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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • First answer that comes to mind is, of course, ‘all of them’.

    Though that’s not got any nuance and probably depends on if you’re after preservation, making something more accessible, or just data hoarding for the sake of data hoarding.

    Given the current state of things in the world, I’d say any sort of scientific, health-related, or similar type of content would be where I’d immediately assume the greatest need is.

    Edit: Anything relating to trans healthcare, in particular. As well as anything even remotely non-straight.


  • I’ve written a couple of replies, deleted them, wrote some more, and deleted those and then debated replying at all but finally came up with what I think I want to say that doesn’t come across as being an absolute raging asshole.

    TBH, that kind of response is a good portion of why I’m tired of trying to engage. I’m perfectly willing to use my privilege in any way that’s going to actually make a meaningful difference, but frankly nobody can provide a useful thing. It’s just neoliberal snark that I’m just plain not doing enough and really should be doing better, without any useful guidance into what I should be doing than the typical usual crap that comes out of neolibs.

    It’s always just ‘go vote!’ (which I’ve done, and will continue to do), or ‘call your senator!’ (which I have and is utterly worthless), or maybe ‘don’t buy things on this day because that’ll show them!’ (it won’t), or even the always popular ‘go protest!’. Which again, I have, but showing up with 25 other people is not going to be something anyone in power cares about, at all.

    If anyone has an actually useful impactful thing to do, I’m all ears, but frankly, I’ve yet to hear anything that strikes me as likely to actually either effect change, preserve something, or otherwise improve anyone’s life more than me getting focused on myself, friends, and family.






  • Well, so far it’s been pretty clear we’re willing to let lots of school children get shot and are willing to blame ANYTHING but the state of mental health care in this country, so I’d have to say that we’re not very good discussing this, or doing anything about it.

    It’s a combination of the old British stiff upper lip, the American belief in rugged individualism, and a whole lot of just plain burying our heads in the sand.

    …Also mental health coverage by insurance is usually not very good. You can typically get coverage to see a psychiatrist to get drugs for whatever ails you, but seeing a psychologist is a lot more iffy usually. Have to find one that takes your insurance, assuming your insurance pays for it at all, and even if it does pay for it you usually have some sort of visit limit, so hopefully whatever your issue is can be sorted out in 10 visits or whatever, so good luck god bless thoughts and prayers.



  • The format is the tape in the drive, or the disk or whatever.

    Tape existed 50 years ago: nothing modern and in production can read those tapes.

    The problem is, given a big enough time window, the literal drives to read it will simply no longer exist, and you won’t be able to access even non-rotted media because of that.

    As for data integrity, there’s a lot of options: you can make a md5 sum of each file, and then do it again and see if anything is different.

    The only caveat here is you have to make sure whatever you’re using to make the checksums gets stored somewhere that’s not JUST on the drive because if the drive DOES corrupt itself, and your only record of the “good” hashes is on the drive, well, you can’t necessarily trust those hashes either.


  • So, 50 years isn’t a reasonable goal unless you have a pretty big budget for this. Essentially no media is likely to survive that long and be readable unless they’re stored in a vault, under perfect climate controlled conditions. And even if the media is fine, finding an ancient drive to read a format that no longer exists is not a guaranteed proposition.

    You frankly should be expecting to have to replace everything every couple of years, and maybe more often if your routine tests of the media show it’s started rotting.

    Long term archival storage really isn’t just a dump it to some media and lock it up and never look at ever again.

    Alternately, you could just make someone else pay for all of this, and shove all of this to something like Glacier and make the media Amazon’s problem. (Assuming Amazon is around that long and that nothing catches fire.)


  • Do some people? Sure. There’s more than a few sects of evangelicals that are all in on the end of the world.

    But, frankly, outside of certain religious sects and/or cults, I strongly doubt it’s all that widespread.

    Even the preppers I know don’t want it to collapse, they’re just aware that society is fragile and is more likely than not going to collapse - knowing something is likely to happen and preparing for it is very very different than hoping for it.

    I’m terminally doomer, but even I don’t really think that the “world is ending” is a likely outcome, even if the worst of everything possible happens.

    The question, for me, has always not been ‘will humans die out’ so much as ‘can we stop squabbling over stupid shit long enough we don’t all die’.


  • I’m using blu-ray disks for the 3rd copy, but I’m not backing up nearly as much data as you are.

    The only problem with optical media is that you should only expect it to be readable for a couple of years, best case, at this point and probably not even that as the tier 1 guys all stop making it and you’re left with the dregs.

    You almost certainly want some sort of tape option, assuming you want long retention periods and are only likely to add incremental changes to a large dataset.

    Edit: I know there’s longer-life archival optical media, but for what that costs, uh, you want tape if at all possible.