[LAD] [OT] Richard Stallman warns against ChromeOS

[Philipp Überbacher]

Excerpts from Arnold Krille's message of 2010-12-16 08:30:32 +0100:
> On Thursday 16 December 2010 01:13:24 Dan Kegel wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 10:48 PM, gene heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> wrote:
> > > Now, if we can just get a law that when I have ... issued the delete to
> > > the server, it truly was deleted
> > 
> > For what it's worth, Google's caution in promising deletion
> > is probably because it's not quite sure how to do that
> > quickly.  Users would be Very Very Angry if a disk outage
> > or a fire in a datacenter resulted in the loss of their stored
> > email, so Google probably has some sort of offsite backup
> > arrangement, and that might complicate prompt deletion.
> > ... yup,
> > http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=7401
> > says
> > "residual copies of deleted messages and accounts may take up
> > to 60 days to be deleted from our active servers and may remain in our
> > backup systems."
> > 
> > So, if you were google, would you use tape backup?  If so,
> > how would you do that permanent deletion thing?  If not,
> > how would you make darn sure you didn't anger users by
> > losing messages during a disaster?
> 
> I don't think google uses magnet-tapes or similar for any backups except the 
> vital core data of its business. Given the number and size of their data-
> centers around the world, they just sync the data to a different part of the 
> world an be done with it. Of course the deletion has to be synced to all 
> remote-copies and probably also forwarded to older backups but once such a 
> mechanism is implemented it should do the actual delete within a day...
> 
> There are even universities that decided against a new tape-library and in 
> favor of a big stack of disks for long-term backup because these where 
> cheaper, similar reliable and much faster for restore. And they don't need a 
> special tape-library-managing app to access the data, a file-browser or the 
> command-line is enough...
> 
> Have fun,
> 
> Arnold

I guess it really depends on what you try to achieve. Afaik the average
life-span of a HD is puny 2 years. From what I heard the magnetic tapes
used by for example ESA a long time ago have a life-span of 80 years. If
'store it good and forget' is what you're after then tape seems like a
good idea.

As for my university, as far as I know they use some RAID system for
everyday and tapes for sensitive data. And they already had their whole
RAID fail at the same time.