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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • You got an incredible deal on your tape drive. For LTO8 drives, I’m seeing “for parts only” drives sold for around $500. I’d be willing to throw away $100 or $200 on the possibility that I could repair a drive; $500 is a bit too much. It looks like LTO6 is more around what my budget would be.; it would require a much larger number of tapes, but not excessively so.

    I remember when BD-R was a reasonable solution for backup. There’s no way that’s true now. It really seems like hard drive capacity has far outpaced removable media. If most people are streaming everything, those of us who actually want to save their data locally are really the minority these days. There’s just not as much of a compelling reason for companies to develop cheap high-capacity removable discs.

    I’m sure I’ll invest in a tape backup solution eventually, but for now, at least I have ZFS with paranoid RAIDZ.


  • What kind of tape drive are you using? My array isn’t as large as yours (120tb physical), but it’s big enough that my only real options for backup are tape or a whole secondary array for just backup.

    Based on what I’ve seen, my options are a prohibitively large number tapes with an older LTO standard or prohibitively expensive tapes with a newer LTO standard.

    My current backup strategy consists of automated backups to Backblaze B2 for the really important stuff like personal documents or projects and hoping my ZFS array doesn’t fail for everything else.







  • It’s actually surprising how much just having a person in the room can alter the temperature and humidity levels. In my master bathroom, I have my bathroom fan set to activate when the dew point reaches a certain level (I’ve found that dew point produces better results than just humidity); the idea is that the bathroom will be ventilated when someone takes a shower and for however long it takes for the humidity to dissipate after they’re done. The funny thing is that every so often, I’ll take an excessively long poop (lets me honest, I’m scrolling on my phone), and the fan will kick on. Just being in the bathroom will alter the dew point enough that it triggers the fan.

    I also have a room that contains all my server/networking equipment. It’s climate-controlled, and I’m constantly monitoring temperatures. The times that in the room working, I can see a noticeable spike in the temperature graph, even though the only variable that’s changed is that there’s a person in the room.

    So my point is: OP might not have been having fun that night; it’s entirely possible someone just came in and went to bed.






  • At least for me, the whole “made by devs for devs” isn’t really the major downfall. It’s the fact that it can’t be trusted to remain functional in a dynamic environment. I like using the command line, but sometimes that’s just not enough.

    If I need a specific software package, I can download the source, compile it, along with the 100 of libraries that they chose not to include in the .tar.gz file, and eventually get it running.

    However, when I do an “apt update” and it changes enough, then the binary I compiled earlier is going to stop working. Then I spend hours trying to recompile it along with it’s dependencies, only to find that it doesn’t support some obscure sub-version of a package that got installed along with the latest security updates.

    In a static environment, where I will never change settings or install software (like my NAS), it’s perfect. On my desktop PC, I just want it to work well enough so I can tinker with other things. I don’t want to have to troubleshoot why Gnome or KDE isn’t working with my video drivers when all I want to do is launch remote desktop so I can tinker with stuff on a server that I actually want to tinker with.