Congratulations on having no customers. Granted I agree with you in principle, but your customers definitely aren't mine and your approach is but a pipe-dream.

Educating the people we sell website hosting to, about the nature of protocols like SFTP, is a long and painful process.

There is little point saying, "I think you should use $some_better_protocol" when 99% of the world's Dreamweaver/Frontpage users have no clue how any of it works anyway.

FTP is here to stay for a lot longer (despite no-one in the know enjoying this idea). So whilst we have to put up with it, we do need a good, widespread FTP honeypot system. It's a good bet that people like http://www.atomicorp.com would be interested in contributing to such a thing.

http://sshbl.org operates such a system for SSH brute force attacks. Perhaps it's worth asking them to extend their efforts?

Disclaimer: $dayjob supports them with a base VPS.

Exactly! Customers are far more understanding of downtime if they're promised improvements.

Dump the disks to a virtual image, virtualise the machines and then you can snapshot away to your hearts content. Be it via the virtualisation tech, or the host's file systems.

However, as already said, if you're still running 2.4 kernels, you're well over-due an upgrade/migration to newer software AND hardware environments. Why not combine both suggestions?

Understandably, uptime is really golden, but everyone understands that you have to upgrade and/or maintain systems at some point.

... A free and open-source way of playing them, without having to doctor the content on the disk (i.e. strip the DRM out) first.

A broken disk could most-likely complicate that idea somewhat.

...I'd always thought this was impossible with basic FDD tech. How wrong was I. :)

(AND I run Linux. I just haven't used an actual FDD with a mainstream distro since I switched. Kinda glad it's that way around, actually!)

I don't currently back up to a hard drive and stick it in my drawer... I back up important data to CD/DVD/.

Backing up to a HDD each time is expensive compared to the cost that a few discs should run to. The problem is that next-gen optical storage isn't cheap enough yet.

To be fair, it doesn't have to be BD. I'd take anything with better density, so long as it's relable.

But it was interesting to read the other replies to your post, about CD and DVD encoding. :)

I really wish they'd start investing in dragging the cost of next-generation media down. Blu-Ray is great if you ignore the DRM aspects.. Which for data backup renders it perfectly adequate.

Though I'd much rather see something with a little more than 50GB of storage... But then, if they spent their R&D money on perfecting/improving the multi-layer technology, we'd all be backing-up to n*25GB discs in no time.

Why waste all the research budget on ageing technology, when it takes a whole spindle of DVD-Rs to back-up my 2TB RAID array?