I am trying to enable DDR in SD/MMC cards and it wont work - <AUTHOR> I am trying to enable DDR in sd (spec above 2.0) the procedure in the specifications is as follows<p>Execute CMD0 to make the card idle Execute CMD8 to enable ask about the voltage requirements Execute ACMD41 with S18 bit enabled and log for S18 in the reply to see if the card has voltage switch functionality: checked and the card has the functionality Now execute CMD11, if the card replies with a response the voltage switching sequence is started, the cmd and data line should go low: checked and yes they do Stop the clock, Program the voltage switch reg (with 1.8V) and wait 5 ms Start the clock: the card should start at speed SDR12 with 1.8V: cmd and data lines should go high, a cmd_done interrupt should be received: NOT RECEIVED Any pointers regarding this would be helpful...the card status registers shows that there is a data transfer in progress and the card is not present. After this I cannot execute any CMD (the cmd_done interrupts are not received) <comment><AUTHOR> Execute CMD0 to make the card idle

Execute CMD8 to enable ask about the voltage requirements

Execute ACMD41 with S18 bit enabled and log for S18 in the reply to see if the card has voltage switch functionality: checked and the card has the functionality

Now execute CMD11, if the card replies with a response the voltage switching sequence is started, the cmd and data line should go low: checked and yes they do

Stop the clock,

Program the voltage switch reg (with 1.8V) and wait 5 ms

Start the clock: the card should start at speed SDR12 with 1.8V: cmd and data lines should go high, a cmd_done interrupt should be received: NOT RECEIVED

Any pointers regarding this would be helpful...the card status registers shows that there is a data transfer in progress and the card is not present. After this I cannot execute any CMD (the cmd_done interrupts are not received)

</comment><comment><USER2> This is not an hardware hacking support site.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes but there are some intelligent people who come here and I thought someone might have worked on this before, its a very common problem....</comment></comment>


Windows 8 banned by benchmarking and overclocking site - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/164209-windows-8-banned-by-worlds-top-benchmarking-and-overclocking-site

<comment><USER2> Title is linkbait.

What's happened is that there's apparently a bug with the Win8 RTC API implementation that doesn't properly calibrate for changes in the CPU BCLK, which obviously makes it useless in the presence of overclocking (beyond mere changes to the multiplier, anyway).

That's a bug, and a comparatively bad one (though obviously it won't affect production systems), and it should be fixed. But the lede use of "banned" makes it sounds like MS was caught "cheating" or something, which is wrong.

Presumably other OSes like Win7 or Linux expose the underlying ACPI RTC directly. Win8 probably tried to finesse things by using the CPU timer counters to improve precision.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is fascinating. I wish we had view to the bug report submitted to Microsoft; I would love to see the discussions about this one over there.

</comment><comment><USER4> Can someone go into a little more detail about how Windows 8 can screw with the RTC?</comment>


Show HN: AdaptiveTableLayout – Library helps to read, edit and write CSV files - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Cleveroad/AdaptiveTableLayout <comment><AUTHOR> Our company has been engaged in the development of open source CSV Reader. And recently we have also created separate open source CSV Library AdaptiveTableLayout for its integration into your own software. It implements the following features:

\- Reading and editing of CSV files

\- Reshuffling rows and columns

\- Diagonal scrolling

\- Fixing of headers to the edges

\- Changing of cell margin

\- Working with the large files without lags

\- Drag-and-drop feature

Don't hesitate to try it and we will be glad to receive your feedback! What do you think about it?</comment>


How a bug in Dropbox permanently deleted my 8000 photos - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/how-bug-in-dropbox-permanently-deleted-my-8000-photos-cb7dcf13647b <comment><USER3> I think this bug should be considered completely separately from how unwise it is to use a cloud service as the sole storage of important files.

Regardless of the circumstances, losing user files against the wishes of the user is _the absolute worst thing a cloud backup provider can do_.

Even for files that are deleted intentionally and unambiguously by the user, I'm astonished that Dropbox actually deletes the files at the end of the 30-day restore window. I would expect them to keep the files for some multiple of the publicly-stated restore deadline where the multiple >= 2, if for no other reason than as a goodwill generator. There is no more evangelical advocate for your company than the customer you email to say "Yes, you intentionally deleted this file six weeks ago. The 30 day deletion deadline has passed, but I have managed to restore the most recent version of your dissertation. Thank you for using Dropbox."

For files that aren't intentionally deleted by the user but are "de-synced", it is disgraceful and appalling that there is no contingency system in place. Keeping user files when the user assumes or wishes them to be kept safe is the core competency of a service like Dropbox.

"The user should have kept multiple redundant copies" is _not an excuse_ for a poorly managed online backup service. "Keep multiple backups of everything important" is good advice for a _user_ , but "Keep user files safe when the user thinks they are safe" is the most essential advice imaginable for the CEO of an online backup service.

<comment><USER4> _> I think this bug should be considered completely separately from how unwise it is to use a cloud service as the sole storage of important files._

YES: from DropBox's point of view - this is a serious bug even ignoring what other actions the users have/not taken to protect their data.

And NO: this sort of thing is one of the key reasons _not_ to use such a service as a sole backup - linking the two when trying to educate users on the importance of thinking about data safety, so we can't separate the two as one is important when hammering the other point home...

 _> Even for files that are deleted intentionally and unambiguously by the user, I'm astonished that Dropbox actually deletes the files at the end of the 30-day restore window. I would expect them to keep the files for some multiple of the publicly-stated restore deadline_

That would cause significant consternation in some areas. If I explicitly delete a file I might explicitly want it gone within the stated window and no later and would therefore be unhappy if I found the data still available (even if I had properly encrypted it before it touched the cloud service so noone else could read it).

 _> For files that aren't intentionally deleted by the user but are "de- synced",_

I definitely agree there - it sounds like that process needs some transactional workflow wrapped around it so that:

1\. Client and server don't do _anything_ until they've both agreed what to do (then they can both go away and do it even if the connection drops, safe in the knowledge that the action is correct).

2\. The client and server record what has been agreed as part of that transaction protected process, so in the case of an unclean stop during the process it can be resumed/retried.

3\. Some process may need to be in place for one side rolling back if the other detects a failure applying the agreed actions.

Of course this is a fair bit of work for something that won't happen often, particularly when you consider that there might be more than one active connection to a set of files at any given time so it might not be a simple two-way merge operation, so DB may have other priorities - but the bad PR from it happening and not being cleanly dealt with is something that they need to consider if making that sort of decision.

 _> "The user should have kept multiple redundant copies" is not an excuse for a poorly managed online backup service_

Agreed. But "the single backup service failed" is similarly not something that is going to encourage me to have sympathy for the user!

Sync services are excellent secondary backups, and they satisfy the "off site" requirement that a great many home and small-office users neglect (I know people who worked for a small company which died because the backups were in the same building as the active data so one fire took out the lot), but no one should trust them as their _only_ backup. I even recommend against multiple sync services as your only backups as that in itself can cause problems (when bugs or other peculiarities from one interact badly with similar behaviours in another).

Using just a sync service means you have no off-line (or even semi-offline) backup, which is as bad as not having any off-site copies.

Of course getting this involves educating users as to the risks they are taking, which is a point _notoriously_ difficult to get across, so while I don't expect a service like DB to be perfectly bug free (and therefore wouldn't trust it as an only backup) I think such services need to help the education process by being a little less indigenous about the safety issue and making sure their users know that an accidental delete will be propagated everywhere and be unrecoverable after a time. This will never happen though: "please use some other backup option too in case ours goes wrong" is not a sentiment marketing departments or investors will want to see publicly stated!

<comment><USER5> _Of course this is a fair bit of work for something that won 't happen often_

If you think about it, that sums up almost any robust back-up system you go to the effort of setting up, properly testing, and maintaining over time. For that matter, it applies to almost any insurance policy in any context.

I expect most of us would still agree that potential catastrophic damage if you're the unlucky one can justify spending the time/money/resources to set up proper back-ups and insurance, though, and surely this is the case if you're running a service where robust file handling is your major value proposition.

<comment><USER4> _> If you think about it, that sums up almost any robust back-up system you go to the effort of setting up_

Exactly, which is why people should think harder than they do about backups. _You_ should make sure that you are not exposed to risk you don't want to be exposed to because someone else's development priorities differ from your point of view.

True data protection is unfortunately a complicated business and most people see the flashy presentations on services' sites and trust all is well without giving it a second thought.

While I agree it should be the service's responsibility to cover these eventualities, it is not good practise to assume that they do. You might misunderstand what they do and not see risk were it is present, they might have honest coding mistakes that cause problems down the line, there could be ineptitude anywhere down the line, and so forth. If you are paying for their service then you _might_ legitimately expect to be covered by some for of insurance for loss in the event of it being caused by a problem in the code/infrastructure, but never assume that until being explicitly told it is present and you have read the small print, and don't ever assume this at all for a free/cheap service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sync is not backup.

Sync is not backup.

Sync is not backup.

My strategy: a big external drive used for Time Machine, and a subscription to Backblaze. Both of these are all about retaining multiple versions, recovering from accidental deletion, and continuously backing up in the background. Dropbox is about syncing stuff between computers.

<comment><USER3> Dropbox keeps deleted files and previous versions of files for 30 days. With Packrat, a free feature for all paid accounts, Dropbox keeps deleted files for the lifetime of the account.

How is Dropbox not a backup provider? It may not be a very good backup provider, depending on your point of view, but it clearly markets itself as a backup provider ("your stuff is always safe in Dropbox and can be restored in a snap"), is used by its users as a backup provider, and has the features of a backup provider.

<comment><USER7> Backups should be read only.

If I can delete parts of a backup, it's just as susceptible to the same human mistakes that make them necessary in the first place.

<comment><USER8> By that definition, most corporate backup systems aren't backups! It's pretty common to overwrite old tape backups with newer backups, and yes, that does mean you need to be organized enough to make sure you don't accidentally overwrite the only backup of something.

<comment><USER9> Maybe a better way to put it is that backups are isolated from current "production" data operations.

Backups are not invulnerable, so yes, it's still possible to overwrite the backups, but that involves engaging the backup system specifically. Just doing file operations or settings changes on the production system won't do it.

Dropbox is not isolated from production data operations. In fact the whole point is to synchronize production data operations as fast as possible. That makes it dangerous.

(This does not excuse the bug is this story; sync setting changes should be obviously be atomic transactions that are confirmed on the server.)

<comment><USER7> Yeah; that's a better way of putting it. rm -rf'ing my production box's hard drive shouldn't nuke the backups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I noticed there hasn't been any mention of attempting to recover your deleted files from your local disk. If you haven't tried it yet it is worth a shot. There are a few software solutions out there that will scan your disk for files that have been deleted. On Windows I have used Piriform's Recuva[1] and on OS X I have used PhotoRec[2], both have worked rather well. It is worth noting that the longer you wait to try the more likely the sectors are to be overwritten with new data. (And you should back up any files currently on the disk). I know it is a long shot at this point but some chance is better than none. Good luck.

[1] [http://www.piriform.com/recuva](http://www.piriform.com/recuva) [2] [http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec](http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec)

<comment><USER11> Or, I wouldn't be surprised if tomorrow he posts that he found them all in his trash.... Because nobody ever thinks to clear it. Sometimes the simplest solution is right under our nose.

<comment><USER12> He said that he de-synced them to free up space. I'm assuming that he would have noticed if the operation _didn 't_ free up space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The bug in question:

> From all this information it seems that Dropbox client first deletes files > locally before it informs the server about the new selective sync settings. > Consequently, if the client crashes or is killed before the server is > contacted, the files remain deleted without any trace. After the client > restarts again, it only sees there are some files missing and syncs this new > state with the server.

It concerns me that the top several comments are some variation of "you shouldn't trust the cloud with your data." How did software services become so totally insulated from the expectations we have of every other service that holds on to our valuable property?

<comment><USER14> > It concerns me that the top several comments are some variation of "you > shouldn't trust the cloud with your data."

No, it's "you shouldn't trust one single thing with your data". Hardware fails. OSes have bugs (OS X's "space in your drive name and we delete your user folder.") Services have unexpected gotchas. This is why you never store anything in only one place.

A sync service by definition is not a separate place (unless he had found a bug in the Packrat feature)

<comment><USER13> My point is that, for some reason, we have been conditioned to believe that bugs and data loss are just something that happen as opposed to something that service providers, who we pay money to, are charged with avoiding. We hold software to a much lower standard of quality than we hold other products and services.

<comment><USER14> * we have been conditioned to believe that bugs and data loss are just something that happen

They're something that happen to unregulated services that cost $8/month. If I paid $8/month for electricity, water or Internet access, yeah I'd expect yearly blackouts. To get an SLA you have to pay more.

<comment><USER13> Would this bug not have happened with Dropbox for Business?

And didn't Microsoft make an absolute fortune releasing buggy as shit software throughout the entire 1990's?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't trust anything called "sync".

I trust file operations "move", "copy" and "remove".

But "sync" could mean anything: which side is syncing to which side? If something is not present on one side, will it delete it on the other?

I wish the term didn't exist, and apps/clients/... would copy or even just load or show things, and if you want to "sync", then rsync with clear source and destination. Same with mail for example: I don't want to "sync" email messages, I just want to see them, the most recent ones first.

<comment><USER16> Here "sync" means what Dropbox says it means. The answers to your questions are well defined in their software, even if to some other software, they might be different.

 _I wish the term didn 't exist, and apps/clients/... would copy or even just load or show things, and if you want to "sync", then rsync with clear source and destination._

The source and destination is always clear. It's to the server and from the server. Dropbox uses a star topology, not P2P.

You'd get the same result if you used rsync with source and destination, if you passed --delete, which is equivalent to what Dropbox does.

<comment><USER15> "The source and destination is always clear. It's to the server and from the server."

That's exactly what I mean by not clear: to the server and from the server are the exact opposites. So if something is not present on one side, it can do two things to make both sides equal: it can delete it from the one side, or it can copy it to the other side. If all it has is a "sync" button, not a "sync to server" or "sync from server" button, it's not clear what it will do.

Something that deletes files shouldn't be called sync, but should clearly be marked as a delete operation. And deleting something from one location should not have the surprise effect of deleting it on other locations too, unless it's called "remove _everywhere_ ".

<comment><USER17> File sync with multiple devices is fraught with danger. Remember the old 'briefcase' on the Windows desktop? There's just no way to distinguish 'I don't want this file on this device' from "I don't want this file on any device'".

<comment><USER16> In Dropbox, it's very simple: the former is simply not supported at all. Your file should be in all devices or none (mobile excepted).

<comment><USER18> No, they have Selective Sync.

<comment><USER16> That's at the folder level, not file level.

<comment><USER18> True, but it does put lie to:

>> Your file should be in all devices or none

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> In today's digital age, I believe lots and lots of people will lose a lot of valuable information like photos because they don't have a good understanding of what backing up means.

I've warned my friend who is computer illiterate that he is risking losing his childrens' complete photo collection for their entire lives because he is only keeping a single copy of his data on his hard drive. This is probably the situation with millions of people in the US alone, and when that hard drive failure event happens, which will happen, then they will lose everything.

<comment><USER20> Did that work?

Would it have been more effective to just provide him with a list of stuff - <USER2> choice of two drives; a choice of two softwares (with really easy URLs to buy and download) and instructions for using and testing.

That could be a gift for birthday or Xmas?

<comment><USER19> I bought him a new hard drive, copied the photos over and gave him instructions on how to do it. He hasn't bothered to update his backup once, and it's been about 5 years and his photo collection has only grown.

<comment><USER21> I'm thinking of buying a CrashPlan Business account (my corp uses the Enterprise version) for my family for this reason. I set them up with TimeMachine, but even plugging in a USB drive has proven to be too much to remember.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I use Dropbox for sharing pictures, but would never even dream to use a cloud based service for backup purposes.

Granted, Jan's case is a bit more complex and I'm really sorry for his loss.

Stories like that should really be a lesson to everybody never to completely trust a cloud based service as your main backup.

On a side note: I agree that archiving of digital files is a hard problem. The smartest librarians of the world are thinking about how to achieve this for, literally, decades and I'm not sure they even have a good solution to the problem.

My personal strategy is redundancy: I buy new hard disks every couple of years and copy all important files, twice. One hard disk is kept off site.

It's not perfect, but it's the best I can come up with. Reading horror stories, like Jan's, indicates that it's the better solution. Despite the messiness.

<comment><USER23> Why not? I find it pretty great in terms of backups (though that's not my purpose for doing it.)

I have copies of my files on my work machine, my laptop, my wife's laptop, my gaming machine, and ofcourse dropbox's servers itself.

I could lose any one of those without losing the bunch thanks to dropbox synching things.

Sure it doesn't help in the case of deletion but its great for the more common case of "my machine suddenly won't boot".

<comment><USER5> _I could lose any one of those without losing the bunch thanks to dropbox synching things._

If it's due to a hardware failure, sure.

If it's due to a bug as in this case, or an accidental deletion that went unnoticed for some reason, or corruption of a key file by the application that created it, or malware encrypting your entire filesystem until you pay a ransom, not so much.

 _Please_ don't consider a bunch of sync'd copies to be a complete backup solution, whether the mechanism is a RAID setup on your local machine, or an automatic sync offsite, or a Dropbox-style cloud service, or anything else. These tools are guarding against one specific and relatively common failure mode, which is useful, but they do not guard against a lot of other things that can and sometimes do go wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> When your main business is storing files (and you also just raised yet another shitload of cash), not offering better safeguards against file loss is inadmissible. I left Dropbox for Google Drive when they announced the Condolezza Rice move, and I haven't looked back since.

</comment><comment><USER25> _If you are using Dropbox as a sole backup of your files, think again._

Simplify to _If you only have a sole backup, think again._ Points 4 and 5 should be you always have more than one backup of important material and at least one backup should be on physical media that you own.

<comment><USER26> Also, in the case of removing it from your computer and only storing it on the "backup". It is not really a backup if it only exists in one location.

<comment><USER14> This this this. The parable I've heard is that even two locations isn't a backup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This happened to me (in German): [http://www.basicthinking.de/blog/2012/04/18/fur-immer- ausges...](http://www.basicthinking.de/blog/2012/04/18/fur-immer-ausgesperrt- bei-google-eine-leidensgeschichte/)

<comment><USER28> The linked article is about someone who managed to lock himself out of his Google account. No word about Dropbox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is clearly a problem for the reputation of dropbox.

On their website they market the service as:

"Even if your phone goes for a swim, your stuff is always safe in Dropbox and can be restored in a snap."

With this message in mind, and a valuation of roughly >>10$ BILLION<<.

I think, you can have very very high expectations regarding the data retention of their service.

Also, the whole point of using a service like dropbox is to remove friction/time investment regarding the standard backup/sync tasks.

If you suggests to handle multiple harddisk backups locally+offsite, that is fine except that not everyone wants this kind of time investment and cost associated with a do-it-yourself backup service and rather depend on a service provider that they can trust.

</comment><comment><USER30> As I said to someone the other day after dealing with yet another failure by Dropbox to do the safe thing or even the reasonably-recoverable thing with our data: "One reason I'm not worth a billion dollars is I would never have let Dropbox ship like this!"

Doing sync on top of an existing filesystem, making it work with existing apps, maintaining solid transaction semantics, and having a simple, understandable user model -- you just can't do all four. The Dropbox experiment has now shown that "correctness" doesn't matter, commercially speaking.

</comment><comment><USER31> We live in a convenient age, but also a fickle one. I laugh when my wife prints 100 hundreds of digital photos although her disaster recovery process is more stable than mine.

<comment><USER32> My wife does the same; she has a Snapfish account. She will have them print and mail her the most important pictures from a set, while trusting the ones she doesn't care as much about to our home server and Facebook (the former for long-term storage, the latter for convenient access). Since she has to order a certain number of prints every year to keep the account open, and it comes with unlimited free storage, it works out well for her.

The only exception was our wedding photos. We have a set of prints directly from the studio hired to take the pictures, as well as a digital copy on DVD from them. We also have those digital files backed up on our home server, a computer at my parents' house, Dropbox, Snapfish, and both of our Facebook accounts. The photography company also has long-term storage that we would have access to if all else failed. That's about as redundant as we can get without spending a ton of money, but it's more than most people seem to have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Dropbox has _one of the worst websites on the Internet_. Seriously!

E.g. people have mentioned that "packrat" would have helped in this situation. But try finding that service from the pricing page. Hint: NOT THERE. Someone here linked to some explanation in their "help" section. Seriously? Such an important feature is only mentioned under "help"?

Even if you go to sign up for the paid version, Dropbox Pro, packrat isn't mentioned [1]. Their horrid website alone is enough for me to not want to do business with them.

Someone else here has succinctly summarized the situation [2]:

       One reason I'm not worth a billion dollars
       is I would never have let Dropbox ship like this!

[1] [https://www.dropbox.com/upgrade](https://www.dropbox.com/upgrade) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8105548](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8105548)

</comment><comment><USER34> As many others mentioned already "sync is not backup". If you really want true backup then on a Mac I will suggest to have a setup like: 1- local backup for quick recovery with Time Machine 2- remote backup with a true backup solution like CrashPlan (or similar)

I personally have such setup with a local one with my Time Machine, and having CrashPlan running all the time, it did save me a couple times when after many weeks I deleted a wrong file or folder... Got everything back without problem.

If you don't have a Time Capsule, then you can always consider an alternative with just a smaller subset of what you want to archive by using a JetDrive by Transcend. I recently got a 128GB JetDrive and it is my local destination for my MBP for TimeMachine... Yes 128GB is not enough but knowing that CrashPlan is constantly running make me comfortable enough with that setup.

<comment><USER35> I use my Time Capsule's USB port to attach an external drive that is shared so that Crashplan can backup to a folder on it. That's in addition to using Crashplan Central for cloud backups and Time Machine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> > "you should backup"

What about in 10, 20 years? Photo libraries will keep inflating. Local storage will not. As of now I backup from a SSD Mac. What happens when I don't have a computer anymore?

Interestingly, people don't value "bits" or information. We value moments and emotions and work and art. There's no successful current consumer business model for people to store and backup photos (Backblaze is mainly prosumer).

And so aren't social networks the real backups by now? The redundancy of publishing on multiple services means some photos will stick and the rest will fade, somehow like former printed pictures I guess. Publish it or lose it?

<comment><USER37> > Local storage will not.

External backup drives continue to increase in size at a falling cost per GB.

It is cheaper and lower latency to store/retrieve a large amount of data locally than remotely, unless you believe that the current glut of "near-free cloud storage" will continue indefinitely. Market cycles suggest otherwise.

> Publish it or lose it

Why do social networks store your photos "for free"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I had an issue similar to this (but fortunately not nearly as bad) about two and a half or three years ago and that was what convinced me to pay of the Packrat service add-on.

I agree with the OP that that should be a built-in option for all paying customers -- or at least make it more visible as an add-on. I've had instances in the past where it was months later that I realized something was either deleted or didn't sync and I had to look through Events and use Packrat to restore. It can be scary - even if you do make backups of your backups.

</comment><comment><USER39> Once you deleted your own local copy, the folder of photos on Dropbox was no longer a "backup." You just moved your one copy elsewhere. You essentially had NO backup. And everyone should know, you should always have at least two backups. (Again, you had zero.) I wouldn't even consider Dropbox (without Packrat) a valid backup destination either, because any changes get synced.

Sorry this happened to you, but better backup practices could have avoided it easily.

</comment><comment><USER17> My buddy Tom says "If its not on your current computer, its lost". Imagine when Dropbox closes one day (as every company ultimately does), how much will be lost.

<comment><USER40> Since all the files are sync'ed to the computer, nothing would be lost unless selective sync was enabled.

<comment><USER41> A comparable bug would be that when the server goes away (Dropbox closes), the client starts deleting all local files.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> It really sucks that we all have to keep learning this lesson over and over. Everyone I've ever spoken to that has a good backup strategy in place has it because they have lost irreplaceable files.

Have real backups. Syncing is not a backup strategy, raid is not a backup strategy, etc. 3-2-1 At least three copies in 2 different (storage) formats and at least one copy offsite. It sounds like overkill but you have to decide how much your data is really worth.

<comment><USER43> i think people are still struggling because creating _real_ backups still seems like kind of a pain in the ass compared to cloud syncing.

what's currently the most convenient and simple way to store multiple local backups?

<comment><USER42> It _IS_ a pain and I don't know that there is a way to fix that. As I said though you have to decide what your data is worth to you.

I personally use [http://duplicity.nongnu.org/](http://duplicity.nongnu.org/) and a semi-complicated system of cron and bash script to backup my files to my local server, some flash drives and s3.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I worry about stuff like that happening to me with my photos. The best idea I've come up with is setting up a Synology that I export my photos to. It has a basic web app for showing off photos. I then use it's AWS S3 service to back those photos up every night. The Synology also has something like RAID1 on it for some redundancy at the local level. The hard part is remembering to export the files from the computer to the Synology.

</comment><comment><USER45> I think the lesson here is not that the cloud is bad, it's that a sync service is not a backup. I use Dropbox to share, I use Amazon S3 to backup.

</comment><comment><USER46> I use both backblaze, as well as Google Drive. I don't have anything in particular I'd be completely upset if I lost it forever, which is why I dont do local backups, but I've definitely been looking at using Crashplan as a secondary backup. I just cant be bothered to hook my laptop up to an external when I hardly sit next to it anyway.

What does HN think? Safe if I went with 2 cloud backup providers?

</comment><comment><USER47> The solution to this kind of problems is: Make Read-only "disaster recovery" backups - zip it and burn it to a DVD set or Bluray, and put it off-site. Make incrementals or differentials of those discs every few months and a full data set each 3 months.

Takes a few hours, I like to burn all my data to Bluray (50GB per disk) while watching a movie.

Store the bluray data sets at a friend's house and never worry again.

</comment><comment><USER48> Dropbox is NOT a backup service. It's a convenient file syncing and sharing service. And even then it's a good ides to actually check docs or help before proceeding to do something which might result In a loss of data.

</comment><comment><USER49> Just curious why more people don't learn about and invest in home NAS's? Something like Synology would be pretty good at storing 8000 important photos. It is still a single point of failure, but its one I control.

<comment><USER50> It's a hassle to learn, admin, and it's more likely to eat your data. Many people do not have real internet connections at home so they could assign it an ip and access it remotely. Plus it's hard to buy a good one unless you go for generous overkill. And after 2 years you have yet another vendor abandoned Linux device with remote vulnerabilities on your home net.

(I still prefer it to cloud storage though)

<comment><USER49> Thanks for the point of view. I personally love the Synology at home and have a spare disk for cases where I may have a failure. I would say, barring something catastrophic, that I am set for another 3-5 years, which is fine. I would most likely buy a new model Synology 3 years from now and continue expansion. They also offer another disk shelf you can addon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> > If you are using Dropbox as a sole backup of your files, think again.

Good advice.

> Without making a mistake, you might lose your files.

If Dropbox, or any other single service or method, constitutes your entire backup strategy, then the mistake is already made.

<comment><USER52> I agree that single service or method should not be entire backup strategy. I backup pictures and important files to two seperate external discs, besides desktop's storage.

Sorry to hear, but sometimes it happens. Look at the positive side. you will have more precious moments to look forward to and those lost pictures, you will have to go old fashioned way of recollecting. Do you remember the day...kind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I would never consider using Dropbox (or any other cloud storage) as my sole backup system for critical files unless I was willing to pay for the "Packrat", i.e. infinite history, feature.

</comment><comment><USER54> The moment you only have one copy of your files _anywhere_ you don't have a backup.

I've heard it said that if a file doesn't exist in at least three different places it might as well not exist.

<comment><USER21> Exactly. (I can't believe I had to scroll down this far to find this.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Try going into the folders and manually restoring. You can select more than one file at a time.... I was able to restore for more than 30 days... Worth a shot.

<comment><AUTHOR> Many thanks for your advice, this was the first thing I tried, unfortunately without any success...

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Thanks for the tip on the Packrat feature. I didn't know about that. Added.

</comment><comment><USER57> If it's not saved in three places, it's not saved.

</comment><comment><USER58> Well, sorry to say this, but if all of your photos were stored only online...

<comment><USER32> It depends on how you look at it. They were stored online (Dropbox servers) as well as locally (Macbook). The problem is that a bug in Dropbox's client turned a de-sync operation into a delete operation. So one way to see it is that even having local storage was not safe because the sync was flawed. Another possible way to look at it is if your only local copy is synced with the cloud, then effectively your only storage is online.</comment></comment>


Ask YC:  making contract for new co-founder?? - <AUTHOR>

Hello YC,
Recently in the past, I have ended up in some pretty bad relationships, getting ideas and hard work stolen by people who would try to turn me into their lowly paid employee with no equity.  I have dug myself out of some horrible pits and made great progress in my startup.  I found a guy that shares my goals and seems pretty honest.  Our skills compensate each other very well.
However, I'm still paranoid because of getting burned so bad.  I've wasted well over two years because of bad relationships.  I want to at least get some kind of basic contract down.  What have you guys done on your pre-money arrangements with other co-founders?  I'm going to call my normal lawyer tomorrow, but he mostly does criminal defense stuff, so I want other options.
I've honestly burned through most of my savings that I had from a successful business years ago, with these previous startups and a terrible lawsuit.  I can only spend maybe a few hundred dollars at most.
Both of us have some software built and a decent amount of time spent on seperate stuff.  There are no patents.  The company is an LLC registered in Nevada a few months ago.
Please help me with any advice you can give.  I can't bear to get screwed over again.  I'll probably end up going postal if I do.  :)
Thank you for your advice,
-Zak <comment><USER2> _I can't bear to get screwed over again._

I think your only true protection against getting burned again is to deeply face what it is in yourself that created those painful situations in the first place. No contract in the world will protect you from creating an equivalent situation again, if you haven't learned what you need to learn from the previous ones.

Your use of phrases like "getting screwed over", "getting ideas and hard work stolen", and so on, suggest that you believe that it was because other people did bad stuff to you that things ended up the way they did. I'm willing to believe that other people did bad things. Nevertheless it was your own choices that put you there in the first place. As a wise person once explained, it was never really the other person you were trusting; first and foremost you were trusting your own bad judgment, and that's what really betrayed you.

I'm not saying you shouldn't put things in writing or draw up a contract. By all means do. One way to protect against the risk of a relationship going bad is to have shares vest at a certain rate per month. I think our arrangement is 1/48 per month (so, over four years), with a 1-year minimum, and a portion of up-front vesting for work already done.

But that pales in important to the deeper issue: if you don't want to get screwed again, then stop ascribing your painful experiences to other people. This doesn't mean you have to absolve or forgive _them_ , it means you have to be truly honest with yourself about what _you_ did and thought that was wrong. That's been my experience anyway... the only solution that works is fundamental growth.

<comment><USER3> Hey Gruesom, I'm upvoting you because you've got some good points in your comment and I've seen quite a few comments from you I really like. But...

"I think your only true protection against getting burned again is to deeply face what it is in yourself that created those painful situations in the first place."

That's... not really true. The rest of your advice is sound and good, but there are bad people in the world that do bad things. There's also normal people, and between normal people, there's friction. Almost everyone I know who is successful in business has been burned a couple times, and you just need to learn from it. Certainly the original poster did some things wrong via contracts, relationships, etc, but it's also quite possible that he was just dealing with some rat bastards. There's a lot of them in the world, and unfortunately, you usually start by working with them. Established people typically only work with people with a great track record, so when you don't have one, you're usually working with someone else who doesn't have one. So you've got a 1 in whatever chance that a random person is a donkey chance that you're working with a donkey.

<comment><USER2> _it's also quite possible that he was just dealing with some rat bastards_

Certainly, and I hope I didn't imply otherwise. But then a person in that situation needs to better discern who's a rat bastard. It still comes down to taking responsibility for what you need to learn. It sounds like we agree on that.

I think maybe what you're objecting to is a sense that I was blaming the victim. I admit there's a fine line between saying "it was the victim's fault" and saying "if the victim wishes to cease being a victim he must take responsibility for what he himself did". Possibly it's too fine a line to come across well in a brief post. It can be hard to tell whether someone is writing from a caring state or a judgmental one (whereas in person, you'd pick that up easily from nonverbal cues).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You can (and certainly should) do everything to protect yourself and you still might get screwed. Going into business with someone is giving them your trust. If you can't do that then you can't have a partner.

</comment><comment><USER5> > I'm going to call my normal lawyer tomorrow, but he mostly does criminal > defense stuff

Get another lawyer.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'll highly recommend this book:

[http://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses- Abou...](http://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses- About/dp/0887307280)

It talks about setting up clear roles and expectations from the beginning. Contracts typically aren't worth the paper they're printed on - where you're at in life right now, you're not going to go to court if you fall out with someone. Contracts protect you a bit if you're further along, but a contract isn't worth a damn thing without a good relationship and clear expectations. The most important thing a contract can do is to lay out clearly, in writing, what you both expect to do and have roles set up. But so many of your assumptions will likely be wrong that you might have to redraw some elements of it over time. It happens - but getting down who does what, when, where, and how they're measured is huge. A basic operating agreement goes a long way. Check out E-Myth, it reads fast. Probably my favorite book on small business ever.

</comment><comment><USER6> One way to test your partner's trust is to deliberately instigate a money fight. It probably will happen later if not now, and now's when there's little at stake. Figure out a few "hard lines in the sand" that an unscrupulous person would really dislike, hold those positions as far as you think you can go without destroying your relationship, then come clean once you've determined the person you are truly dealing with. People will always reveal themselves when pushed to the edge.

<comment><USER2> If anyone tried such a gimmick with me, it would damage my trust and respect for them permanently. I certainly wouldn't want to be partners with someone who would do that.</comment></comment>


Tracking the future of remote workplaces: Apps, communication, and liability - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/02/tracking-the-future-of-remote-workplaces-apps-communication-and-liability/ <comment><USER2> > _Google 's suite of connected office apps functions quite well, but the > company doesn't really have an agreed-upon chat app, and it's hard to > overstate the usefulness of a casual, watercooler-like chat app to let > colleagues alternate between serious conversations and bond-building > gibberish._

That statement is incorrect - Google Chat ([http://chat.google.com](http://chat.google.com)) is the GSuite enterprise chat product. It is compatible with Hangouts and will eventually replace it.

My company uses it and it works very well. They have first-party concept of top-level lightweight threads in rooms, and it's the most convincing threading implementation I've used so far. Each message belongs to a thread, and threads aren't hidden away but are shown as summaries in the room. You can follow/unfollow individual threads.

The concept is very similar to Zulip, except there's no subject line and threads feel more lightweight.

<comment><USER3> > and will eventually replace it

Really? But isn't Hangouts free and GSuite not?

I find Google's abrupt roadmap changes dizzying, especially wrt its many messaging products. Can you cite where you heard that plan?

<comment><USER4> Didn't they kill hangouts?

<comment><USER5> Nope. Regular old Hangouts is still alive and kicking. I use it every day with a couple gaming groups and a home grown chatbot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ah yes, the good ol' startup employee entering sex threads in slack work channels</comment>


Vodafone.pt is rewriting CSP headers to whitelist Vodafone and jQuery - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/JackyHallyday/status/968263408003973121 <comment><USER2> Vodafone Portugal absolutely does MITM your internet connection. I've seen it myself.

I was in Portugal last summer, and my family had a Vodafone 3G wifi hotspot. I noticed that on every single non-https webpage, Vodafone was inserting a banner with a huge load of JS, as part of their "Vodafone Secure Net" "feature"([https://securenet.vodafone.com/](https://securenet.vodafone.com/)). They inserted their own code on every request to make sure that they could display a banner telling you whether or not a website was "trustworthy".

I managed to figure out the complicated steps to do on their systems to turn this "feature" off, but between that and some other bad experiences I've had with them I still don't trust them in the least.

<comment><USER3> Injecting JavaScript into someone's pages for "security" sounds like one of the very worst ways to go about improving security. I'm surprised I haven't heard of that injection being hacked to do very bad things yet.

<comment><USER4> If you can MITM the connection, you can just do it server-side, which is far more insidious. This was done in the UK + Brazil a few years back -- some ISPs (including British Telecom) trialled it without even telling affected customers that they were being snooped on!

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8438461/BT- and-P...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8438461/BT-and-Phorm- how-an-online-privacy-scandal-unfolded.html)

[https://phonecallsuk.co.uk/bt-webwise.html](https://phonecallsuk.co.uk/bt- webwise.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Time and again telecoms continue to pull these types of shenanigans. If you are building a website in 2018 using https with hsts enabled is a must.

<comment><USER6> That, and there is little excuse not to set apache2 or nginx to only allow tls1.2 with the best choices in crypto options. The population of client browsers that are so old they don't do 1.2 is extremely tiny.

[https://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/ssl/ssl_howto.html](https://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/ssl/ssl_howto.html)

<comment><USER7> I was going to argue with you, but stats do indeed seem to back this up (I hadn't looked at them in at least a year or two). The gains for chrome are insane, and there is clearly a harsh decline for IE. I suppose this is probably why PCI-DSS felt it appropriate to push hard into deprecating TLS1.0 and TLS1.1 (without negatively affecting users too harshly).

<comment><USER6> Yeah, pretty much any browser that was newly installed or updated from late 2012 onwards has tls1.2 support. The population of browsers older than that is <1% at present.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just another normal day in the shitty telco industry.

</comment><comment><USER9> You care about some simple headers, because that's what you "see", but Vodafone is much worse

[https://electrospaces.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/incenser-or- how...](https://electrospaces.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/incenser-or-how-nsa-and- gchq-are.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> Vodafone needs to stop meddling with their clients' connection. Their ridiculous "safe browsing" scam costs you $5 a moth for the privilege of only being allowed to use port 80.

To top it all off they also block all SMS access to twitter and instagram. Hope someone takes them to court ASAP

</comment><comment><USER11> It's a bit odd to set CSP headers but not TLS.

</comment><comment><USER12> Vodafone is nudging the users to turn on https.

</comment><comment><USER13> Is there any evidence for this (e.g. response headers from a site using cURL on and off Vodafone's network)?

<comment><USER14> > Hello Jojo. Vodafone's content control platform does not monitor or log your > internet traffic, but as part of Vodafone's commitment to ensuring your > safety on the internet, we can monitor websites and domains that contain > offensive content. [0]

Ignoring the corporate speak, they admit they do for censorship reasons.

[0] [https://twitter.com/VodafonePT/status/968544082707603456](https://twitter.com/VodafonePT/status/968544082707603456)

<comment><USER15> "We don't monitor or log your internet traffic, except when we do", how can they say that with a straight face?

<comment><USER16> Probably because it technically isn't false. They say their "content control platform" can't monitor or log internet traffic but they don't say they don't have a system that does do the logging.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> devil's advocate: what's the issue here? while it's obviously better if they didn't do any MITM at all, I don't see what they're doing is worse (in terms of security) than your run of the mill MITM. it only works for http sites, so presumably there's nothing (too) sensitive on those pages. however, even if there was sensitive stuff, it's whitelisting jquery and vodaphone, neither of which contains any exploitable code. if you're doing some sort of xss, you'd still need to get some sort of initial code execution.

<comment><USER18> any tampering of content by ISP makes it more difficult to spot really hostile MitM / webinjects tampering.

then there's net neutrality.

<comment><USER17> >any tampering of content by ISP makes it more difficult to spot really hostile MitM / webinjects tampering.

I wasn't arguing for MITM, I was arguing that it's not _any worse_ than your run of the mill MITM

<comment><USER3> MITM is generally considered to be a mode of compromise, so that's sort of like saying, well, it's not really any worse than being shot in the head. It might be true on some level, but it's hardly any consolation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hiker finds 1,200-year-old Viking sword under rocks - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/22/europe/viking-sword-norway/index.html <comment><USER2> This is giving me a strong Renowned Explorers vibe :p Want to play the new content when I get home.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's where I left it!</comment>


Having more, owning less: how to fight throwaway culture - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/having-more-owning-less-how-to-fight-throwaway-culture-81493 <comment><USER2> >> And given that the average electric drill is in use for just 15 minutes each year, and is kept in storage for the rest of the time, it's clear that many "household" items don't really need to be owned at all.

Owning a drill is convenient - I don't want to rent or borrow one to drill a single hole to put up a new dishrag holder.</comment>


Concepts The Emacs Newbie Should Master - <AUTHOR> http://benjisimon.blogspot.com/2011/04/10-concepts-emacs-newbie-should-master.html <comment><USER2> If you're using Emacs and git, you might want to look into magit, which allows you to touch-type through common git operations. If you commit a lot, this will speed you up significantly.

<http://philjackson.github.com/magit/>

I use custom Elisp to combine magit, git-blame, and other commands into a unified git environment:

[https://github.com/emk/elisp/blob/5db6db4e7d96a3ef1c0a5fee76...](https://github.com/emk/elisp/blob/5db6db4e7d96a3ef1c0a5fee762f41b3da99f1d9/git- tools.el) [https://github.com/emk/elisp/blob/5db6db4e7d96a3ef1c0a5fee76...](https://github.com/emk/elisp/blob/5db6db4e7d96a3ef1c0a5fee762f41b3da99f1d9/dotemacs#L162) [https://github.com/emk/elisp/blob/5db6db4e7d96a3ef1c0a5fee76...](https://github.com/emk/elisp/blob/5db6db4e7d96a3ef1c0a5fee762f41b3da99f1d9/dotemacs#L362)

It's especially handy to be able to pull up git-blame information for the current buffer with just a few keystrokes. This turns your git commit messages into a layer of hidden code comments.

<comment><USER3> I love Magit, but don't miss git blame: vc-annotate works really well. P and N navigate the git history of the buffer.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, magit isn't meant to replace vc; it just supplements it for the operations for which vc is awful.

I've got to say though; seeing that article explain how Emacs helped him use RCS and how it also has support for CVS and SVN really does _not_ help the "Emacs is from the 80s" stereotype. Especially ironic since magit is the best git UI I've seen anywhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The post has many good suggestions! To them, I would add:

The mark ring. Whenever you place a mark (highlighting a region), its place is also added to a ring, and you can jump between them by pressing "C-u space" (or "C-x space" for pop-global-mark, which will jump between buffers). Many commands that move a long way add an implicit mark, so this works quite well as a "where was I..." command.

For "dynamic abbreviations", I recommend pabbrev ([http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/phillip.lord/download/emacs/pa...](http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/phillip.lord/download/emacs/pabbrev.el)) - when Emacs is otherwise idle, it starts building a lookup trie of prefixes to frequently used words, so it will suggest completions under the cursor as you type. I love it.

I much prefer iswitchb to the default buffer switching system. YMMV.

Don't forget about learning Emacs lisp, either! It adds quite a bit of flexibility to Emacs. It's kind of a crappy, backward Lisp dialect, but still tremendously useful.

Finally, learn to use the help system. Emacs's naming is really idiosyncratic, but it gives you several powerful ways to look things up, so you don't have to memorize everything.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the pabbrev hint. Sometimes, Emacs reminds me of games like Diablo. Half the fun is in finding new pieces of equipment and trying them out.

Like image-dired, ibuffer, yasnippet, ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Missing examples:

 _C-x z_ , the command that repeat the last command for every 'z' you type. This is in my opinion one of the most important feature of Emacs

 _M-s o_ , the 'occur' command that show all the lines that match a specified regexp

File variables: [http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Spe...](http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Specifying- File-Variables.html#Specifying-File-Variables)

<comment><USER8> C-x z is definitely useful, thanks!

<comment><USER9> First one you need to know is C-x C-c... then you are free to experiment and learn to you hearts content...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> 2 concepts I think are missing from this list:

* Tramp for remote/sudo editing: <http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/TrampMode>

* emacsclient if you want emacs everywhere all the time: <http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsClient>

</comment><comment><USER10> This thread is hilarious.

The Universal Principles of Design (among other places) talks about the 80/20 rule — but Emacs is so powerful and customizable that no two people ever agree on which 20% is the most important!

<comment><USER5> Well, Emacs is very much "a day to learn, a lifetime to master". I've been using it for years, have led sessions teaching other developers, and just yesterday I discovered rainbow-mode (<http://julien.danjou.info/rainbow- mode.html>). Before that, it was magit and halp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I disagree with #2, now at least.

 _First rule of emacs: don't quit. Or, more specifically, don't shut it down._

I used to do this, but a few months ago I managed to really screw up a file I was working on, but didn't notice the problem until after I had saved it. And because I hadn't closed that emacs session for over a week, I couldn't even revert to a backup without losing a week's worth of work (emacs normally only creates a backup file when it closes). So for the last few months I close every session every day when I quit for the night.

</comment><comment><USER12> As far as buffer switching, I never keep hundreds of files open because when I switch git branches it's hard to remember which buffers need to be reverted. Instead I usually close everything, change branches, and then open up files as needed. I find I can open files more quickly using IDO-mode than I could by switching buffers (plus I often forget the filenames).

<comment><USER4> If you use magit to switch branches it will automatically revert the buffers that were changed.

<comment><USER12> That's nice. Although I really like using git-emacs. <https://github.com/tsgates/git-emacs>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I trade registers and the help system (especially hyper-apropos) for narrowing and spellchecking.

</comment><comment><USER13> Didn't know about dynamic-abrevs, and haven't learned how the kill-ring works yet. Thanks

<comment><USER14> Even though setup is messy, you might want to also consider auto-complete/yas instead of dynamic-abrevs

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is there a way to kill something _without_ putting it in the kill ring? It's probably my biggest pet peeve about emacs that there's no way to kill text without emacs assuming that you want it somewhere else.

<comment><USER16> M-x delete-region by default (although you can bind it to anything).

I use emacs every day, and don't think I've ever used it though. Just put the stuff you want to delete in the kill ring.

Why don't you want stuff in the kill ring? It takes some getting used to, but I've found it's generally a good thing. You can always yank back previous items in the ring with M-y too, so it isn't like your OS clipboard where 'cutting' something else means you lose access to the previous item on the clipboard.

<comment><USER15> Because sometimes I want to cut A, delete B, paste A where B used to be, and it's irritating to have to have that extra M-y in there.

Perhaps I should instead write a new command to kill a region, but then swap the last two things in the kill ring. That's actually a good idea...

<comment><USER17> In addition to the other two solutions, you can also use registers: <http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Registers>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For the ruby people out there you guys should try xiki (xiki.org). It extends emacs with a bunch of cool commands via el4r.

</comment><comment><USER19> viper-mode

<comment><USER20> Or even M-x terminal -> vim. :)

<comment><USER21> Does eterm have all the capabilities needed to run a full-screen editor like Vim?

<comment><USER22> screen + irssi works OK. vim probably does too.</comment></comment></comment></comment>