Nixta Rolls

I have a musing on Skyhook wireless that I will post when time permits and I find the notebook I wrote it down in, but in the meantime, here’s a musingdump from the back of my mind triggered by TUAW’s bit on Time Machine.

I believe I have mentioned to both Robert and Hedgy that Time Machine would change the way people use their hard-drives, but that I wasn’t quite sure whether it would be in a good way or not. I think it will be in a good way.

It’s certainly designed to work in a good way and the intent behind it is commendable. As with many (but by no means all) things Apple, it’s also done well. People should back up data. It should be easy to do. Now it is.

But the link above describes a very interesting usage, a kind of a virtual file system with potentially limitless storage. A Current File System if you like. If you’re lazy, I’ll summarize since I use it that way myself: I delete stuff for relatively short periods (say a couple of weeks away from home), safe in the knowledge that I can retrieve it from Time Machine later.

It’s a fair paradigm change for data storage, but it’s beautiful in its simplicity.

Of course, I only delete stuff for short periods because I don’t trust the “Server Grade” drive in the Time Machine to be that reliable. Truth is, it’s a consumer drive you might buy yourself to put in a home-built computer. I’m not too chuffed at Apple for that false advertising (though I knew from the moment it was uttered by Mr. Jobs on stage back in January that it had to be marketing BS). But there is no such things as a 100% reliable drive. In fact, I’d suggest there isn’t any such things as a reliable drive - they will all crap out at some point for some reason - the aim is for them to crap out after you no longer care about what’s on them, and in the meantime you mitigate with backups.

So once you resolve the problem of backing up your Time Machine Arsebundle, which I hope will soon be solved using Google or Apple or Amazon, you will have a limitless working storage area for your current data, with an intuitive direct and reliable way to retrieve it.

Performance is still an issue. It took 5 hours to backup my 73 Gb of data off my MacBook pro over a wire (there are issues to iron out there, I’m sure, as my first aborted attempt raced along about 10 times faster than all subsequent efforts - I propose that aborting the initial backup did Time Machine no favours) and since most people are still on download-biased broadband, the initial backup will be painful but a service that intelligently syncs the ArseBundle to a remote reliable store will then form the foundation of a really awesome solution for a huge virtual drive.

No, seriously, we should all be changing the way we think about our computers in the way that this changes the way we think about storing our guff.

I have in the past suggested storing information on the wire. Not on storage devices like drives in central locations, but between them, constantly on the move replicated and quickly available. If it exists in many places and not in a single place for long, you reduce the risk of a single failure losing your data.

Then again I’ve also suggested a 0-bit compression algorithm where you pay someone else to keep your data for you so that you don’t have to keep it yourself. You retrieve it by giving them information to identify, but that’s just a word you keep on a piece of paper. 0 bits used. It’s clear you shouldn’t trust your data to me…

And yes, there is of course a topical trendy cost to this - all that storage costs energy to run the hard-drives at Google that are backing up your ArseBundles.

It’s another step towards the dream of remote computers. Don’t have noisy machines under your desk. Just as you centralise energy production to be sure that you have control over its efficiency, centralise your computing needs to make sure you don’t have to upgrade all the time - Google throw out your old kit en-masse for you, sensibly.