does the desktop matter anymore?

Posted Sep 27, 2005 12:10 UTC (Tue) by pjs (guest, #10927) [Link]

Virtually all home computing is done on Microsoft Windows. The most common "application" is entertainment. Often that's playing games, sometimes playing music or movies, other times it's trying nifty new software that amounts the resource-hogging eye candy. New applications (if you can go so far as to call them applications) are installed on a whim with little regard for long term system stability. Even without a buildup of malware, the system becomes less and less responsive as more and more, often poorly written eye-candy software hooks itself into various OS functions. Sometimes, a hardware failure occurs, though I've seen cases where home users mistake software problems for hardware failure (in which case they often believe recovering and saving their data is impossible). Human frustration also plays a significant factor.

Eventually, either a computer savvy friend does a clean install, or more often, a new computer is purchased to replace the old one which no longer functions well. How does typical home computer data get migrated to the new system? Most often, it simply doesn't.

By the time frustration with the computer's poor or flakey performance builds to the point of buying a replacement system, such a feeling of disgust and resignation builds that no attempt is made to save data.

Most home users, and in fact most business computer users don't have much awareness of where in the directory heirarchy they are storing their files. In recent times the situation has improved somewhat, with photo program defaulting to save photos in a "My Photos" directory, music applications defaulting to save files in "My Music", and so on. But if the files are located somewhere else, usually because some software had a default working directory configured elsewhere, only savvy users will have some idea where their data is actually stored. Many "user friendly" programs are designed for home users who can't understand the filesystem heirarchy and attempt to shield users from such difficult concepts, resulting in no opportunity to learn where the files are really stored in the ordinary course of using the program.

Even when they do know where their files are located, the task of transfering their data to a new PC, or backing up their data before a reinstall and restoring it afterward is quite daunting. Perhaps some home users can successfully network two computers and copy files (in the case where a complete 2nd system including a second monitor is purchased). But the reality is that burning files to cdrom is about the only managable way (for users savvy enough to even know where their files are) to transfer them between PCs. Of course, on top of knowing where files are located, copying to cdroms requires a PC still functioning well enough to actually burn a cd, and patience and thoughness to actually manages the process of dividing up many files between mulitple discs, patiently burning each one, and double checking to make sure everything important has been saved properly. It's an error prone process to manually back up to small size removable media, when any attempt is made at all.

For people who don't invest the time and money required for regular backups, who aren't savvy to the actual location and format of their data files, whose primary PC application is entertainment, who value new eye-candy over long-term system stability, and who may not always excersize caution and dilligence against infection of malware, long-term storage of data on external website makes a lot of sense.

Posted Sep 27, 2005 16:13 UTC (Tue) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]

seen many comments like this, of course no matter what point is made in a discussion, someone will rebut, but i am amazed that people are trying to pass off as insightful what in essence is a statement of fully trusting their own hard-drive to never fail as their one source of data. and now of course there will be a dozen comments about elaborate backup schemes like cds and dvds, but lets be honest, you don't do that either.

Posted Sep 28, 2005 2:18 UTC (Wed) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link]

why would anyone want to entrust all their private memories to a foreign company?

• Because consumer-oriented data storage can have one unrecoverable failure every 3 weeks yet still operate within its reliability specs, and the warranties cover the media and/or drives, not the data. Backups are nice, automated backups are nicer, but they're nicest of all if you can just pay someone else to do them.
• Because some people have the photos so they can share them with other people. That's possible to do on a server system in your own basement, but it's often more convenient to farm that sort of task out a hosting service, especially if you live in a small apartment, own only one noisy computer and don't want to keep it online and malware-free 24/7. As a bonus, if your photography is attractive to a Slashdot-sized crowd, it's your hosting service that goes down in flames, not your personal Internet feed. I've learned that particular lesson the hard way...
• Because so many systems are misconfigured, compromised, or just plain broken, such that they slowly corrupt data over time. A bit gets flipped here, a word gets doubled or zeroed there...unless you're verifying your data every day, it's possible to have this going on for years without causing anything to visibly fail. Since most people don't run 'md5sum -c' over their entire filesystem every day, most people don't notice the damage until it's too late. I look for it proactively, and find it disturbingly often.
• Because beginner-oriented articles in digital photography magazines advocate storing digital images on flash cards, CD-R's and DVD's, even on paper...but never ever on the system hard drive, except as a backup of all the other media, or for editing or transmission.