Department of Redundancy Department

Found an old Redo Backup image of my ThinkPad on my external hard drive.  Decided I wanted the space back, but didn't want to just delete it.  (Pack rats point to me when they want to talk about people who hoard things.)

Didn't want to risk 'bit rot' on the DVD's I burned it too, so I ran Parchive to get Reed-Solomon error-correction files, then burned the Redo files and the *.par files to a set of disks.

But that's not being paranoid enough.

So, I ran DVDisaster on the ISOs that I'd built, then ran Parchive on the resulting ECC files, and made an ISO image from them.  Then I re-ran DVDisaster on that ISO to include as much ECC data as would fit, and burned two copies.

So, if any of the primary DVD's bit-rot, the DVDisaster data should get them back.  If not, I'll restore what I can, then use the PArchive files to get the Redo data back.

I have to admit, I didn't check to see if the Redo files and their Par files are spread out well enough that I can loose an entire DVD without being unable to recover.

Maybe I ought to burn another set...

(That direct link isn't responding right now, so here's the Wikipedia entry for Redo Backup)

Here's another sentence I never thought I'd read

From a recent Linux Weekly News summary of current Linux kernel development:

For S390 users who find the current limit of 3.8TB of RAM to be constraining: 3.3 will add support for four-level page tables and an upper limit of 64TB (for now).

Normally I complain about how absurd such things would have been ten or twenty or whatever years ago.

This one seems absurd now.