(That hard disk was in a Windows box and there was no such thing as RAID or anything similar. Didn’t have the money for fancy stuff anyway.)

@mckinley@twtxt.net Yes, over 20 years ago, a hard disk died. Not completely, only some parts of it, but it was enough to destroy ~30 GB or something like that.

I bought a lot of DVDs over time and many of them have become unreadable. Star Trek DS9 is among the victims, parts of TNG, parts of X-Files. Really annoying. I didn’t have the required disk space to make backups and, honestly, didn’t think they would die so quickly. When/if I buy movies these days, I either make a backup right away or I treat those DVDs as “will die soon”. 🫤

CDs regularly die, too, although not as often as DVDs.

And of course, lots of floppy disks are dead now. 😂🫤

@bender@twtxt.net Yep, it’s pass. 👍

@bender@twtxt.net Definitely a bug here, but I think it’s an old outstanding bug that I have to figure out again and fix 🤦‍♂️

@dbucklin@www.davebucklin.com I would recommend using a client that at least supports the Twt Hash and Twt Subject extensions 😅

@dbucklin I would recommend using a client that at least supports the Twt Hash and Twt Subject extensions 😅

@mckinley@twtxt.net When typesetting our graduation newspaper (“Abizeitung” as we call it), I destroyed the work of a whole day. :-D

I plugged in the USB stick of my mate (exact same model as mine) to do a backup of that day’s work. Since mine was already plugged in, the mount path /media/USB_DISK or whatever it was already existed. Throughout the day I saved everything on my drive (I don’t know the reason for that anymore). The newly plugged in thumb drive then got automatically mounted by Konqueror as /media/USB_DISK2 or something like that. I wanted to show off my other mate how cool Linux was and how quickly the command line was able to get things done. By force of habit I cded into the wrong path to first rm -rf *, so that there was room for the new stuff. Indeed, the data was ruined super quickly.

When I noticed my fuckup I aborted immediately, but it was already too late. I went to the family computer to research recovery tools. All the files I was able to restore were corrupted. The Scribus XML files ended somewhere in the middle. So then we decided to redo all the work instead of wasting more time trying to fill in the missing XML. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that not only the last closing tags were missing, much more of the contents disappeared. I remember that I gladly noticed the second typesetting round went much faster. :-)

I could be totally wrong here, but I think one problem was that write operations to external devices were not immediately synced, one had to expicitly flush the write cache, e.g. by umounting it properly. Early on in the typesetting process we decided to have each page or spread as separate *.sla, because a) our computers were not powerful enough to handle a large project and b) once the layout template was cast in stone, we could easily work in parallel and join everything in the end. That helped to limit the damage to just my work. My mate’s was still there I believe.

Oh yeah, that’s certainly the best strategy, @bender@twtxt.net! ;-)

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Is that a terminal multiplexer? If so, which one? I suspect it says at the top but I can’t quite read the text.

@mckinley@twtxt.net Fair 👌

@bender@twtxt.net Over ten years now 😆 And you’re right! Problem is no-one makes the chassis anymore 😢

@bender@twtxt.net Fair point… :)

@prologic@twtxt.net Planning it ahead of time is all well and good if you have the money to buy 6 or 8 hard drives at once. I really don’t, and I want to mirror the whole thing offsite anyway. Mergerfs will let me do it now, and I’ll buy a drive each for SnapRAID in short order.

@prologic@twtxt.net how old is the actual appliance? You can replace disks all you want/need, but the life of the appliance itself is finite.

To be honest I don’t find it all that inflexible.

When you consider that you’re limited by hardware anyway, you plan your ZFS array ahead of time like I did.

As the years go on and drives fail you eventually replaces all disks with slightly larger ones.

@mckinley@twtxt.net the best way to suffer no data loss is to not have data at all. 😂 I haven’t lost a single datum.

@mckinley@twtxt.net No

QOTD: Have you ever suffered significant data loss? If so, what went wrong?

@bender@twtxt.net Yes bit weird 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net I am following @dbucklin@ but mentioning him renders that broken thing you see on this twt.

@dbucklin@www.davebucklin.com hmmm

@prologic@twtxt.net this happened. Mentions often break. 😩

@dbucklin Hey! 👋

@bender@twtxt.net Wgat happened? 🤔

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com images are linked using markdown “standard”, like so:

![Description](https://link.to.the.image/image.jpg)

I guess I’m not missing my GUI Web Browser yet. In fact, I think I’m enjoying this. 😆

Image

I might even drop to TTY to try stuff I read about earlier today.

I guess I’m not missing my GUI Web Browser yet. In fact, I think I’m enjoying this. 😆

Image

I might even drop to TTY to try stuff I read about earlier today.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com hehehehe, I was trying to mention dbucklin but Yarn is broken.

I vote for jenny too. It is pretty cool. Even more so if you are a mutt’s fan!

@hecanjog@hecanjog.com I was a programmer for almost 20 years before I figured that out. Never too late.

@bender@twtxt.net Seems to be working! I’m using mdom’s txtnish and I’m figuring out replies.

@dbucklin@www.davebucklin.com Hi there! Well, I got your message. Let me know if you have gotten mine.

@dbucklin@www.davebucklin.com further test. It seems Yarn is very finicky.

Let’s see if this works, shall we? 😊

@someone@www.davebucklin.com testing…

And that’s… bad, right @prologic@twtxt.net?

So, started following https://www.davebucklin.com/twtxt.txt, but there is no way to interact with him. Mentions will never come out right.

@bender@twtxt.net Howdy.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Wasn’t too bad in the end. Just a hand full louder thunders and decent wind. It smells really good after the light rain. Mjam!

@bender@twtxt.net Ha, we both looked it up at once. You win.

@bender@twtxt.net Synology uses single-volume Btrfs on software RAID, which seems to be pretty solid in my research but that’s less flexible than ZFS. https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/tutorial/What_was_the_RAID_implementation_for_Btrfs_File_System_on_SynologyNAS

Ha! Found it:

Due to the Btrfs RAID issues, Synology chose Linux RAID. Based on the diagram below, Synology has implemented the layers in between the file systems and disks to ensure that Synology has full control to achieve the highest stability.

@mckinley@twtxt.net I am curious now, though. Doesn’t Synology use RAID Btrfs? How in the world do they do it? Researching…

@bender@twtxt.net Exactly. It’s just not an option with warnings like that all over the place. Some people have had success, but I’m not risking it. https://lore.kernel.org/linux-btrfs/20200627032414.GX10769@hungrycats.org/

@mckinley@twtxt.net “Warning: The RAID 5 and RAID 6 modes of Btrfs are fatally flawed, and should not be used for “anything but testing with throw-away data.” – Yikes!. Gulp.

@prologic@twtxt.net ZFS is fine but it’s out-of-tree and extremely inflexible. If Btrfs RAID5/6 was reliable it would be fantastic. Add and remove drives at will, mix different sizes. I hear it’s mostly okay as long as you mirror the metadata (RAID1), scrub frequently, and don’t hammer it with too many random reads and writes. However, there are serious performance penalties when running scrubs on the full array and random reads and writes are the entire purpose of a filesystem.

Bcachefs has similar features (but not all of them, like sending/receiving) and it doesn’t have the giant scary warnings in the documentation. I hear it’s kind of slow and it was only merged into the kernel in version 6.7. I wouldn’t really trust it with my data.

I bought a couple more hard drives recently and I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to allocate them before badblocks completes. I have a few days to decide. :)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de what password manager do you use on the CLI? Is it pass?

YouTube introduces a “stable volume” feature:

https://movq.de/v/ad0dd48aac/a.jpg

Once filmmakers realize that people just want stable volume instead of SUPER LOUD SECTIONS (…andreallyquietones…), then maybe I can finally remove the limiter from my pipewire filter chain. 🥴

In case you need a profile picture: https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Why not, give it a shot! 😅

I think I even integrated my password manager into tmux at some point. There’s a lot that you can do.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Same here. I’m watching the storm tracking on kachelmannwetter.com 🍿