All of this seems like a fully general counterargument to doing anything that any salespeople tell you to do, ever.
One imagines that some of those customers who later returned to angrily and tearfully demand data recovery, followed something like your line of reasoning, and decided not to back up their data. As a result, they are now sitting on top of their giant pile of utility.
… oh wait.
Do you think it’s just chance that following your logic leads you to lose, in this case? And not just lose: be almost guaranteed to lose, if in fact you have something to lose. (All hard drives fail. All of them. It’s just a matter of time.)
All of this seems like a fully general counterargument to doing anything that any salespeople tell you to do, ever.
It is sometimes smart to do something that a salesperson tells you to do. But you shouldn’t do it because the salesperson tells you; the fact that the salesperson tells you to do it is not very useful information.
One imagines that some of those customers who later returned to angrily and tearfully demand data recovery, followed something like your line of reasoning, and decided not to back up their data.
They had no reason to believe the salesperson’s advice was good. The fact that the salesperson’s advice was good, and following it would have left them better off, doesn’t change this. It just makes it a case of bad luck. Saying “If they had followed the advice of that salesman they’d have been better off, so they should have listened to that salesman” is like saying “if they had followed the advice of that tea leaf reader, they’d have been better off, so they should have listened to that tea leaf reader.”
It is sometimes smart to do something that a salesperson tells you to do. But you shouldn’t do it because the salesperson tells you; the fact that the salesperson tells you to do it is not very useful information.
Yeah, exactly. In that particular case, you’re either savvy enough and you know that you should backup your data (in which case you’re likely to buy backup storage from someone other than overpriced Apple), OR you’re not savvy enough, in which case you have to take it on faith that e.g. hard drives break down often enough, that there’s no existing built-in redundancy to begin with, that the backup solution actually works, etc etc.
edit: Besides, good hard drives have yearly probability of failure of less than 5%, so the data better be simultaneously worth several hundred bucks and not be worth sharing with other people, copying to other computers, etc.
It might be worth mentioning here that cheap external hard drives are crap. I’ve made a practice for the last few years of using them for backups and anything else I need a terabyte drive for (mostly media storage), and in that time I’ve lost three of them, about one every year and a half. I haven’t lost an internal drive since about 1995.
The usual point of failure seems to be the backplane rather than the drive itself, though. So the data’s recoverable as long as it’s not hardware encrypted.
sharing with other people, copying to other computers, etc.
What do you think “backing up” means, exactly?
It’s not some tech magic that only happens in the presence of certain specific, specially sanctified, pieces of equipment. If you have your data in more than one place, such that if one location goes down, the data still exists elsewhere — congratulations, your data is backed up.
However, if we’re talking about a full backup, then there’s also another consideration:
the data better be simultaneously worth several hundred bucks
It’s not just the data, it’s also your time.
Without a Time Machine backup
Your hard drive goes down. You buy (or receive, via warranty replacement) a new hard drive. You then have to spend the next several days:
a) reinstalling your operating system;
b) reinstalling all of your programs;
c) performing all software updates;
d) reconstructing all of your application-specific settings and other aspects of your configuration.
With a Time Machine backup
Your hard drive goes down. You buy (or receive, via warranty replacement) a new hard drive. You boot from your system DVD or recovery partition and click the button to restore from backup. In an hour or two, as if by magic, your system is fully restored to its state as of the last backup, data, applications, settings, and all.
If your data plus at least a day, usually several days, of time lost, is not worth even one hundred dollars (which is how much a terabyte hard drive plus external enclosure costs these days), then I suppose you’re not doing anything of particular value with your time and you may freely ignore my advice.
If your data plus at least a day, usually several days, of time lost, is not worth even one hundred dollars
You forgot the division by the probability of this happening.
I’m not saying backups are not worth it, I do backup my system, what I am saying is that it’s not necessarily the case that backups are worth it for your regular person that doesn’t customize things a lot, doesn’t have much valuable data, uses very few programs regularly, and what ever valuable data they got is backed up on other computers. edit: for that matter, average person’s settings are probably of negative value to them, heh.
edit : holy cow , some drives have annual failure rate of 0.9% .
I don’t know what “regular people” you hang out with, so this might be true in your experience. When I worked retail, many of our customers were creative professionals of some sort — musicians, photographers, digital artists, writers, etc. Their computers had tons of work-relevant data.
Another example: my mother, certainly a “regular person” insofar as she has no tech industry background, is an educator. On her computer are things like work-related documents; syllabi; curriculum design docs; teaching materials; etc. All of that is certainly valuable.
Do you actually know people who own and use a personal computer, but have no valuable data on it, or very little? Also, how do you peg the value of your Great American Novel you’ve been writing in your off time for the last three years?
I don’t really hang out with regular people generally, and I was speaking in the data by sheer tonnage. The examples you’re listing fit on a single SD card. Non computer proficient people I know are really paranoid about the computer failing so they copy their stuff onto disks manually (even though better options are available).
How much revenue in dollars do you think a typical person with failed hard drive will lose, on the average?
(The total net worth of the data I got is definitely in the six and most likely in the seven figures range in terms of total loss of revenue if i’d lost all of it, so it’s backuped rigorously of course, off site too in case of fire) edit: also I have large data that is valuable, not just photos (which people nowadays upload someplace on the internet).
The examples you’re listing fit on a single SD card.
What?!
<consults Newegg>
It seems you can get SDXC cards in capacities up to 256 GB… for over $600. The up-to-$100 range gets you, perhaps, 64 GB. The sort of data I refer to in my first example most certainly does not fit onto one of those; and even the largest SD cards in no way, shape, or form have the capacity to let you do a full backup (i.e., the kind that saves you all that reinstall time) on a machine you use for any kind of media work.
(The total net worth of the data I got is definitely in the six and most likely in the seven figures range in terms of total loss of revenue if i’d lost all of it, so it’s backuped rigorously of course, off site too in case of fire) edit: also I have large data that is valuable, not just photos (which people nowadays upload someplace on the internet).
Well, there you go. I don’t know why you think “regular people” don’t do important, valuable things on their computer, or don’t have lots of data, but in my experience, they certainly do.
In any case, my original point remains, which is that even if you backup your several megabytes of important Word documents onto Dropbox, and that’s your entire backup strategy, and your time is so worthless to you that you don’t mind spending hours or days reinstalling...
… that’s still a backup strategy. Not backing up would still be worse.
(As an aside, measure the value of time exclusively in lost revenue has always struck me as shortsighted as heck.)
What do people do when they get a new computer, do they copy over all settings automatically, usually, or not?
and your time is so worthless to you that you don’t mind spending hours or days reinstalling.
The annual failure rate was 0.9% for Hitachi drives… let’s say, 1%. So, for example, if the full backup costs $100 per year, the reinstalling would needs to cost $10 000 assuming linearity. Which is an overestimate due to possibly higher probability of accidentally deleting your data with your own hands, things getting stolen, etc, yes, I know. Why you keep repeating “time is so worthless”?
In the context of you being a salesman, the regular person, they don’t know what is the failure rate of the drive, they have to trust you that it is high enough, and you being a salesman, it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense to trust you. You can’t somehow prove from the first principles that the rate is high enough. It is not obvious that the rate is high enough. In fact for some manufacturers the rate can well be not high enough, unless we are speaking of operating system failures, human errors, and such.
edit: misremembered some other failure rate, fixed.
edit2: to summarize, between them backing up the most valuable data manually, the low probability of failure, and their low confidence in the words of a salesman, you can have a rational decision here. (I’m of course playing the advocate for “stupid people” not present to advocate themselves)
What do people do when they get a new computer, do they copy over all settings automatically, usually, or not?
If it’s a Mac, I think they do, because it’s so easy. In my experience they certainly do.
backing up the most valuable data manually
Uh, but if they back up their data “manually”, then they have thereby followed my advice. I don’t know why you keep drawing this distinction. My exhortations have always been to back up somehow. I never said “and you absolutely must do so with the following preapproved backup technology which you must buy, and certainly not any solution you may already have access to”.
The annual failure rate was 0.9% for Hitachi drives
The following are nitpicks, but still: a) not everyone has Hitachi drives; b) failure rates were higher in the past; c)
As for your monetary value argument, it ignores nonlinear marginal utility of money, risk aversion, and difficulties in translating value of time into money. (As do most such arguments.)
Uh, but if they back up their data “manually”, then they have thereby followed my advice.
Ahh, ok. Albeit there’s the second point with regards to the full backup.
As for your monetary value argument, it ignores nonlinear marginal utility of money, risk aversion, and difficulties in translating value of time into money. (As do most such arguments.)
Yeah, I know. I’d still backup. The point is, those are variables and may differ quite a bit, especially for the full-backup advantage.
On the other side of spectrum though, I know a lawyer whose opinion is that you should not keep durable records unless you actually really need to have them. (I think he often does divorce dispute cases and such).
On the other side of spectrum though, I know a lawyer whose opinion is that you should not keep durable records unless you actually really need to have them. (I think he often does divorce dispute cases and such).
Interesting. That’s certainly a perspective I hadn’t considered. One sort-of-related situation is one of political dissidents, activists, etc.: such people would almost certainly not want to use Dropbox and similar cloud storage solutions for e.g. lists of contacts, but they might want more private backups (off-site over-network backup solutions, for instance) to protect data against government seizure of their computers.
Certainly, if your concern is having your data accessible by entities (such as the government) that will take coercive measures to get it, then the equation changes.
such people would almost certainly not want to use Dropbox and similar cloud storage solutions for e.g. lists of contacts
It depends on whether they consider themselves vulnerable to rubberhose cryptography. If not, they can backup encrypted files anywhere they want to, including Dropbox, etc. But if they do, then it becomes a game of steganography and the local hard drives of their machines aren’t safe either.
Indeed, although the truly paranoid may rig their hard drives to self-destruct, or take some similar measure, in the event of the police breaking down their door.
I imagine active destruction of that kind might create huge legal problems of it’s own. On the technical side you can store the key in a file you can securely destroy.
I heard somewhere that in the US and UK, an average law abiding citizen, from the formal standpoint, rather frequently breaks various laws by accident. No idea about other jurisdictions. This is why NSA is such a big deal.
I imagine active destruction of that kind might create legal problems of it’s own.
If your fear of rubberhose cryptography is well-justified, “legal problems” are a minor part of your worries.
By the way, it’s hard to destroy a hard drive to the extent that a determined government wouldn’t be able to extract data from it. At least hard during the time it takes the police to break down your door.
I heard somewhere that an average law abiding citizen, from the formal standpoint, rather frequently breaks various laws.
Interesting. I’m curious what kind of laws are frequently broken… at company level I know there’s a plenty of regulations related to health and safety which are here for a good reason when people are working with, say, dangerous machinery, but are silly in the office context.
edit: how many laws would a company break if a computer scientist replaced a light bulb?
“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.”—Cardinal De Richelieu
All of this seems like a fully general counterargument to doing anything that any salespeople tell you to do, ever.
One imagines that some of those customers who later returned to angrily and tearfully demand data recovery, followed something like your line of reasoning, and decided not to back up their data. As a result, they are now sitting on top of their giant pile of utility.
… oh wait.
Do you think it’s just chance that following your logic leads you to lose, in this case? And not just lose: be almost guaranteed to lose, if in fact you have something to lose. (All hard drives fail. All of them. It’s just a matter of time.)
It is sometimes smart to do something that a salesperson tells you to do. But you shouldn’t do it because the salesperson tells you; the fact that the salesperson tells you to do it is not very useful information.
They had no reason to believe the salesperson’s advice was good. The fact that the salesperson’s advice was good, and following it would have left them better off, doesn’t change this. It just makes it a case of bad luck. Saying “If they had followed the advice of that salesman they’d have been better off, so they should have listened to that salesman” is like saying “if they had followed the advice of that tea leaf reader, they’d have been better off, so they should have listened to that tea leaf reader.”
Yeah, exactly. In that particular case, you’re either savvy enough and you know that you should backup your data (in which case you’re likely to buy backup storage from someone other than overpriced Apple), OR you’re not savvy enough, in which case you have to take it on faith that e.g. hard drives break down often enough, that there’s no existing built-in redundancy to begin with, that the backup solution actually works, etc etc.
edit: Besides, good hard drives have yearly probability of failure of less than 5%, so the data better be simultaneously worth several hundred bucks and not be worth sharing with other people, copying to other computers, etc.
It might be worth mentioning here that cheap external hard drives are crap. I’ve made a practice for the last few years of using them for backups and anything else I need a terabyte drive for (mostly media storage), and in that time I’ve lost three of them, about one every year and a half. I haven’t lost an internal drive since about 1995.
The usual point of failure seems to be the backplane rather than the drive itself, though. So the data’s recoverable as long as it’s not hardware encrypted.
What do you think “backing up” means, exactly?
It’s not some tech magic that only happens in the presence of certain specific, specially sanctified, pieces of equipment. If you have your data in more than one place, such that if one location goes down, the data still exists elsewhere — congratulations, your data is backed up.
However, if we’re talking about a full backup, then there’s also another consideration:
It’s not just the data, it’s also your time.
Without a Time Machine backup
Your hard drive goes down. You buy (or receive, via warranty replacement) a new hard drive. You then have to spend the next several days:
a) reinstalling your operating system; b) reinstalling all of your programs; c) performing all software updates; d) reconstructing all of your application-specific settings and other aspects of your configuration.
With a Time Machine backup
Your hard drive goes down. You buy (or receive, via warranty replacement) a new hard drive. You boot from your system DVD or recovery partition and click the button to restore from backup. In an hour or two, as if by magic, your system is fully restored to its state as of the last backup, data, applications, settings, and all.
If your data plus at least a day, usually several days, of time lost, is not worth even one hundred dollars (which is how much a terabyte hard drive plus external enclosure costs these days), then I suppose you’re not doing anything of particular value with your time and you may freely ignore my advice.
You forgot the division by the probability of this happening.
I’m not saying backups are not worth it, I do backup my system, what I am saying is that it’s not necessarily the case that backups are worth it for your regular person that doesn’t customize things a lot, doesn’t have much valuable data, uses very few programs regularly, and what ever valuable data they got is backed up on other computers. edit: for that matter, average person’s settings are probably of negative value to them, heh.
edit : holy cow , some drives have annual failure rate of 0.9% .
I don’t know what “regular people” you hang out with, so this might be true in your experience. When I worked retail, many of our customers were creative professionals of some sort — musicians, photographers, digital artists, writers, etc. Their computers had tons of work-relevant data.
Another example: my mother, certainly a “regular person” insofar as she has no tech industry background, is an educator. On her computer are things like work-related documents; syllabi; curriculum design docs; teaching materials; etc. All of that is certainly valuable.
Do you actually know people who own and use a personal computer, but have no valuable data on it, or very little? Also, how do you peg the value of your Great American Novel you’ve been writing in your off time for the last three years?
I don’t really hang out with regular people generally, and I was speaking in the data by sheer tonnage. The examples you’re listing fit on a single SD card. Non computer proficient people I know are really paranoid about the computer failing so they copy their stuff onto disks manually (even though better options are available).
How much revenue in dollars do you think a typical person with failed hard drive will lose, on the average?
(The total net worth of the data I got is definitely in the six and most likely in the seven figures range in terms of total loss of revenue if i’d lost all of it, so it’s backuped rigorously of course, off site too in case of fire) edit: also I have large data that is valuable, not just photos (which people nowadays upload someplace on the internet).
What?!
<consults Newegg>
It seems you can get SDXC cards in capacities up to 256 GB… for over $600. The up-to-$100 range gets you, perhaps, 64 GB. The sort of data I refer to in my first example most certainly does not fit onto one of those; and even the largest SD cards in no way, shape, or form have the capacity to let you do a full backup (i.e., the kind that saves you all that reinstall time) on a machine you use for any kind of media work.
Well, there you go. I don’t know why you think “regular people” don’t do important, valuable things on their computer, or don’t have lots of data, but in my experience, they certainly do.
In any case, my original point remains, which is that even if you backup your several megabytes of important Word documents onto Dropbox, and that’s your entire backup strategy, and your time is so worthless to you that you don’t mind spending hours or days reinstalling...
… that’s still a backup strategy. Not backing up would still be worse.
(As an aside, measure the value of time exclusively in lost revenue has always struck me as shortsighted as heck.)
What do people do when they get a new computer, do they copy over all settings automatically, usually, or not?
The annual failure rate was 0.9% for Hitachi drives… let’s say, 1%. So, for example, if the full backup costs $100 per year, the reinstalling would needs to cost $10 000 assuming linearity. Which is an overestimate due to possibly higher probability of accidentally deleting your data with your own hands, things getting stolen, etc, yes, I know. Why you keep repeating “time is so worthless”?
In the context of you being a salesman, the regular person, they don’t know what is the failure rate of the drive, they have to trust you that it is high enough, and you being a salesman, it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense to trust you. You can’t somehow prove from the first principles that the rate is high enough. It is not obvious that the rate is high enough. In fact for some manufacturers the rate can well be not high enough, unless we are speaking of operating system failures, human errors, and such.
edit: misremembered some other failure rate, fixed.
edit2: to summarize, between them backing up the most valuable data manually, the low probability of failure, and their low confidence in the words of a salesman, you can have a rational decision here. (I’m of course playing the advocate for “stupid people” not present to advocate themselves)
If it’s a Mac, I think they do, because it’s so easy. In my experience they certainly do.
Uh, but if they back up their data “manually”, then they have thereby followed my advice. I don’t know why you keep drawing this distinction. My exhortations have always been to back up somehow. I never said “and you absolutely must do so with the following preapproved backup technology which you must buy, and certainly not any solution you may already have access to”.
The following are nitpicks, but still: a) not everyone has Hitachi drives; b) failure rates were higher in the past; c)
As for your monetary value argument, it ignores nonlinear marginal utility of money, risk aversion, and difficulties in translating value of time into money. (As do most such arguments.)
Ahh, ok. Albeit there’s the second point with regards to the full backup.
Yeah, I know. I’d still backup. The point is, those are variables and may differ quite a bit, especially for the full-backup advantage.
On the other side of spectrum though, I know a lawyer whose opinion is that you should not keep durable records unless you actually really need to have them. (I think he often does divorce dispute cases and such).
Interesting. That’s certainly a perspective I hadn’t considered. One sort-of-related situation is one of political dissidents, activists, etc.: such people would almost certainly not want to use Dropbox and similar cloud storage solutions for e.g. lists of contacts, but they might want more private backups (off-site over-network backup solutions, for instance) to protect data against government seizure of their computers.
Certainly, if your concern is having your data accessible by entities (such as the government) that will take coercive measures to get it, then the equation changes.
It depends on whether they consider themselves vulnerable to rubberhose cryptography. If not, they can backup encrypted files anywhere they want to, including Dropbox, etc. But if they do, then it becomes a game of steganography and the local hard drives of their machines aren’t safe either.
Indeed, although the truly paranoid may rig their hard drives to self-destruct, or take some similar measure, in the event of the police breaking down their door.
I imagine active destruction of that kind might create huge legal problems of it’s own. On the technical side you can store the key in a file you can securely destroy.
I heard somewhere that in the US and UK, an average law abiding citizen, from the formal standpoint, rather frequently breaks various laws by accident. No idea about other jurisdictions. This is why NSA is such a big deal.
If your fear of rubberhose cryptography is well-justified, “legal problems” are a minor part of your worries.
By the way, it’s hard to destroy a hard drive to the extent that a determined government wouldn’t be able to extract data from it. At least hard during the time it takes the police to break down your door.
I know I do :-)
There is this book, for example.
And, of course:
“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” -- Cardinal De Richelieu
I was thinking of “or else” crypanalysis .
Interesting. I’m curious what kind of laws are frequently broken… at company level I know there’s a plenty of regulations related to health and safety which are here for a good reason when people are working with, say, dangerous machinery, but are silly in the office context.
edit: how many laws would a company break if a computer scientist replaced a light bulb?
Yeah.