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1529 clicks; posted to STEM » on 07 Feb 2023 at 12:05 PM (6 weeks ago)   |   Favorite    |   share:  Share on Twitter share via Email Share on Facebook



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koder [TotalFark] [OhFark]
2023-02-07 11:38:25 AM  
Too bad they don't have a thing where you can install an app that syncs your emails to your computer so that if something goes wrong you can still get to them.

I bet someone would make a lot of money off that.
 
likefunbutnot [OhFark]
2023-02-07 12:16:59 PM  

koder: Too bad they don't have a thing where you can install an app that syncs your emails to your computer so that if something goes wrong you can still get to them.

I bet someone would make a lot of money off that.


Desktop Outlook is right up there with iTunes for Windows and Lotus Notes as a lesson in how not to make software. Thunderbird is pretty good but I usually try to get people who want desktop mail on EMclient since it'll do all the Outlooky things and still sync with a variety of calendar and contact providers without any extra stuff.

I have a couple customers impacted by this. I occasionally have Google Workspace outages as well but they never seem to be as severe nor as lengthy as Microsoft's.
 
mongbiohazard
2023-02-07 12:27:03 PM  

koder: Too bad they don't have a thing where you can install an app that syncs your emails to your computer so that if something goes wrong you can still get to them.

I bet someone would make a lot of money off that.


Yeah, I have Outlook desktop installed on my work PC and it seems to have been working just fine the whole time. Thankful for it.

I understand there are some advantages to moving us to web apps, but I also hate it and am glad my company is still using the desktop versions of the MS suite applications. Programs running on your own silicon in your own home will generally be a lot more responsive, my favorite thing about them. Also when there's an issue it usually means a specific person has an issue, not everyone in the company like it does when cloud services have issues.

I vastly prefer using Outlook desktop to Outlook 365. Same with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and all the rest they want to move to the cloud.
 
AlphaG33k
2023-02-07 12:42:50 PM  
thunderbird syncs all of my mails locally, either with google, or microsoft, always good to have a backup.

the 3,2,1 rule of backups applies, 3 copies, 2 different media types, at least 1 offline and/or offsite.

BluRay, HDD , SDD Copies, and a copy stored on MSFT that is encrypted as 1 off-site copy.

I hate to say it but Office365 is worth it, just for a "free" 6TB of off-site storage. it just can't be beat by any of the other major players. I wouldn't trust it 100% , hence the encryption, but hey, for 99.99/yr 6Tb backup, it can't be beat.
 
likefunbutnot [OhFark]
2023-02-07 1:58:10 PM  

mongbiohazard: I vastly prefer using Outlook desktop


I see that you used these words but I cannot believe that they are intended in that order.

AlphaG33k: for 99.99/yr 6Tb backup, it can't be beat.


Backblaze will give you functionally unlimited storage for $70/year, if you're really worried about having reliable online backup. Crashplan is a smidge more expensive, but they're better about keeping file versions long-term, so for some use cases, it's the better option.

Also, since you mention BD discs, high density writable optical discs degrade over time. If you want long term storage for removable media, you're better off looking at some form of LTO.
 
mongbiohazard
2023-02-07 2:07:30 PM  

likefunbutnot: mongbiohazard: I vastly prefer using Outlook desktop

I see that you used these words but I cannot believe that they are intended in that order.


I did, and they were indeed intended that way. I'm not even the only one to think so!

I vastly prefer desktop applications running on local silicon. They're more responsive, and less vulnerable to system-wide issues. That includes Outlook. Using Outlook with the desktop app is a way, way, way better - in my humble opinion - experience than using the cloud app. My company has both, and the desktop app is sooooo much better. Cloud applications are also often annoying to use, they almost inevitably involve input delay, or you have to wait while elements load up and the UI re-adjusts itself. Yucky.
 
likefunbutnot [OhFark]
2023-02-07 2:24:47 PM  

mongbiohazard: I vastly prefer desktop applications running on local silicon


It's more the concept that someone could like Outlook in ANY form. That sounds like Stockholm syndrome to me.

Above, I mentioned a number of applications that are appallingly awful: iTunes, Notes and Outlook. Each of them tries to do a lot of things and while all three are to some degree technically capable of those tasks, none of them are actually GOOD at any of the things they do.   I mostly trust that Outlook can read and present a mailbox, true, but it also has a staggering number of ways that it can shiat itself. It keeps user and mailbox preferences in nine different places I'm aware of, and that's only counting the Windows Registry once. It's very easy to misconfigure, even with decent IT management in place. It's also an absolute slug, whether all your data is local or sitting on an Exchange or IMAP server someplace.

At the end of the day, there are crap tons of better email/contacts/calendar tools and I'd honestly rather use any of them in place of Outlook. I get that it's nifty to have all the calendar sharing and assistant functions that come with Exchange put in savvy user hands, but having been an Exchange admin, I'm well aware of just how often users who are supposed to be savvy just aren't.
 
Dr Nostromo
2023-02-07 2:28:45 PM  
25 years and I'm still using Eudora.
 
AlphaG33k
2023-02-07 2:31:10 PM  

likefunbutnot: mongbiohazard: I vastly prefer using Outlook desktop

I see that you used these words but I cannot believe that they are intended in that order.

AlphaG33k: for 99.99/yr 6Tb backup, it can't be beat.

Backblaze will give you functionally unlimited storage for $70/year, if you're really worried about having reliable online backup. Crashplan is a smidge more expensive, but they're better about keeping file versions long-term, so for some use cases, it's the better option.

Also, since you mention BD discs, high density writable optical discs degrade over time. If you want long term storage for removable media, you're better off looking at some form of LTO.


Problem is backblaze doesn't support linux, and MSFT through Duplicati does. I'll maintain my own keys , and not rely on someone's dodgy implementation.

LTO is nice, but as long as the BluRays are "refreshed" ie, new ones created every year or so, it's a good hedge against bit rot.
 
Ivo Shandor [TotalFark] [OhFark]
2023-02-07 2:43:08 PM  

likefunbutnot: mongbiohazard: I vastly prefer using Outlook desktop

I see that you used these words but I cannot believe that they are intended in that order.

AlphaG33k: for 99.99/yr 6Tb backup, it can't be beat.

Backblaze will give you functionally unlimited storage for $70/year, if you're really worried about having reliable online backup. Crashplan is a smidge more expensive, but they're better about keeping file versions long-term, so for some use cases, it's the better option.

Also, since you mention BD discs, high density writable optical discs degrade over time. If you want long term storage for removable media, you're better off looking at some form of LTO.


Tape only makes sense if you have a huge amount of data.

A far better approach for regular people is to use spinning hard drives in an external eSATA or USB docking station. The 2.5" ones are convenient and will fit in a safe deposit box if you only need to store a few TB.

Optical discs are obsolete. Maybe keep a couple of discs with copies of your most important data if you want diversity in storage media, but they shouldn't be your primary method.
 
likefunbutnot [OhFark]
2023-02-07 2:49:44 PM  

AlphaG33k: Problem is backblaze doesn't support linux


Crashplan does most definitely have a Linux client. You'd be paying a bit more than for Office, but if you're worried about Linux clients, Microsoft 365 ALREADY isn't giving to the primary benefit of its service.

There's also nothing stopping you from encrypting client data on your devices prior to shipping it off to any third party.

BD-Rs are small and kind of expensive. Given how fast DVDs have been found to degrade, I'm not sure I'd tempt the gods of data duplication to depend on access to one, even for only a year.
 
likefunbutnot [OhFark]
2023-02-07 2:52:27 PM  

Ivo Shandor: Tape only makes sense if you have a huge amount of data.


The older LTO drives in particular are very affordable and tapes are both cheap and stable for actual decades.
 
mongbiohazard
2023-02-07 2:57:54 PM  

likefunbutnot: mongbiohazard: I vastly prefer desktop applications running on local silicon

It's more the concept that someone could like Outlook in ANY form. That sounds like Stockholm syndrome to me.

Above, I mentioned a number of applications that are appallingly awful: iTunes, Notes and Outlook. Each of them tries to do a lot of things and while all three are to some degree technically capable of those tasks, none of them are actually GOOD at any of the things they do.   I mostly trust that Outlook can read and present a mailbox, true, but it also has a staggering number of ways that it can shiat itself. It keeps user and mailbox preferences in nine different places I'm aware of, and that's only counting the Windows Registry once. It's very easy to misconfigure, even with decent IT management in place. It's also an absolute slug, whether all your data is local or sitting on an Exchange or IMAP server someplace.

At the end of the day, there are crap tons of better email/contacts/calendar tools and I'd honestly rather use any of them in place of Outlook. I get that it's nifty to have all the calendar sharing and assistant functions that come with Exchange put in savvy user hands, but having been an Exchange admin, I'm well aware of just how often users who are supposed to be savvy just aren't.


There may be better email programs, but I've always enjoyed using Outlook. Its always worked well enough for me, and I've tried some alternatives over the years and always ended up going back to Outlook because I liked it better.

It's fun to make fun of Microsoft and all, but honestly... I like Outlook (desktop) and I like Windows 10.
 
mongbiohazard
2023-02-07 3:02:37 PM  

Ivo Shandor: likefunbutnot: mongbiohazard: I vastly prefer using Outlook desktop

I see that you used these words but I cannot believe that they are intended in that order.

AlphaG33k: for 99.99/yr 6Tb backup, it can't be beat.

Backblaze will give you functionally unlimited storage for $70/year, if you're really worried about having reliable online backup. Crashplan is a smidge more expensive, but they're better about keeping file versions long-term, so for some use cases, it's the better option.

Also, since you mention BD discs, high density writable optical discs degrade over time. If you want long term storage for removable media, you're better off looking at some form of LTO.

Tape only makes sense if you have a huge amount of data.

A far better approach for regular people is to use spinning hard drives in an external eSATA or USB docking station. The 2.5" ones are convenient and will fit in a safe deposit box if you only need to store a few TB.

Optical discs are obsolete. Maybe keep a couple of discs with copies of your most important data if you want diversity in storage media, but they shouldn't be your primary method.


Yup. I store tons of data in my personal server farm, and the best home storage scheme I've found is using Unraid to build a NAS out of old PC components (second "R" in reduce, reuse, recycle) I already owned, with an array of whatever HDD's I either had or could find on sale.

I've got three servers with about this much capacity:

Fark user imageView Full Size
 
Ivo Shandor [TotalFark] [OhFark]
2023-02-07 3:14:17 PM  

likefunbutnot: Ivo Shandor: Tape only makes sense if you have a huge amount of data.

The older LTO drives in particular are very affordable and tapes are both cheap and stable for actual decades.


https://www.newegg.com/p/2BM-000H-000Z0?Description=lto-3&cm_re=lto-3-_-9SIAJCJJJJ0712-_-Product - Refurbished LTO-3 tape drive, about $100. Fiber Channel HBA not included. Remember to buy two in case the first one craps out when you need to restore something.

Fark user imageView Full Size


https://www.newegg.com/p/2M6-003Y-00002?Description=lto-3&cm_re=lto-3-_-9SIAP9WCJU3482-_-Product&quicklink=true - media, $15 per 400 GB (native capacity).

vs.

https://www.newegg.com/seagate-enterprise-capacity-3-5-st2000nm0055-2tb-hard-drive/p/1Z4-002P-00138?Description=2.5%22%20SATA&cm_re=2.5%22_SATA-_-1Z4-002P-00138-_-Product&quicklink=true - 2000 GB for $70

https://www.newegg.com/sabrent-ec-hd2b-dock/p/N82E16817366079?Description=usb%20hdd%20dock&cm_re=usb_hdd%20dock-_-17-366-079-_-Product - $50 docking station.

The media cost per TB is about the same, the HDD has a faster transfer rate, and it takes up considerably less desktop real estate.
 
Day_Old_Dutchie
2023-02-07 3:17:25 PM  
Microsoft confirmed the outage on its service health website, saying: "We're applying targeted mitigations to a subset of affected infrastructure and validating that it has mitigated impact. We're also making traffic optimization efforts to alleviate user impact and expedite recovery."

In other words, they had no idea wtf they were doing
 
AlphaG33k
2023-02-07 3:20:38 PM  

likefunbutnot: AlphaG33k: Problem is backblaze doesn't support linux

Crashplan does most definitely have a Linux client. You'd be paying a bit more than for Office, but if you're worried about Linux clients, Microsoft 365 ALREADY isn't giving to the primary benefit of its service.

There's also nothing stopping you from encrypting client data on your devices prior to shipping it off to any third party.

BD-Rs are small and kind of expensive. Given how fast DVDs have been found to degrade, I'm not sure I'd tempt the gods of data duplication to depend on access to one, even for only a year.


Crashplan is expensive, especially since they define what an "endpoint" is. Sure, I can aggregate all my clients, backup on my "endpoint" and then backup that, but then I am doing the work for them. With duplicati, I just say, back up all this stuff to MSFT, encrypt it, and done.

BDRs are small, but relatively cheap, problem is they are slooooow. I don't have enough for tape, it's just 250Gb or so, with only about 60Gb of that being absolutely critical, fitting on 1-2 BDRs compressed.

Good Quality BDRs seem to last long, much better than the poor quality DVDs that I have seen degrade in a few months. Hard drives good, flash also good, but immutable storage in the form of a BDR/DVDr good to have.
 
likefunbutnot [OhFark]
2023-02-07 3:41:31 PM  

Ivo Shandor: Fiber Channel HBA not included. Remember to buy two in case the first one craps out when you need to restore something.


I was thinking of something more like this nice little SAS guy that can be made to work in a normal desktop without much effort. 10x 800GB tapes will set someone back ~$100, and it'll all play really nice with a linux host. The systems are relatively easy to service, and it's not that hard to hunt down more than one of the older drives to keep on hand.

The reason I advocate for tape here is that it's exceedingly cheap to expand to needs once the initial investment has been made in obtaining drives. Yes, tapes are slow, but they're faster than cloud backups and they can sit on a shelf forever, hold up to shipping or transport and have a tiny footprint.

External hard drives are fine for fixed quantities of data and I'm not saying people shouldn't use those as well, but if I want a long term copy, especially one suited for offsite backup, tape is actually a solid choice.
 
austerity101
2023-02-07 4:03:40 PM  
Isn't there anything else people can use? I don't know if I've ever heard anyone say anything good about Outlook.
 
Ivo Shandor [TotalFark] [OhFark]
2023-02-07 4:05:45 PM  

likefunbutnot: Ivo Shandor: Fiber Channel HBA not included. Remember to buy two in case the first one craps out when you need to restore something.

I was thinking of something more like this nice little SAS guy that can be made to work in a normal desktop without much effort. 10x 800GB tapes will set someone back ~$100, and it'll all play really nice with a linux host. The systems are relatively easy to service, and it's not that hard to hunt down more than one of the older drives to keep on hand.

The reason I advocate for tape here is that it's exceedingly cheap to expand to needs once the initial investment has been made in obtaining drives. Yes, tapes are slow, but they're faster than cloud backups and they can sit on a shelf forever, hold up to shipping or transport and have a tiny footprint.

External hard drives are fine for fixed quantities of data and I'm not saying people shouldn't use those as well, but if I want a long term copy, especially one suited for offsite backup, tape is actually a solid choice.


That's not bad, but you're still paying about the same $/TB for something which is slower and bulkier than spinning hard drives. I suppose it might have an advantage in long-term data integrity (assuming well-controlled temperature and humidity).
 
likefunbutnot [OhFark]
2023-02-07 4:24:17 PM  

Ivo Shandor: That's not bad, but you're still paying about the same $/TB for something which is slower and bulkier than spinning hard drives. I suppose it might have an advantage in long-term data integrity (assuming well-controlled temperature and humidity).


It's useful to point out that many high capacity non-enterprise drives use SMR (shingled magnetic resonance) encoding, which dramatically reduces transfer rates. Like 25MB/sec, once the drive's cache is filled. I can fill an 18TB 7200rpm Ultrastar three times over before I fill a 6TB WD Green drive. If you're specifically buying a name-brand external hard drive, you're almost always getting SMR and boy howdy does that suck.

Like the desktop version of Outlook.
 
likefunbutnot [OhFark]
2023-02-07 4:33:46 PM  

austerity101: Isn't there anything else people can use? I don't know if I've ever heard anyone say anything good about Outlook.


Thunderbird is a perfectly decent email client, but it isn't great at syncing contacts without external help.

EMclient isn't free for commercial use but it plays nice and syncs with external services and does the things most Outlook users want.
 
Ivo Shandor [TotalFark] [OhFark]
2023-02-07 4:38:09 PM  

likefunbutnot: Ivo Shandor: That's not bad, but you're still paying about the same $/TB for something which is slower and bulkier than spinning hard drives. I suppose it might have an advantage in long-term data integrity (assuming well-controlled temperature and humidity).

It's useful to point out that many high capacity non-enterprise drives use SMR (shingled magnetic resonance) encoding, which dramatically reduces transfer rates. Like 25MB/sec, once the drive's cache is filled. I can fill an 18TB 7200rpm Ultrastar three times over before I fill a 6TB WD Green drive. If you're specifically buying a name-brand external hard drive, you're almost always getting SMR and boy howdy does that suck.

Like the desktop version of Outlook.


There shouldn't be that much of a penalty for a single sequential write stream (i.e. analogous to tape storage), but I haven't actually benchmarked any of them.
 
likefunbutnot [OhFark]
2023-02-07 4:49:14 PM  

Ivo Shandor: There shouldn't be that much of a penalty for a single sequential write stream (i.e. analogous to tape storage), but I haven't actually benchmarked any of them.


I can send you a few retired drives if you'd care to test it out. I got stuck on de-shelled externals for a while to keep up with my need for affordable drives and it was miserable.
 
Quantumbunny
2023-02-07 5:15:17 PM  

austerity101: Isn't there anything else people can use? I don't know if I've ever heard anyone say anything good about Outlook.


I honestly don't know why people hate it. I have used it for 20 years and it's still the best client for handling email, calendar, meetings, etc.

Google, even corporate, feels like their free email. It's just not a fully featured and it doesn't feel integrated even with other Google products like Doc and Calc and such. It's usable, but not impressive.

Lotus, Novell, Eudora, and others are just so bad they're not worth it. Thunderbird was fine for personal email 20 years ago, but it has very little in the modern feature set.

I feel that I haven't actually seen a better client, which is too bad, but Outlook is just not bad and I'm not sure where all the hate comes from. There certainly isn't a better alternative, so I'm not sure what folks would honestly suggest instead.
 
morg
2023-02-07 6:56:27 PM  
I was very reticent when my company announced that we were going to O365 and to just make it work. Now I more ambivalent because I get the equivalent of a snow day once a quarter.
 
akallen404
2023-02-07 6:57:32 PM  

likefunbutnot: mongbiohazard: I vastly prefer desktop applications running on local silicon

It's more the concept that someone could like Outlook in ANY form. That sounds like Stockholm syndrome to me.


Well, yeah. If you have to use outlook -- and a lot of businesses do -- it's better to use the desktop app. OWS is... weird.

Microsuck is the most popular business software source purely because they spend a lot of money to keep it that way. Nothing they produce works as well as it's supposed to, but all of it KINDA works 99% of the time.
 
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