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

[Telstra]

On 30 July 2015 8:31:16 pm AEST, JMZ <florentior at gmail.com> wrote:
>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.
>>
>
>
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A lot of so called 'energy savers' neglect to factor in the energy consumed in creating the new product. It may be an urban myth but I feel confident I saw stated a while ago that it takes as much energy to create a new car as the car is likely to consume in its lifetime. I would suspect that computers have a similar construction energy burden. Consequently keeping older gear working safely and productively whether by driving a clunker or using a lean version of Linux on older hardware, it is already making a huge difference :-)

Cheers, Rob
 
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
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