Linux and data storage?

[Chuck Hallenbeck]

Steve,

I have been thinking about why folks get so gun shy with respect to such
reliable technologies. I think sometimes it originates with the all too
common disasters that come from working in the DOS world, or Windows
world, where there has always been this utterly stupid and risky
business about "text mode" vs. "binary mode" for file transfers and
compression. Making the wrong choice here can really cause you to shoot
yourself in the foot.

For me, one of the enormous advantages of saying bye bye to the
Microsoft atrocities is the ability to forget about that distinction,
text mode vs. binary mode. Data are compressed and uncompressed,
uploaded and downloaded, without ever once having to give a second
thought to those modes, which are nowadays only booby traps.

But I have no idea how one overcomes being nervous about the matter.
Maybe we need a mailing list for "recovering MS-holics!"

Chuck

On Wed, 29 Sep 2004, Steve Holmes wrote:

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> Ahh this fear of compression! Can't say for sure about over the net
> between the two machines (shell world and your web host) but I know
> for sure that files transferred via a 56K modem are compressed in
> transit and then decompressed as they spill onto your computer so at
> the day you wish to pull those files down to a local machine of yours
> over the modem, guess what, compression will be there like it or not.
> If I were a system administrator preparing to transfer someone's files
> over to another location, I would use tar, compress it with the gzip
> or bzip2 option and ship that over and then do likewise to unpack it;
> no questions asked.  This situation is 100% reliable! I havenever
> lost data in the 20 years I've been computing due to any file
> compression.  Now since rsync has been discussed here as a viable
> method of transferring files and keeping them in sync in the future, I
> recall there being a "compress on the fly" option and I would
> incourage its use simply to move things more quickly.  But that is an
> option in itself.

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