> Perhaps, but it seems to me like digging ore, extracting the small > percentage of valuable; forging a ring; and throwing it in the ore, and > storing the whole...
generally it's apparent which files are worth investigating, and between history (list of changes by date) and a binary search, it shouldn't take more than a handful of tries to narrow things down. in practice, i've found the executables more helpful than the source. > Secondly, I still use optical definitive storage from time to time > (disks go in a vault)... with KerGIS and others, and kerTeX, this still > fit 3 times on a CDROM. So... if you are using venti, there is no reason to re-archive closed arenas. (and there's no a priori reason that your optical backup must include history.) > And finally, didn't the increase in size of the disks, with no decrease > of the reliability, increases the probability of disks failure? > Unfortunately, one finds not "small" (that were huge some years ago) > disks anymore... i think disk reliability is a term that gets canceled out. if you have n copies of an executable, whatever the reliablity of the drive, each copy is exactly as likely to be intact. > PS: and for a Plan9 tester, he will begin by devoting a partition on a > disk to see. The iso is around 300Mb, so allocating 512 or 1024Mb will > seem enough. If he's hooked to Plan9---that happened to me ;)---sooner > or later a problem will occur. that's not what i did. i started with several 18gb scsi drives. - erik
