[xubuntu-users] Hard drives and backup - Was: Am I the only one who still uses floppies?

[JMZ]

I share Eric's concern about drive wear.  gvfs might save a bit of 
energy, but only save the environment in an abstract sense.  How many of 
us run at least one desktop all the time?  One of mine is always up 
since it runs multiple layered cronjobs all day.  That's a big source of 
energy use.

A user has to weigh saving $/€ 5 or 10 a year (if that) versus the risk 
of backup drive crash[es].  Personally I'd try to cut back a little bit 
on my take-out coffee addiction rather than risk losing my research.  
There's a cost/benefit analysis question here.

I respect Ralf's concern about the environment.  Maybe if every linux 
user switched to gvfs there would be a qualitative and quantitative 
environmental change.  Soon I'll be replacing a drive with a WD gvfs 
compliant drive, so maybe I can experiment there. You're dealing with 
someone who generally doesn't latch on to new technology well.  I'm 
still driving an almost 20-year old car which would fail inspection if 
the car emissions regulations are tightened.  My old clunker is much 
more of an environmental offender! ;-)

Jordan

On 07/29/2015 08:27 PM, Eric Christopherson wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 29, 2015, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>> On Wed, 29 Jul 2015 14:39:09 +0200, Petter Adsen wrote:
>>> Is it the actual software that makes the drive spin down, or do the
>>> drives do it themselves?
>> My Western Digital spins down and falls asleep if it wasn't touched for
>> 30 minutes. It stays asleep if nothing touches it, unfortunately a lot
>> of software without reason does activate the drive. For SpaceFM this
>> can be disabled, while it's still possible to mount the drive by
>> mouse click. GVFS (GNOME, optional for Thunar) is a PITA and after
>> running a few KDE apps something does also cause this issue.
>>
>> I already posted it, one developer fixed this issue! Most other
>> developers are not interested to fix it.
>>
>> http://sourceforge.net/p/lxde/bugs/751/
>> https://github.com/lxde/libfm/commit/994a1e25ba0c3da80575fc002af17ab02ed5998b
>>
>> Apps that have a hard dependency to GVFS still work without issues, if
>> the gvfs package is replaced by an empty dummy package.
> Is this sort of cycling a danger to internal drives too (ones that don't
> get actively used by the OS, I mean)? I wonder if my internal backup
> drive might be at risk.
>