Comment by simondotau | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simondotau | Hacker News Reader

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Houses sometimes burn down. Occasionally, physical storage media catastrophically fails. When these things happen, you'd better hope that your backup process (a) worked, (b) was complete and (c) didn't suffer the same fate as the primary hardware. Hopefully the author is diligent and has backed up everything with sufficient frequency and with sufficient physical separation.

Whereas a VM backup means you can rehabilitate a functioning computer for the author with all of their data and __all__ of their esoteric configuration nuances in a matter of minutes. They can effectively have their computer reappear in front of them using any commodity hardware available off-the-shelf from any large town in Western civilisation—no need to rummage around your local community to track down esoteric, period-correct hardware components.

I don't think cloud backups are strictly necessary but given the size of a DOS virtual machine in its entirty, why the hell not? What are we talking about here, one or two megabytes after compression? That's less than one JPEG from a smartphone.

> I drive a car made in 1980

Don't crash.

> Don't crash

That's good advice in any vehicle :)

I think you are missing my point. I only say just because something is available doesn't meant you should use it. Life is not always about minimizing risk, or effort or maximizing productive output.

You can (should) do offsite backups, and even if you don't life doesn't end if you lose some of your work. Not everyone needs to rebuild their setup in milliseconds. If my house burned down my custom configuration would be the last of my worries don't know about you.

But, well. To each their own.

I wholeheartedly agree with all of the above—assuming that you are your own client. If you have the knowledge and can weigh the pros and cons for yourself, go for it. I was more thinking about a scenario where you're acting as the systems administrator for someone else who's not so technical.

If you were in charge of maintaining George R.R. Martin's WordStar workstation, at the very minimum I doubt you'd feel comfortable having it using a period-correct Quantum Fireball or IBM DeskStar...

> That's good advice in any vehicle :)

I wish it was advice. Unfortunately it's not, it's a warning. You can do everything right and still be the victim of someone else's bad luck or bad life choices. Whether it's an oncoming car or getting T-boned at an intersection, the risk of a serious crash exists no matter how good of a driver you are.

The difference between a car made in 2015 and a car made in 1980 can easily be as dramatic as walking out with superficial injuries—or certain death. The newer car will help you to wash off more speed prior to impact, it will absorb more of the crash energy in its chassis before it gets transferred to your body, and it will deploy precisely timed airbags in concert with a seatbelt pretensioner, all to ensure that the internal organs inside your body decelerate as gently as possible.

I love classic cars in the abstract, but I'd never drive one.

> I wholeheartedly agree with all of the above—assuming that you are your own client.

Yes, I was talking from that perspective. Just to remember people that not everything has to be the best possible ever.

> The difference between a car made in 2015 and a car made in 1980 can easily be as dramatic as walking out with superficial injuries—or certain death.

I was replying tongue-in-cheek. This is certainly true, and I appreciate your concern

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