Most Votes
- By the end of 2026, how useful do you think agentic/multi-agent AI systems will actually be in your daily work or personal projects? Posted on March 11th, 2026 | 12602 votes
Most Comments
- By the end of 2026, how useful do you think agentic/multi-agent AI systems will actually be in your daily work or personal projects? Posted on March 11th, 2026 | 40 comments
Back up? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Back up? (Score:5, Funny)
Since you had to ask...
I think the poll refers to either defintion 1-b or defintion 2.
I voted for less than 24 hours ago, because right now I have about two dozen kids backing me up on triangles, harmonics and recorders. I'm teaching them my theme song! Maybe you've heard it [lycos.fr] already?
Also, traffic was terrible yesterday...
Re: definition 2 (Score:5, Funny)
trucks backup nightly (Score:3, Funny)
they're backing up.
Re:Back up? (Score:3, Interesting)
Fortunately for us, we work in a small town, and he had a business card on a tag on the bag. He got a call at about 9:00 that night, an old man: "I think I have your suitcase here..." Chump ha
Boo Hiss (Score:5, Funny)
- Cowboy Neal with pen and paper
option? What is /. coming to?!?
Re:Back up? (Score:4, Funny)
One great thing about Free Software is that if you lose the source code, you can just post a message on your website asking if anyone has a copy to send you.
Oh, and SourceForge [sourceforge.net] is also a good place to store stuff
Re:Back up? (Score:5, Informative)
Sounds kinda like rsync to me. You might want to see if that fits your needs.
Old OLX (OffLine eXpress) tagline (Score:3, Funny)
"Slashdot sucks" (Score:2, Funny)
Re:"Slashdot sucks" (Score:2)
Re:"Slashdot sucks" (Score:2)
Although to be fair, five days ago a website backup saved my ass
(I accidentally ran "rm -f
the CowboyNeal option (Score:2, Funny)
Re:the CowboyNeal option (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:the CowboyNeal option (Score:3, Funny)
EMC frame? (Score:2)
So i chose once every decade.
Re:EMC frame? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:EMC frame? (Score:2)
Not the best solution admittedly, but OSTB is costly and slow, and another EMC frame is VERY costly.
Re:EMC frame? (Score:3, Funny)
Backups? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Backups? (Score:5, Funny)
That's not your HDD, it's the sound of a thousand unemployed sysadmins scratching at the door, waiting to take your job.
Two Dimensional Question (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess I should mention that the computer I am using right now develops a bad cluster or two each week, and no, I don't have a backup. I am not stupid enough to put anything of value on it.
Life is too short to spend time manually backing up client machines. Anything of value needs to go on to secured mirrored servers with autom
Too many options (Score:4, Insightful)
Backups are for wimps! (Score:5, Funny)
"Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on FTP and let the rest of the world mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
use P2P! (Score:5, Interesting)
While this sounds as a joke, there is a serious point to it all. Distributing your stuff around the globe is not such a bad idea. My ideal solution would be a P2P network to keep backups. People rarely need backups, so the traffic on such a network would be minimal. And space is cheap. Use good encryption to protect your sensitive stuff, so only you can read it. To avoid abuse, establish a quota system - you have to contribute several times the storage you will be using yourself. That should prevent making a large free warez site out of the system. The system should preriodically check to make sure that each person's data is backed up on at least N servers in X different countries, preferably different continents. When some people leave the project (inevitable), replicate the data they used to store to other participants, so the number of sources stays high.
I have a few megs of data I really don't want to lose, and would be more than willing to dedicate several times that space to host other people's stuff. I don't even need to know who they are.
I have observed the "Strength in numbers" principle on some P2P networks. By experience people now have faith that if even one person keeps the file needed up long enough, it will leak to others, and will not get lost. That's not reliability on paper - that's reliability proven by experience. I believe that we could harness that reliability for where it's really needed - backups.
Re:use P2P! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:use P2P! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:use P2P! (Score:5, Informative)
Breaking news about Freenet (Score:5, Funny)
7th May, 2003 - Website problems
The Freenet website was wiped out by an unfortunate oversight and the backups weren't running. This means that we are rebuilding the website from scratch.
Re:Backups are for wimps! (Score:5, Funny)
Echelon (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, everything.
Even your thoughts.
I'd offer some juicy bits of dreams for money, but I already have too much.
Now to just use my power on the editors to use their unlimited mod points to get me to score:5...
Re:Echelon (Score:5, Funny)
You're currently stuck at 2... perhaps you should get out and push....
Re:Echelon (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, everything.
Even your thoughts.
Great! My savior!
I can't remember where I put my car keys, can I pay you to restore the my memory?
wipe, restore, reboot... repeat (Score:5, Funny)
I really need for those DVD burners to come down im price.
Re:wipe, restore, reboot... repeat (Score:2, Funny)
Re:wipe, restore, reboot... repeat (Score:5, Funny)
So I assume you checked the less than 24 hours box.
Re:wipe, restore, reboot... repeat (Score:4, Insightful)
har har har, here's some help. (Score:5, Informative)
Ever heard of incremental backups? With all those files, you would do well with a private server. Get any old PD and 2 hard drives big enough to fit all of your stuff:
650MB x (24 + 45) = 650 x 69 = 44,850 MB = 50 Gigs, two fifty gig hard disks should do, splurge if you wish.
Now set up that computer with one of the disks as a ftp / html server with a nice cheap 100 mbit/s ethernet card. I recomend Debian, proftp and boa for your simple static content. Now, mount that nasty bitch windoze disk and copy all the content to appropriate ftp / http directories. I'd eliminate all those silly MICROS~.LNK files. Now shut the box down and remove the source of your woes. Mount the second drive and copy all of your content to it. Take that second drive out, it's your big whole disk backup. As often as you like make incremental backups with find:
tar cvf new.tar `find -mtime -number_of_days_since_last_time`
ftp that tar file over to your CD burner, preferably a nice red hat computer with CD roast, but windoze if you must (I do, I'm lazy). Whenever you feel like it, do the whole disk trick, by copying without replacing files (cp -u -r source destination).
Now sit back and enjoy your favorite porn and music all you want.
For extra credit you can run fetchmail and a pop server for yourself, perhaps squirrel mail to keep the mail on your the box you back up with reasonable tools.
To keep your sanity, remove windoze from you life the next time it fails you and must be "wiped and rebuilt" from scratch. Windoze fails more often than any hardware, though I have had one disk die of natural causes (all contents were rescued). By the way, with 24 CDs of porn, you might have more to wipe off than than your hard disk. Keep it clean.
Re:har har har, here's some help. (Score:3, Informative)
Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps if you change around the games colors, take away unlimited mod points, put over/underrated into metamod, and put every slashcode release through rigorous testing before plopping it into slashdot, you could change some people's feelings?
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Lets throw in spell checking and dupe checking while we're at it. Of course, I guess that's a plum from subscribing.
Wow.. complaining about Slashdot is actually ontopic for once!
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
That's not the only reason why I'm here. I also try to pick up chicks.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
My last full backup was: (Score:5, Funny)
Print (Score:5, Funny)
You're not the first person who did that (Score:3, Funny)
which system? (Score:2)
My personal computer only gets the important stuff backed up when it's created/completed (setup files, source code, mp3s).
My web servers that I run get backed up two times a day (once by the datacenter techs and once by me).
So, which system are we talking about? Personally, I chose echelon (home pc).
Lazy man's backup/restore (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know if this works or not--it's just a gedankenexperiment I'm entertaining.
The restore is a piece of cake--google will usually find my backup with 0.42 seconds. I love google!
Re:Lazy man's backup/restore (Score:5, Interesting)
I've got into the bad habit of editing web pages directly on the server and one day I decided to give my sister access to her web page which I created using frames. For some reason all the links broke, data disappeared, pages got lost and the colors got all weird.
Not having a backup I decided to see what the google cache had stored for me to discover that it was the old version of the page. Imagine the joy!
Re:Lazy man's backup/restore (Score:4, Informative)
Sigh.
(I also tried keeping some backups on a thumb drive: DO NOT, EVER, buy a Transcend Jet Flash USB Drive. They are complete shit.)
Re:Lazy man's backup/restore (Score:5, Funny)
Don't forget to let google cache your private key incase it gets deleted too!
Re:ASCII Armor? (Score:4, Informative)
Scarily Lazy (Score:5, Interesting)
It kind of scares me how lazy I've got. My response was to do what I'd just done a couple of days before...
Cheap hard drives set you back about $1/gb at the moment. More to the point, if you purge your system annualy, a $50 hard drive is probably as large as the largish one you bought last year.
So I now just find myself buying a new hard drive, installing the OS on to the clean disk, installing the software and then copying over from the other drive as I need it. If there's anything I've forgotten, or even if I fuck up the new drive, all I do is plug the old drive back in and copy back over what I need.
Sure, I could probably back up to CD but that's a whole hell of a lot of disk swapping and the danger of still missing something unless I want to backup the whole thing, windows installs included. For $50, I've got a complete safe backup and a fully working system just a plug away if I ever need it. $50 for peace of mind just feels worth it.
A year or two later, if I'm certain I no longer need the backup anymore, the old drives are great for playing with other OSs and I've now got enough smaller drives kicking around that I can play with exploring ideas like separate drives for swapfiles etc. to see if the saved access times/lack of competition make a difference or not.
There's still a part of me that remembers what it was like before hard drives, getting my first hard drive and how precious it seemed, that's totally traumatised by how wasteful this feels though.
The D.U.M.B. rule of thumb (Score:5, Insightful)
I want my CowboyNeal option (Score:5, Insightful)
I know chrisd is not around anymore, but the CowboyNeal option is a tradition I don't like to see lost and replaced in this stupid way. It was there for a reason and usually meant you don't care about the poll, you are not related to the poll's subject or you don't see an answer that satisfies you. Simply put, "slashdot sucks" just doesn't cut it.
So yes, Slashdot polls suck without a CowboyNeal option.
Re:I want my CowboyNeal option (Score:5, Informative)
I'f you'd like to join, just befriend me.
Re:I want my CowboyNeal option (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I want my CowboyNeal option (Score:5, Insightful)
We love you, Cowboy Neal!
Re:I want my CowboyNeal option (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I want my CowboyNeal option (Score:4, Informative)
Hemos sucks!
Doesn't anyone remember? All these newbies!
bah! I am SO sick of cowboyneal! (Score:3, Flamebait)
Why do you feel an obsessive need to vote in every poll? If I see a poll asking about feminine hygiene products, I don't get upset that none of the choices apply to me (since I'm male). I just don't vote, since the poll obviously isn't aimed at m
Re:I want my CowboyNeal option (Score:3, Interesting)
I suggested this poll because in a previous discussion about Lindows people were bashing them for having it default logon as root... so I wa
New Polls are Better! (Score:3, Interesting)
Grammar Sucks (Score:2, Insightful)
How shall I mod thee? Let me count the ways: -1 Offtopic, -1 Boring, -1 Grammatically Challenged, -1 Overrated, -1 Not Funny, -1 Troll, -1 Flamebait. Maybe, just maybe, if the poll had been about
Something does suck around here, but it's not
Re:Grammar Sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
um.... (Score:2)
I understand what the poll is trying to survey, but the wording could have been a little more logical...
If you don't create useful work, you don't need to (Score:5, Insightful)
They look at me kind of funny and laugh nervously.
The only thing I've got backed up is Quicken, everything else is re-creatable.
Dead HDDs make great backups. (Score:2)
Now I have a semi-recent copy of my HDD lying around. Sure, it would take me another 3 days to get the data off, but the drive is unlikely to degrade much further while sitting on a shelf.
My old 2GB windows drive will probably get backed up soon (and probably upgraded/replace
missing option (Score:2)
Re:missing option (Score:2)
delete from syscolumns
click run query
Wait a few seconds
Database on both drives are now completely screwed. Sure the lieklyhood of someone doing this is low, but I have seen enough stupid things done to database to scare me into regular backups.
How about 'back-up of what needs back-uping?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Kjella
Backups? (Score:2)
Parallel Universes (Score:5, Funny)
That's where I keep a backup of all of my data. I can just go to the fork before the crash, and grab everything off my machine before it could have happened.
Jesus (Score:5, Funny)
Jesus and Satan have an argument as to who in the better programmer. This goes on for a few hours until they come to an agreement to hold a contest, with God as the judge.
They set themselves before their computers and began. They type furiously, lines of code streaming up the screen, for several hours straight. Seconds before the end of the competition, a bolt of lightening strikes, taking out the electricity.
Moments later, the power is restored, and God announces that the contest is over.
He asks Satan to show what he has come up with. Satan is visibly upset, and cries, "I have nothing. I lost it all when the power went out."
"Very well, then, " says God, "Let us see if Jesus fared any better."
Jesus enters a command, and the screen comes to life in vivid display, the voices of an angelic choir pour forth from the speakers.
Satan is astonished. He stutters, "B-b-but how?! I lost everything, yet Jesus' program is intact! How did he do it?"
God chuckles, "Everybody knows...Jesus saves."
Belt and suspenders (Score:2)
My laptop's home dir is rsync'd to my linux box nightly, whole system backups to DVD monthly. And the occasional CDR backup of the mp3's whose original CDs I can't seem to locate at the moment...
The linux box makes weekly backups to the spare hard drive, and the most recent copy gets included in the monthly DVD.
And of course my important stuff is in CVS and/or on a dev server at work, which is backed up nightly to disk and weekly to tape.
-Esme
Obligatory Matrix Quote (Score:5, Funny)
Guard 1: Please remove any metal objects you may be carrying.
* Neo opens jacket revealing a small arsenal of weapons.
Guard 1: Holy Sh*t!
BANG BANG BANG
Guard 2: Backup... send backup!
BANG
Me: (To TV) SEE WHAT BACKUP GETS YOU!?!? It gets you DEAD!
Coming up on 2 years (Score:2)
When I lived in the same house as my mail server, he had >3 times as much space as he needed. Twice a month, cron would back up the main partition and the user partition into two backup copies on the same drive. Each pair of backups was in a different pair of destination partitions as the previous pairs (15th of the month went to a different place as 1st of the month backups). Every few months, I'd copy the unzipped (due to bit error tolerances) tars to my desktop.
This worked very well, saving my but
i back up all the time via peer-to-peer systems... (Score:2)
backing up and sampling?
who can forget those great little disclaimers stating
"this is a backup server"
Started back into... (Score:3, Funny)
Be careful what info. you ask for...you might get it!
Cheers
Good backup-to-CDRW program for Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
Anybody got any favourites?
DG
Re:Good backup-to-CDRW program for Linux? (Score:3, Informative)
RAID means you don't have to backup (Score:3, Interesting)
Fortunately for them, the platters were unharmed, and for $14K they got their data back good as new from a recovery service. $14K buys a lot of tape drives and tapes.
Re:RAID means you don't have to backup (Score:3, Informative)
The bigger problem with that approach is that RAID doesn't protect you from overwriting or deleting files. Some operating systems provide that ability (NetWare is an example), but it's still pretty dumb to rely on anything but real backups.
One small tech company I worked for was broken into and the fileserver was stolen. That machine had mirrored drives (RAID-1) but amazingly that didn't help much. The backup drive and tapes were stolen as well. Luckily one of our guys was smart enough to keep a week
I do it the cheap way... (Score:5, Funny)
Backups? (Score:5, Funny)
*NO CARRIER
Echelon (Score:5, Funny)
The worst thing about using Echelon to back TERRORISM up your data is the constant KILL THE PRESIDENT necessity to include certain AL-QAEDA keywords in your messages you think will be picked WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION HIDDEN IN MY SECRET BUNKER up.
No *FULL* backups. (Score:5, Insightful)
rsync you insensitive clods (Score:5, Informative)
Disk is cheap. I can pickup a 120GB 7200 RPM IDE disk w/8MB cache for $100 after rebate from Best Buy.
IDE controllers are cheap, and many motherboards these days include 4 of them (as opposed to simply 2).
Linux is cheap. In fact, I can't remember a time when it was expensive.
NFS is cheap. And it has always been free in Linux.
RSync is cheap. Did anyone ever try to charge you for rsync?
LVM is cheap. Ignoring Veritas, has anyone tried to charge you for LVM on Linux?
DATA LOSS IS NOT CHEAP.
The loss of important data loss (and resulting humiliation) is extremely costly. And, given the pervasive nature of modern equipment (digital photos come to mind) - some data is irrecoverable once it is lost. Digital Photos are not like MP3s - you are the only one that has a copy of it.
That being said, with how cheap media and software is (and how expensive personal digital property (photos) is), one would be an idiot NOT to take advantage of today's hardware situation.
I got burned by a disk going bad. Lost about 2 years worth of digital pictures. What did I do? Learn from it. Went to best buy and dropped about $400 for 3 120 GB disks.
I now have two LVMs on my file server - one for data and one for backup. I also have a 5 line script that runs every 6 hours. It does this:
cd
rsync -rltvopg *
Wow that is difficult.
And now all of my data is safe.
In this day and age, I can't imagine how anyone can lose data. (Yes I'm aware that I recently lost data, which somewhat disproves my entire premise
Redundancy is not equal to backups (Score:3, Insightful)
My last backup was (Score:5, Funny)
Manditory RIAA reference and insensitive clod joke (Score:5, Funny)
I'm from the RIAA and I don't think that information should be duplicated or moved from one media to another without money changing hands no-matter how important, logical or fair it may be, you insensitive clod
The passport to total backup (Score:3, Funny)
These Guys [slashdot.org]
look after all my important stuff
Re:Serious Side (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I use RAID1, I don't backup.... (Score:3, Insightful)
delayed RAID1? (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps it's not even RAID, maybe more of a dynamic backup system. Someone who knows something please comment...
Re:slashdot sucks ass (Score:2)
I know! Pond scum!
Re:Echelon (Score:3, Funny)
Winning an argument on the Internet is like winning the special olympics.... Even if you win, you're still a retard.
Re:Ninnle never needs backing up! (Score:3, Insightful)
Early backup software ... (Score:3, Funny)
This software backs up your data great! Resore? Oh yea, well umm... we are still having a few problems with the restore routines.
Arg!!!
Re:Every second? (Score:3, Informative)
1) RAID only protects against hardware faults. A drive fails and your data is intact (except RAID-0 of course. It does not protect against operator error, software bug, malicious code, genuine mistakes (i.e. changing source code for a feature enhancement, incidentally breaking code, and not having good source control or backup to use to figure out how it worked before), and many other such things that no amount of hardware fault-tolerance can ever fix.
2) Most RAID configur