Good morning everyone^^
I just heard my company is doinig some weird shit.
1. We RECOMMEND doing backups on a USB stick (our customers get a cheap giveaway when they purchase our products).
2. We sell farm controllers with less power than a fucking arduino as "Top Notch technology". (single core 1Mhz, 128MB RAM)

We Devs are not supposed to understand this logic. We shall only "make it faster". If proper solutions are suggested it gets shrugged off as "expensive".

Hold my beer, I've got the perfect link to the USB backup! 🤣
https://devrant.com/rants/1812323

... Anyway, at least the Arduino stuff must've been heavily optimized to be able to run on such high-tech devices, so at least there's something good in that strategy 🙃

Time to run

If they don't need any more power than an Arduino, what's wrong with that?

And what's wrong with doing backups to a USB stick, as long as you have a bunch, eject them safely, have a schedule of rotation, keep some of them off-site etc like any other sensible backup procedure.

@d4ng3r0u5 way too janky for a set of corporate data. Also there'd be availability issues (who's having the stick at the moment? Can you miss sit? Etc etc) as well as it being prone to loss. A backup server is much more resilient and being network-based, available to everyone simultaneously.

My company also sells hardware that uses a less advanced computer board than a current gen arduino or raspberry pi.

Logic? They fit the electromagnetic compilance especifications so changing now to a more powerful unit would be certification breaking.

Sometimes there is a reason behind not using the latest and greatest gadget

@d4ng3r0u5 like everything. USB Sticks are lnown to fail if used to much/no enough.
also: they use one giveaway shit-stick. no offsite backup. some have a fallback to a hdd but thats rare.
@awelxtr yes there is a reason. A subsidiary company of us doesn't like RasPis. Really nothing technical or even logical.

Also we will definitely need more power in the very near future as running OS and libs already takes 127/128MB.

The RaspPi has problems with SD-card corruption, the company I work on rejected the idea of using them because of that.

https://raspberrypi.org/forums/...

@ManuLG it's mostly because SD cards aren't really suitable for running an OS on it, especially when you're writing a lot to it. Generally it isn't much of a problem though, because the only writes would in most cases be user data modification or system upgrades. I've had write issues once on I think a SanDisk knockoff, but that's about it actually. Also to avoid SD cards altogether, you can write somewhere in the bootloader config files to enable USB boot. It changes the GPU's prebootloader or something like that, to also look on USB for bootable devices.

USB sticks (and SD cards) are a bad idea to store data for longterm. It's just cheap flash storage and prone to data corruption.
Better use HDDs or Tape Drives.

@PonySlaystation yep. Thats what nearly every dev is saying (including me). But i'm nowhere near making these decisions. I will try to talk to my department manager though.

@PonySlaystation tape drives is something that I've been very interested in for archival storage actually. But the player/writer station thingy, I've heard that those are quite expensive?

@Condor haha yeah I'd love to buy one some time...
Backing up data becomes difficult when you only have monetas for 2x 10TB (RAID1) 🙈

@PonySlaystation haha, same here. 10TB is what I've got here as well.. but most of it I don't access very often anyway. So yeah, tape would be a great added redundancy for a fourth data mirror, and a way to cheaply expand the storage by several more TB. Just the paywall on the tapewriters is kinda off-putting 😕

Come to think of it though, what if you were to encode it as video data for an old-school VHS player to write it? Sure it'd be janky, but the tapes are essentially the same, right? Just the dimensions and perhaps the grading are different.

@Condor Interesting idea for a hack!
I think the capacity would be a problem though... not sure how much could fit but it seems like just some hundred megabytes.
The mechanics & head coils seem too big for good density.

@PonySlaystation hmm, good point. It'd sure be an interesting project to see exactly how much they can hold, but considering the quality of old-school tapes, I guess it'd be safe to say that it'd be maybe 1GB or so.. who knows. Another challenge I guess would be to still find one of those damn things XD

IBM seems to have tape drives that can store up to 30TB.. really impressive. No idea what they ask for it though.. or whether they even sell it to general consumers, since it's kind of an enterprise solution...

@Condor In the latest issue of IEEESpectrum was an article about tape drives and the limits of magnetic storage. They are really on the egde of density on magnetic storage.
30 TB is very impressive!

I can recommend you a membership to IEEE. The IEEESpectrum always has great articles about old, current and future technology!

@PonySlaystation to my knowledge, the tapes i have at work that say "up to 14gig" actually mean it compressed and they actually only hold like 6 gb..also filling them takes like 6 hours or so. 30 GB sounds like a looot