Comment by bayindirh

Comment by bayindirh 5 days ago

> How come that Windows still uses a 32 year old file system?

Simple. Because most of the burden is taken by the (enterprise) storage hardware hosting the FS. Snapshots, block level deduplication, object storage technologies, RAID/Resiliency, size changes, you name it.

Modern storage appliances are black magic, and you don't need much more features from NTFS. You either transparently access via NAS/SAN or store your NTFS volumes on capable disk boxes.

On the Linux world, at the higher end, there's Lustre and GPFS. ZFS is mostly for resilient, but not performance critical needs.

BSDobelix 5 days ago

>ZFS is mostly for resilient, but not performance critical needs.

Los Alamos disagrees ;)

https://www.lanl.gov/media/news/0321-computational-storage

But yes, in general you are right, Cern for example uses Ceph:

https://indico.cern.ch/event/1457076/attachments/2934445/515...

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bayindirh 5 days ago

I think what LLNL did predates GPUDirect and other new technologies came after 2022, but that's a good start.
CERN's Ceph also for their "General IT" needs. Their clusters are independent from that. Also CERN's most processing is distributed across Europe. We are part of that network.
Many, if not all of the HPC centers we talk with uses Lustre as their "immediate" storage. Also, there's Weka now, a closed source storage system supporting insane speeds and tons of protocols at the same time. Mostly used for and by GPU clusters around the world. You connect terabits to that cluster casually. It's all flash, and flat out fast.

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- ryao 5 days ago
  
  Did you confuse LANL for LLNL?
  
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  bayindirh 5 days ago
  
  It's just a typo, not a confusion, and I'm well beyond the edit window.
  
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poisonborz 5 days ago

So private consumers should just pay cloud subscription if they want safer/modern data storage for their PC? (without NAS)

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shrubble 5 days ago

No, private consumers have a choice, since Linux and FreeBSD runs well on their hardware. Microsoft is too busy shoveling their crappy AI and convincing OEMs to put a second Windows button (the CoPilot button) on their keyboards.

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bluGill 5 days ago

Probably. There are levels of backups, and a cloud subscription SHOULD give you copies in geographical separate locations with someone to help you (who probably isn't into computers and doesn't want to learn the complex details) restore when (NOT IF!) needed.
I have all my backups on a NAS in the next room. This covers the vast majority of use cases for backups, but if my house burns down everything is lost. I know I'm taking that risk, but really I should have better. Just paying someone to do it all in the cloud should be better for me as well and I keep thinking I should do this.
Of course paying someone assumes they will do their job. There are always incompetent companies out there to take your money.

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- pdimitar 5 days ago
  
  My setup is similar to yours, but I also distribute my most important data in compressed (<5GB) encrypted backups to several free-tier cloud storage accounts. I could restore it by copying one key and running one script.
  I lost faith in most paid operators. Whoops, this thing that absolutely can happen to home users and we're supposed to protect them from now actually happened to us and we were not prepared. We're so sorry!
  Nah. Give me access to 5-15 cloud storage accounts, I'll handle it myself. Have done so for years.
  
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BSDobelix 5 days ago

If you need Windows, you can use something like restic (checksums and compression) and external drives (more than one, stored in more than one place) to make a backup. Plus "maybe" but not needed ReFS (on your non-Windows partition), which is included in the Workstation/Enterprise editions of Windows.
I trust my own backups much more than any subscription, not essentially from a technical point of view, but from an access point of view (e.g. losing access to your Google account).
EDIT: You have to enable check-summing and/or compression for data on ReFS manually
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/ref...

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- bayindirh 5 days ago
  
  > I trust my own backups much more than any subscription, not from a technical standpoint but from an access one (for example, losing access to your google account).
  I personally use cloud storage extensively, but I keep a local version with periodic rclone/borg. It allows me access from everywhere and sleep well at night.
  
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- qwertox 5 days ago
  
  NTFS has Volume Shadow Copy, which is "good enough" for private users if they want to create image backups while their system is running.
  
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  BSDobelix 5 days ago
  
  First of all, that's not a backup, that's a snapshot, and NO, that's not "good enough", tell your grandma that all her digitised pictures are gone because her hard drive exploded, or that one most important jpeg is now unwatchable because of bitrot.
  Just because someone is a private user doesn't mean that the data is less important, often it's quite the opposite, for example a family album vs your cloned git repository.
  
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bayindirh 5 days ago

I think Microsoft has discontinued Windows 7 backup to force people to buy OneDrive subscriptions. They also forcefully enabled the feature when they first introduced it.
So, I think that your answer for this question is "unfortunately, yes".
Not that I support the situation.

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NoMoreNicksLeft 4 days ago

Having a NAS is life-changing. Doesn't have to be some large 20-bay monstrosity, just something that will give you redundancy and has an ethernet jack.

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j16sdiz 4 days ago

No, if they need ZFS-like function, they just pay for NAS.
ZFS is not in the same market with AWS S3.

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