Unix files have (at least) two sizes

Many years ago I looked after a Novell cluster of three hosts with a rather expensive FC connected array. So what - that's pretty normal?

It was the early noughties and a TB was expensive. I wrote a spreadsheet with inputs from the Novell .ocx jobbies. The files were stored on some Novell NSS volu.mes.

I was able to show all states of the files and aggregate stats too.

Nowadays a disc is massive and worrying about compression is daft

> Nowadays a disc is massive and worrying about compression is daft

I wouldn't go that far. I've professionally seen storage pools with a compression factor of 2-3x, and it really mattered at that job. For that matter, my home directory on the laptop I'm writing this comment from is sitting around 1.2-1.3x, and that's pretty nice. I dunno if I'd make a whole lot of effort (although if I was getting paid to save money on storing terabytes, it might be worthwhile), but the technology has evolved in ease of use.

> Nowadays a disc is massive and worrying about compression is daft

I wish. Not even because I want to store more data, but because that would imply going the other way is super cheap. Make RAID-1 the standard, with a filesystem that keeps snapshots for multiple months. But we're not at the point where that costs a trivial amount.

> But we're not at the point where that costs a trivial amount.

It depends on your data.

For (generalised) text files or even Word documents, we have been at that point for quite a while.

> Nowadays a disc is massive and worrying about compression is daft

Enabling compression can also increase performance (decompressing is quick compared to reading from the disks) so disk size isn't the only reason to enable it.

I'll believe it when I see it as an option in a large fraction of prebuilt computers.

That's exactly how Google Docs works (and whatever Microsoft's Office web equivalent is called).

So we are already living in that world.

If you use those services you often have zero local copies, so that's not really what I meant.

And more importantly, once you have local RAID you can put all your important files on it. That's a critical part of the world I want to see.

> If you use those services you often have zero local copies, so that's not really what I meant.

Yes, I was merely using these examples to show that storage space is cheap enough. Google and Microsoft store your stuff on HDD and SSD and tape, too. They ain't magic.

The "stuff" they store is not enough for me to have a hard drive failure but keep all my data. So it's not cheap enough imo.

Even for text files, the only software I trust to find them all when set up by a normal person is something like backblaze and that's a good chunk of money. And for the rest of the data you need to pay significantly for the space no matter how you do it.

For most people, apart from text files / documents there's perhaps photos and videos that they took that really take up space, and that can't be replaced.

Eg installed Steam games take up oodles of space, but you don't need to back them up.