Of course people understand that.

IMHO it is important to see which context people are coming from. Different culture, social acceptance, historic treatment options, etc. influence the response.

Also, dementia is not the only disease with a strong degenerative impact on character and behaviour e.g there is schizophrenia et al. What is common with many of these conditions that there is a strong individual component of progression and morbidity.

It is great that you have the option to make a choice for yourself. Others might decide to make other choices.

I had to check for data integrity due to a recent system switch, and was surprised not to find any bitrot after 4y+.

It took ages to compute and verify those hashes between different disks. Certainly an inconvenience.

I am not sure a NAS is really the right solution for smaller data sets. An SSD for quick hashing and a set of N hashed cold storage HDDs - N depends on your appetite for risk - will do.

I've hosted my own data for twenty something years - and bitrot occurs but it is basically caused by two things.

1) Randomness <- this is rare 2) HW-failures <- much more common

So if you catch hw-failures early you can live a long life with very little bitrot... Little =! none so zfs is really great.

Don’t get me wrong: IMHO a ZFS mirror setup sounds very tempting, but its strength lie in active data storage. Due to the rarity of bitrot I would argue it can be replaced with manual file hashing (and replacing, if needed) and used in cold storage mode for months.

What worries me more than bitrot is that consumer disks (with enclosure, SWR) do not give access to SMART values over USB via smartctl. Disk failures are real and have strong impact on available data redundancy.

Data storage activities are an exercise in paranoia management: What is truly critical data, what can be replaced, what are the failure points in my strategy?

There's no worse backup system than that which is sufficiently-tedious and complex that it never gets used, except maybe the one that is so poorly documented that it cannot be used.

With ZFS, the hashing happens at every write and the checking happens at every read. It's a built-in. (Sure, it's possible to re-implement the features of ZFS, but why bother? It exists, it works, and it's documented.)

Paranoia? Absolutely. If the disk can't be trusted (as it clearly cannot be -- the only certainty with a hard drive is that it must fail), then how can it be trusted to self-report that it is has issues? ZFS catches problems that the disks (themselves inscrutable black boxes) may or may not ever make mention of.

But even then: Anecdotally, I've got a couple of permanently-USB-connected drives attached to the system I'm writing this on. One is a WD Elements drive that I bought a few years ago, and the other is a rather old, small Intel SSD that I use as scratch space with a boring literally-off-the-shelf-at-best-buy USB-SATA adapter.

And they each report a bevy of stats with smartctl, if a person's paranoia steers them to look that way. SMART seems to work just fine with them.

(Perhaps-amusingly, according to SMART-reported stats, I've stuffed many, many terabytes through those devices. The Intel SSD in particular is at ~95TBW. There's a popular notion that using USB like this sure to bring forth Ghostbusters-level mass hysteria, especially in conjunction with such filesystems as ZFS. But because of ZFS, I can say with reasonable certainty that neither drive has ever produced a single data error. The whole contrivance is therefore verified to work just fine [for now, of course]. I would have a lot less certainty of that status if I were using a more-common filesystem.)

I agree about manual file hashing. For data that rarely changes it also has some benefits.

Some time ago, I ended up writing a couple of scripts for managing that kind of checksum files: https://github.com/kalaksi/checksumfile-tools

I did not look toe matter up in detail, but I am astonished as well in regard to this development. A grab for control over basic devices and a mass robbing of the commons.

There is no strong political pushback from the parties/voters to this large scale collective theft of IP by cooperations, is there?

I would expect some sort of taxation and redistribution to the content creators like there is with music content etc.

Absolutely. Healthy Competition helps to spur innovation and value value provided to the customer.

Seconded.

Regretably, the Boox Note Max or Remarkable might be a better choice than any Fujitsu reader. I am on my second device from Fujitsu and I will not purchase another one.

Like the Sony DPT readers, the Quaderno is would be great product ... however,

1. there is no customer service in the EU/US markets. Something broke? Bin it. 2. the devices are quite fragile, with poor longevity. 3. the closed source software does not support modern systems such as Apple's M4 Macbook series.

Disclaimer:

Thanks for your input!

Since you are from this domain:

1. Why will they master it? Because they dedicate their industrial strategy and hence resources to it like they did in the other technological domains and flood the market?

2. Is the only way out a strict decoupling from the Chinese market in these domains? Or would it be a strategy that involves protecting domestic industries with other levers?

1. Why is because making advanced chips is an engineering problem, not magic. It's about motivation, resources and time. China as all three. 2. If we don't want to rely on China for critical technology we need to focus on our own values and education, which will take generations to realize. But that's what China did, so it's not impossible. Industrial and financial policy are useless if you don't have the cultural and intellectual inclination towards self-sufficiency.

Thanks for your reply.

I understand that advanced chip making has been done, and is an engineering problem. By generations I assume you mean cohorts.

However, one must not forget the subsidy lever China is using to distort competitive advantage on a financial level. As long as we do not level the playing field in a strategic sense, we will loose on the market long term.

That - and there is the perspective of WW2 as change of guard of dominating world power.

The Empire bit the dust, Europe ruined - and the US and CSSR divided the world upon themselves.

It is not narrative for us to hear, as there have been many sacrifice that came to liberation of Europe. It is much easier to see them trough less less of the good guys, the liberators. But there are many sides to history: it also was a change of guard in the strategic geopolitical sense… and even after WW2, the US did a lot to accelerate the Empire’s demise …

It is. Germany had to invest heavily in airport infrastructure and security.

One strong reason why Germany got a batch of F-35 instead of the very capable and EU manufactured Typhoon is the fact that the F-35 is certified to carry nuclear bombs, and the Typhoon need certification for this particular mission capability. (The ordonance in this case is US tech).

Source: Luftwaffe

This is very common for export variants of a high end military products.