Yes, but a gasoline engine can only use around 25-30% of the energy contained in a gallon of gas. Electric motors are around 3x more efficient, even when considering the charge/discharge losses.

Yes, well, that is today. Prior to spring of 2013 that would have not been an option. Windows Server 2012 was available in fall of 2012. Not exactly an earth shattering lead, but a lead nonetheless.

Now to be fair, nikkipolya did mention Linux and Unix, and zfs has been available for Solaris for almost 10 years.

Average in CA is 15.2 cents per kwh. The EPA uses 33.7kwh/gallon of gasoline for equivalency calculations. So that would be over $5 per gallon. However, electric cars have much better efficiency than gasoline cars... perhaps as much as 3x. That will bring your "per-gallon" price way down. You will save money on fuel compared to a gasoline car.

People who have never worked in a marine environment just don't understand this. Seawater is nasty, nasty stuff to anything. Plastic, metal, wood - it doesn't matter. Add a mechanical part and it just becomes a nightmare. The navy, for instance, is continuously painting their ships. As in, they never stop painting them. If you have an offshore wind farm, offshore wave farm, or whatever - you will spend far more on maintenance than you ever do on capital costs. And you have to restrict the technology to proven, overbuilt, and simple. Even titanium will fail in salt water (hydrogen embrittlement)... not a nice place to engineer for.

In addition to Crashplan, I typically run the built-in backup program as well - just to cover the case where the backup program itself was not working properly. For example, on Macs I use Time Machine and on Windows I use the Windows Backup running in parallel with Crashplan.

I wouldn't get too cocky... In the "Linux" world you can indeed run zfs, but you have to roll your own since it uses an incompatible license - it came out of Sun and was released with a non-GPL compatible license. btrfs has many of these features, but it has only recently become "production" quality - and even then, not all of the features are stable. MS was slightly ahead of Linux in the filesystem department.

I ran 8 for a year and put up with all of the usability crap, but they lost me when my hard drive died and I found out how crappy the built-in backup software is. The damn thing doesn't save a disk image, nor have a similar way to recover from a completely dead disk. If I have to reinstall from scratch, it sure as hell wasn't going to be 8 again. So now I'm back to 7 and its sane backup program.

It's not like the early version of Vista, though. It's more like a late Vista service release.

I think this probably indicates that they bite off too much in each release. It's actually a common problem when companies try to abandon an incremental development cycle and get a little ambitious.

NTFS supports arbitrary metadata "streams", analogous to xattrs on unix. Windows and applications simply don't make use of them very much.

Also, Microsoft did introduce a new filesystem: ReFS. It is sort-of analogous to zfs or btrfs, but not very well supported in Windows 8 at the moment and not as feature-complete. Still, they seem to be ahead of Apple which is still using HFS.

That's another good idea, though you wouldn't be able to take advantage of clones and such so that the backup's data would be invalid once the resilver started until it was finished... If I went that route, I'd make sure I had completed a scrub before connecting the backup drives.

Well, you certainly save money on blinker fluid but you end up paying out the nose for voltage grease.

You have me wondering if using zfs wouldn't be a good option here. You could put the pair of drives in a single enclosure and make them into a pool. Then every quarter or so bring your drives home, update the data, and do a scrub. Thus you get the parity for "free". If your primary backup is also zfs, you can even do a zfs send and get incremental backups for "free" as well.

Of course, now the "all you can eat" online backup services are starting to approach the cost of a safety deposit box :)

I agree. However, the nice thing about keeping the data live is that it will benefit from any upgrades you do over the years... what seems like a lot of storage today will be trivial in the future. And you can piggyback on your video storage backup for all of your backup needs. But yeah, the simplest thing to do is copy to a pair of drives and put them in a safe deposit box. From past experience, I would probably add a drive full of parity data as well :)

I looked into BTSync and - at least as of a few months ago - it really had trouble with mixed computer OS environments. It would probably be fine for simple video files, but it did not handle all the Mac metadata on Windows, Windows metadata on Linux, etc. There are workarounds, but nothing I felt like dealing with.

Definitely this. If you have a buddy or relative willing to have a little NAS box running on their network, you can do something like Crashplan and get offsite backup for "free". I happen to use Crashplan, but rsync would work just fine. Both let you "seed" the initial backup so that you aren't waiting for months to do the initial backup.