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Unix files have (at least) two sizes

(utcc.utoronto.ca)
68 points ingve | 2 comments | 14 Apr 25 10:18 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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gerdesj ◴[17 Apr 25 00:54 UTC] No.43711952[source]▶
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

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Dylan16807 ◴[17 Apr 25 03:59 UTC] No.43712994[source]▶
> 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.

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eru ◴[17 Apr 25 05:05 UTC] No.43713282[source]▶
> 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.

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Dylan16807 ◴[17 Apr 25 19:49 UTC] No.43721341[source]▶
I'll believe it when I see it as an option in a large fraction of prebuilt computers.
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eru ◴[18 Apr 25 07:22 UTC] No.43725803[source]▶
That's exactly how Google Docs works (and whatever Microsoft's Office web equivalent is called).

So we are already living in that world.

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1. Dylan16807 ◴[18 Apr 25 20:22 UTC] No.43731541[source]▶
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.

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2. eru ◴[19 Apr 25 05:56 UTC] No.43734518[source]▶
> 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.