December 16, 2022 at 12:00 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Are You Still Using Portable Drives?
December 16, 2022 at 5:12 am
Back in the '90's at work, I had to have a reel to reel tape reader, a CD reader, a special optical reader, and multiple floppy drives, and a special FTP telephone line to receive CDRs (Call Detail Records) from multiple providers. That was a hoot! Prior to that, I worked with folks that worked on mainframes... they had monster removable 4 platter disk packs that held about as much as two high density real to realtapes.
Something else that amazes me... when I was 5 years old in Detroit (circa 1957), we had the latest and greatest dialess phone... where you needed an operator to call next door... provided that next door even had a telephone. There was also about a 4 second delay over the phone if you had to call "long distance". I chuckled about that even today as I clicked a button on Teams and was immediately connected to my assistant half way around the world with no noticeable voice delay and shared my screen in real time.
I also remember my first "hard card". It had 40MB on it and DOS was only geared up to work with 30, so I HAD to partition it. And I was kickin' butt with a whopping full 640KB of RAM. My, now 3 years old laptop has 2 TB of NVME SSD, 1 TB of spinning rust and I'm feeling a little "behind" with "only" having 32GB of RAM. People didn't even have servers that powerful even in the late '90's.
Truly, it's been an amazing life of innovations for me. And, yeah... my first program ever was written on a banana-plug wire-board for Unit Record equipment and one of the greatest innovations at the time was being able to write a "program" on a punch card to control tabbing on a punch card machine. I also had the "joy" of working with both paper punch tape and some really pretty colored mylar tape. I was absolutely thrilled when they finally came out with 300 baud modems. 😀
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
December 16, 2022 at 8:11 am
I use portable hard drives for my personal systems because the internet is not truly global and I go to many places where it is not possible to get a mobile signal and internet (e.g. a favourite sailing spot by a reservoir in Wales) and others where getting connected would be expensive (travelling abroad in rural Europe for example).
Having my data and my precious holiday photos backed up to a hard drive gives me some peace of mind. Further backups happen later.
December 16, 2022 at 3:10 pm
What do you mean 'still using'? Historically, my first 'portable drives' were on an IBM 360-50 and an IBM 360-30 at work about 1968 with four storage units with two removable disk each. Everything was batch processing so drives were switched continuously around the clock. Then later at home was an Apple II+ with only a single connnected 5.25" floppy disk drive
My collection of 'portable' (switchable) drives has continued to grow especially since I have slimmed down to a laptop (ASUS ROG STRIX) with a second 32" monitor, and my wife's one remaining desktop from her business. Our home office houses two four-bay NAS devices on the network. As I work with larger amounts of data I have accumulated a 7-port USB docking station connected to a two-port 3.5/2.5 SATA docking station (for temporary use of drives from retired systems), all connected to the laptop. When all are powered on my laptop has a total of 14 drives connected, with several USB ports left over, and I have lost count of the TB capacity. Do you think I suffer from OCD?
One benefit is that as my portable drives age, I can easily rotate them out, and the docking stations make disk-to-disk backups pretty easy since everything but my one internal drive is removable. And a nice feature of the USB drives is that I can take one or a couple anywhere I need to.
And you know my SQL mantra is: Backup ( Backup ( My backups ) ). I'm soon to be 80 years old, and have only permanently lost an important file once, and that was reconstructed in a couple hours (but required four people entering data on the old dumb terminals).
In the closet is a box that has 11 old EIDE drives from various retired systems and a single old XP machine that still has the business accounting software on it just in case.
Since we gave up our summer mountain cabin where we transported a couple desktops, my laptop has not been out of the house except for a couple wintertime trips to warm climates, but the flexibility of this setup works well for us. We still have one room totally dedicated to our office, with work surface around three walls and one glass wall to watch birds at the feeders.
Rick
Disaster Recovery = Backup ( Backup ( Your Backup ) )
December 16, 2022 at 3:48 pm
I use portable hard drives for my personal systems because the internet is not truly global and I go to many places where it is not possible to get a mobile signal and internet (e.g. a favourite sailing spot by a reservoir in Wales) and others where getting connected would be expensive (travelling abroad in rural Europe for example). Having my data and my precious holiday photos backed up to a hard drive gives me some peace of mind. Further backups happen later.
P Jones and all of you, just a word of caution. Even though we all love magnetic drives for storage, be sure to refresh them regularly. Remember that magnetic storage is not permanent. I commented earlier this year on working through a large number of old 3.5" floppy disks ( you can still find portable USB floppy drives if you search ). The number of failed floppy disks was fairly high after about 40 years. Just last month I had a USB drive fail that was only about five years old, so it had to be refreshed from a backup.
And I'm digitizing 100-year-old family photos to be able to share copies with others, but some lucky individual is still going to inherit several moving boxes full of b/w photo albums back to my great-grandparents and 35mm slide storage boxes back to my college years and early family life. But you must store them safely. I lost a fairly large number of old 8mm movies because the stroage area was too damp and the film warped.
Rick
Disaster Recovery = Backup ( Backup ( Your Backup ) )
December 16, 2022 at 3:56 pm
Something else that amazes me... when I was 5 years old in Detroit (circa 1957), we had the latest and greatest dialess phone... where you needed an operator to call next door... provided that next door even had a telephone. There was also about a 4 second delay over the phone if you had to call "long distance". I chuckled about that even today...
Jeff, you remided me of my childhood in a rural area where we had a large wall-mounted hand-crank phone that was on a 'party line'. Our phone number was '26R11' which meant we were on rural line 26 and our signal was one long crank and one short crank. Everyone's phone on line 26 would ring and anyone could pick up their receiver and listen in. WE got our first desk-top dial phone when I was in mid gradeschool, one phone for the whole family.
Rick
Disaster Recovery = Backup ( Backup ( Your Backup ) )
December 16, 2022 at 5:23 pm
Backing up your photos and personal documents to removable storage and then losing it is a nightmare scenario. For that reason, I think thumb drives and SD cards are a terrible idea - especially for teenagers or anyone else who are in a habit of misplacing things. Not to mention that it can be easily stolen from the hotel room or confiscated at the airport - and then someone else "loses" it.
If I had a job where I was frequently traveling by airplane, I would probably keep all my apps, email, and documents in an Azure VM co-located with the database and then carry a netbook for remoting into the desktop. If that gets stolen or lost, then it can be easily replaced from any retail store.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
December 16, 2022 at 7:03 pm
I do think backups make sense, but I tend to use cloud services. Backblaze for my machine(s), Evernote/OneDrive/Dropbox for lots of docs, and then FB/Google for photos/video.
In general, I try to drop things in two places to be sure I have copies.
However, even without Internet, I usually end up transferring stuff from device to device with a local network rather than a cord of any sort. BT has become really handy or a local wi-fi
December 16, 2022 at 7:09 pm
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December 16, 2022 at 7:09 pm
Backing up your photos and personal documents to removable storage and then losing it is a nightmare scenario. For that reason, I think thumb drives and SD cards are a terrible idea - especially for teenagers or anyone else who are in a habit of misplacing things. Not to mention that it can be easily stolen from the hotel room or confiscated at the airport - and then someone else "loses" it.
The only thing we use thumb drives for is moving digital patterns from my wife's desktop with her digital photo software to her digital embroidery machine ( an amazing high-tech device ). Our only thumb drives are old and fairly small. We don't normlly need a high capacity portable for most things, just backups.
Rick
Disaster Recovery = Backup ( Backup ( Your Backup ) )
December 18, 2022 at 4:12 pm
I do think backups make sense, but I tend to use cloud services. Backblaze for my machine(s), Evernote/OneDrive/Dropbox for lots of docs, and then FB/Google for photos/video.
In general, I try to drop things in two places to be sure I have copies.
However, even without Internet, I usually end up transferring stuff from device to device with a local network rather than a cord of any sort. BT has become really handy or a local wi-fi
Backblaze? I've never heard of it. Thank you for the head's up.
One word of caution about FB. Sometimes one can have their FB account either locked or disabled/removed because some FB algorithm gets it into its head, that you've said something it thinks isn't acceptable. So, you're gone and everything you've ever saved to FB is also gone. This has happened to one of my daughter's friends. She wasn't being political, saying anything that some would consider misinformation, etc. This gal lost everything. She had to create a new FB account, but all those photos are permanently gone. And with FB, there's no contact to challenge FB's action. As everyone knows, FB customer service is next to non-existent.
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
December 19, 2022 at 4:10 pm
One word of caution about FB. Sometimes one can have their FB account either locked or disabled/removed because some FB algorithm gets it into its head, that you've said something it thinks isn't acceptable. So, you're gone and everything you've ever saved to FB is also gone. This has happened to one of my daughter's friends. She wasn't being political, saying anything that some would consider misinformation, etc. This gal lost everything. She had to create a new FB account, but all those photos are permanently gone. And with FB, there's no contact to challenge FB's action. As everyone knows, FB customer service is next to non-existent.
Even if a user is "de-platformed" from a social media or cloud hosting service, the provider should still give them an opportunity to download their data.
Just like there are laws governing apartment lease agreements, eviction, and other tenant rights - there should be similar laws for digital service subscribers. When it comes to internet law, we don't necessarily have to re-invent the wheel - many of these basic age old concepts should carry over.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
December 19, 2022 at 4:18 pm
According to the front page of Backblaze's website, they are currently managing 2,280,426,850,155,030,000 bytes of customer data.
That's 2.2 Exabytes.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
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