looking at the funding, is it?

About $30k - https://opencollective.com/perkeep/expenses - which is more than most OSS projects would ever see in their lifetime, so it's not such a good excuse for lacking documentation and UX.

$30K over 13 years, and 98% of that funding was the lead developer and his wife (plus 10% from another developer) giving their own money to another developer.

It looks more like "wealthy Googlers helping out a friend with a short term gig" than "financing a professional product".

Perhaps you could donate your time as a UX specialist to help these folks who are more versed in backend systems and libraries.

Re: Keep Your Stuff, for Life

#84

Post by sukilot »

generalk wrote: post #81
taneq wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the first sentence not cover that fairly well? > Perkeep (née Camlistore) is a set of open source formats, protocols, and software for modeling, storing, searching, sharing and synchronizing data in the post-PC era. Data may be files or objects, tweets or 5TB videos, and you can access it via a phone, browser or FUSE filesystem. I checked archive.org and that text has been there for a couple of months at least.…

> Does the first sentence not cover that fairly well? It does not. The first sentence on the site ("Perkeep [...] is a set of open source formats...") describes literally what the thing is, but not at all what it _does_. Not to slam on these cats, because marketing copy is _hard_. For project collaborators, or open-source dorks who live in this kind of world anyway, the sentence on the homepage is probably perfectly…

It's not for muggles, and that's OK.

> Perkeep is under active development. If you're a programmer or fairly technical, you can probably get it up and running and get some utility out of it.

Re: Keep Your Stuff, for Life

#85

Post by taneq »

generalk wrote: post #81
taneq wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the first sentence not cover that fairly well? > Perkeep (née Camlistore) is a set of open source formats, protocols, and software for modeling, storing, searching, sharing and synchronizing data in the post-PC era. Data may be files or objects, tweets or 5TB videos, and you can access it via a phone, browser or FUSE filesystem. I checked archive.org and that text has been there for a couple of months at least.…

> Does the first sentence not cover that fairly well? It does not. The first sentence on the site ("Perkeep [...] is a set of open source formats...") describes literally what the thing is, but not at all what it _does_. Not to slam on these cats, because marketing copy is _hard_. For project collaborators, or open-source dorks who live in this kind of world anyway, the sentence on the homepage is probably perfectly…

What it _does_ is:

> modeling, storing, searching, sharing and synchronizing [...] files or objects, tweets or 5TB videos, and you can access it via a phone, browser or FUSE filesystem

I mean maybe it could have been more explicit or they could have added more detail, but having this as the first sentence is WAY better than most of the 'professional' landing pages for startups that get posted here. 'Harmonizes synergy and increases your ability to wow your target space with your aspirations', now that's meaningless.

Re: Keep Your Stuff, for Life

#86

Post by theelous3 »

sukilot wrote: post #84
generalk wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does the first sentence not cover that fairly well? It does not. The first sentence on the site ("Perkeep [...] is a set of open source formats...") describes literally what the thing is, but not at all what it _does_. Not to slam on these cats, because marketing copy is _hard_. For project collaborators, or open-source dorks who live in this kind of world anyway, the sentence on the homepage is probably perfectly…

It's not for muggles, and that's OK. > Perkeep is under active development. If you're a programmer or fairly technical, you can probably get it up and running and get some utility out of it.

Not for muggles is a silly cop out. It's very nondescriptive. That "set of protocols and file formats" etc. could do literally anything.

Is it for a nas? Is it distributed? Is it some backup yoke for a cloud service? Do you run it on your own hardware? Is it all of the above? What does your data look like? Where and how are you searching through it? Is that part not for muggles either or is there a frontend? And so on basically forever.

Re: Keep Your Stuff, for Life

#87

Post by LgWoodenBadger »

mnw21cam wrote: post #67
lostlogin wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. What are the drives at your workplace?

I actually have no idea. I didn't have any part in purchasing that particular system, I don't have root, and all the drives are hidden behind a RAID controller. Sorry.

How do you know they are enterprise drives then?

Re: Keep Your Stuff, for Life

#88

Post by dannyw »

mnw21cam wrote: post #49
dannyw wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HDDs are also prone to silent bitrot, where it will simply return incorrect bytes for a sector, even without any smart errors. (Optical disks also bitrot; but so does HDDs). This is usually a precursor to SMART errors happening in the near future, but unfortunately, it can still result in corrupted replication and corrupted backups; as your backups would be backing up the rotten (corrupt) data. I've witnessed this ha…

Interestingly, on my home ZFS raidz with 3 4TB hard drives, I have had to replace a drive a couple of times because ZFS scrub was reporting silent corruption. They were consumer-grade SATA drives. However, at work, I have backed up ~200TB of data to a large server with RAID-6 and ext4, storing the backups as large .tar files with par2 checksums and recovery data, and regularly scrubbing the par2 data. I have yet to s…

Enterprise drives have different firmware, especially from an ECC and integrity perspective. From a price/perf standpoint tho, shucking consumer grade drives with ECC win.

Re: Keep Your Stuff, for Life

#90

Post by eexan »

sukilot wrote: post #83
eexan wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About $30k - https://opencollective.com/perkeep/expenses - which is more than most OSS projects would ever see in their lifetime, so it's not such a good excuse for lacking documentation and UX.

$30K over 13 years, and 98% of that funding was the lead developer and his wife (plus 10% from another developer) giving their own money to another developer. It looks more like "wealthy Googlers helping out a friend with a short term gig" than "financing a professional product". Perhaps you could donate your time as a UX specialist to help these folks who are more versed in backend systems and libraries.

I'm more of a backend person myself, and perkeep disappoints on that side too. See my other comment about how much time it took to ingest just one .iso. I don't think this system would handle a 5 TB video file as the authors claim, that's some false advertisement!

I considered it for my use case (archiving and deduping dozens of terabytes / millions of files on several personal NAS boxes), really wanted to use it - as I find some of its ideas pretty cool, but in the end decided it would be simpler to just write something from scratch instead. It took less time to write it than it would have taken perkeep to ingest my data.

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