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Sander Rossel wrote: Most of my data is on an external HD, which I really hope never dies on me 
Be careful, electronical items that are not used for a longer period of time, and HDD's in particular, will fail. (Continual use is actually better for electronics than periods of disuse, - pretty much the same theory as for million mile taxi's.)
Unlike car engines though, electronics for some reason left disused will eventually just fail, and no: not sorta work or just drop a few sectors, it'll just not work at all, and unlike engines there's no flushing the oil and fuel line fixes.
So if you've stored a bunch of not very often used stuff, photo's, movies, music etc on an external HDD, and perhaps left that HDD in the cupboard for say a year or two (y'know, always meant to but never got round to lookin at it), there really is a high chance it's all gone. More so if there's a relatively wide temp and/or humidity range over the year(s). The pixies have bolted, the smoke is gone. (bin watching AvE & Hydraulic Press Channels on utupe.)
Best is if you have such drives, either do regular checks, or even easier/better (as someone else suggested) jam them in a NAS and leave them spinning.
As OG mentioned HDD's are cheap, set up the NAS to RAID so there's automagic redundant duplication; should a drive fail crush it and get a new one. What's a 4TB drive over there now? <100 euros? <50 on special? From new left spinning easily good for at least 3 years.
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I know, I know...
I actually use this HDD, so it's not gathering dust in a cupboard.
And it's also not really a back-up of my data (well, not all of it).
Man, I'm terrible at data 
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I'm pretty sure that original pressed CDs are what they were talking about when they said "100 years", not burned CD's, which I wouldn't expect to last as long.
I've got some music CD's I backed up in the 90's (so I had the copy in the car, not the original) that are still readable. Not tried with data ones: I transfered them to my RAID5 NAS ages ago.
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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I never heard anyone claim that home burned CDs would last for a hundred years.
I was so excited about CDs that I started buying discs about a year before I could affort a player (I was a student at that time), and had a friend copy them to CC for my use. When I finally got the money to buy a player, it cost something like USD 1400 (by the USD exchange rate of that time), but it was so cheap that it had only a 14 bit D/A converter.
I believe my oldest CDis from 1983, and it still plays fine. I do have a few discs from the first years where you can easily see that the sealing at the center hole is imperfect; stains of oxidizing are growing within the plastic. Those do not play well any more, but I did manage to save them to hard disk: I learned that CD/DVD units for PC vary greatly in their ability to read bad discs.
I have recently copied my entire collection of CDs to the harddisk - which saves me hours and hours searching my shelves for that one altenate recording of a given piece 
HiFi freaks, don't read the following: I also keep them on the hard disk in AAC HE format - I consider my physical CDs sufficient backup of for the uncompressed quality. (But considering the amount of work re-ripping 1000+ CDs and 600+ vinyl records in case my music HD is ruined, so I do have a copy of my music collection at the office as well!) For my 600+ digitized vinyls / CCs / recordings from the radio, I have kept the raw digitization before noise removal in uncompressed format, but the processed (noise reduced) copy I have for listening is in AAC HE format.
The problem with long time archival storage that I fear the most: I can make a backup of my 4TB audio disk (still less than half filled) in a single command. But fifty years from now, can I be sure that there is a player available for WMA files? For Monkey/Ape? ATRAC? RealAudio? au files? (and two dozen other formats) Can I be sure that the container format is known and dechipherable?
True enough: Files in all these strange formats were not created from CDs (at least not directly from one in my shelf). During the nineties, sound files you downloaded from the Internet could be in any of a great multitude of formats. For now, I have players for all the formats in my sound archive (some of the players are DOS applications!), so there is not a big problem. Yet. Not as long as PCs and Windows are around. For documents - mainly text, but also embedded figures - the problem is far more developed: I have got old documents in several formats for which I have only a hardcopy printout available, along with the file that noone can interpret. For some, I probably could still find readers / converters. For others I could not, especially pre-Windows formats, and even more for pre-PC/Intel formats: Editors were proprietary software on proprietary hardware architectures obsoleted twenty or thirty years ago. I suspect that lots of audio files will be in the same situation a few years from now: When people drop PCs, lots of the old sound files are lost, because the player is.
Then: I hear a loud "Who cares??" from the young generation. I haven't met one person below 35 who really cares for preserving old sound recordings, old photos, old movies. I have prepared some sound files (private recordings) and offered to children of those performing, and been told that "My mother loved it" - but that's where it went. The next generation didn't care at all. Not even for recordings of their own performances or activities. "I don't need that, I was there and know how it was!" (that's an actual quote). Noone asks grandma to tell from the old days, show the old photo and wants to see the old Super-8 movies or listen to the open-reel tapes from when daddy was a boy.
So if recordings are lost: It really doesn't matter. The only ones who might care are the professional historians. And very few common people have any concern for their work.
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Member 7989122 wrote: The problem with long time archival storage that I fear the most: I can make a backup of my 4TB audio disk (still less than half filled) in a single command. But fifty years from now, can I be sure that there is a player available for WMA files? For Monkey/Ape? ATRAC? RealAudio? au files? (and two dozen other formats) Can I be sure that the container format is known and dechipherable?
The solution to that is pretty simple: If you have audio in some file format that's going out of favor, then surely, there's a converter--there's already tons of them for everything under the sun, including lossless formats that won't make any conversion any worse than the original. I have to assume you don't let important data sit around for decades at a time...otherwise you end up with the situation you describe. But, I'm not worried about that.
I'm totally with you regarding the "Who cares generation". They already don't care about the quality of the audio they listen to right now...much less about older recordings...
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dandy72 wrote: CDs will last 100 years
CD's will, or at least if one is being responsible the plastic will be
...and just for you: recycled into IOT clothes pegs - still 'around' even if not so much 'round.'
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I remember from Tomorrow World (remember that UK CPians of a certain age!) the infamous CD's last forever and are hard (?) to damage the guy (can't think of his name) went over a CD with tomato sauce, scratched it, covered it in Jam, used the phrase 'Now, do you think this will play ?' turned it over and it played! now that always made a dubious, I could (and did) do that to old '78 LPs and they worked!. I have discovered really old audio CD's not working & CD Singles giving out over the years, with a 'tea' like stain under the glaze...
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Yes, those stains indicate poor production quality, imperfect sealing. For all but one of my CDs with that kind of problems, I managed to rip all the tracks to HD before it was too late (it develops gradually). If it can't play in one CD player, try another one. They vary greatly in their abilty to read such disks.
For 78s: As you didn't break them into pieces, they were rather robust. The vinyl records were terribly tender. Sometimes you could "play" them, sort of, after mistreating them, but the cracks and pops could be terrible, and the pickup might skip a track (a litte less than 2 secs), or jump back to play the same 2 secs again and again.
If you knew how to ruin a CD by scratching, you could fairly easily do it (scratch it along the tracks, not radially from the hole to the rim). Vinyls you had to learn how to properly handle. You never knew how much that is learned until you see young people handling vinyls, and you want to jump up and scream: You can't hold it that way! Be careful! (That also goes for lowering the pickup on the disc.) That fully proves that they have not learnt it. And you realize how much more robus the CDs are, even though it is possible to break them. CDs you have to learn to break; vinyls you had to learn not to break.
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Must be an age/environment thing with the 78's the ones we got from my Grandad (not the one who taught me corruption of rhymes) all seemed to have developed 'cracks' in them... the Vinyls all were dusty & scratched... Were 78's susceptible to damp?
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Member 7989122 wrote: CDs you have to learn to break
Nah, you just have to roll your chair over one as you're looking for it after it's fallen on the floor. 
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Any recommendations?
We usually go with Godaddy or Hostgator (Excluding cloud providers i.e Azure/AWS)
But I see other brands like:
A2Hosting
FastComet
DreamHost
Hostinger
Are these mushroom companies that open and shut down for their convenience?
I'm not able to trust online reviews, as most of them are paid & cooked.
A2Hosting looks attractive, but I'm not sure how well they do.
It would be truly helpful if you share your experience/Feedback. thanks
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I've used DigitalOcean: Cloud Computing, Simplicity at Scale in the past and was impressed -- easy to set up, fast, inexpensive, etc.
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Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
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Yeah DigitalOcean is very good.
But some customers specifically ask for cPanel. Particularly the old customers who cannot adapt to any new management dashboard UI. I guess Digital Ocean doesnt have cPanel option.
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all much of a muchness, all offer same thing but trying to be 5c cheaper than the other guy (and the extra discount if scroll down to end of the page.)
I found the most important thing to check was the price after the first 1/2/3 years -
most of the cheap ones can rise a few hundred percent and it's only say 2 years years later when the renewal invoice comes that you realise it's time to move again and again and again.
I gave up trying to save that extra dollar per month or get the extra 5 GB of storage etc, rather chose on:
1. been around a good number of years,
2. has a good enough rep (user comments - those "top 10" lists are ALL sponsored crap),
3. has a price that will stay pretty much the same 2-3 years later.
of course when checking user reviews there are fake / paid reviews: negative about the competition and good ones about themselves - not all are fake but most of those light on detail...
check the 2, 3 and 4 star comments, if there's many more 4's than 2's and the 3 stars mostly complain about something that won't ever affect you then usually it'll usually be OK.
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And godaddy says SSL is free for 1st year. & From next year, the cost of an SSL certificate is equal to the cost of the plan.  
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I feel FastComet is more straight forward with features & pricing, without any traps here and there.
Godaddy is the worst kind. They keep trapping money in every possible way.
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Never used it personally, but IIRC a few of the web comics I read are on Dream Host; since most of them are very shoestring low budget operations that will go with whatever is the cheapest hosting that gives them decent performance (generally by working their way up the cost ladder from cheaper "unlimited" plans that use a shared server so overloaded that if you have more than 5 page requests/hour you get throttled for high use) I assume their entry levelish plans are decent quality for the money.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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So I have to write a new extension for VS, which means I have to deal with WPF... DataGrid in this case...
Why's that WPF, that came to life to replace the ugly WinForms, is so ugly?
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge". Stephen Hawking, 1942- 2018
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I know what you mean ... it's like they had a good idea but it never really got finished. With a good intelligent design UI it could have been so good. As it is it's too clumsy and just feels unfinished to develop in. Pity.
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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OriginalGriff wrote: just feels unfinished to develop in
You'll have similar feelings about UWP. Not a surprise since developing in WPF and UWP is so similar.
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Agreed. The framework incorporates some really great ideas and then falls flat in the implementation.
My biggest complaint (vs WinForm) is that the design UI completely sucks by comparison. In VS, with WinForm, everything is drag-and-drop / point-and-click. With WPF, I need to constantly resort to editing the XML. There is no reason it needs to be this way. They really need to either get a better UI team or give the team they already have time to fix it.
The other problem is the (effective) lack of immediate-mode graphics. I understand that for line-of-business apps this makes perfect sense. However, they should support a fall-back for graphic intensive applications. Try drawing and re-drawing a few thousand lines. Performance is fine in WinForm, but its frustratingly slow in WPF...even when you take advantage of all the WPF performance tweaks.
To solve this performance issue, we're left playing with 3rd party work-arounds...using writeable bitmaps. They work great. This means there is absolutely no reason, other than arrogance, that MS can't incorporate some of these concepts into WPF...in a better supported/more seamless fashion.
Also, provide better support for WinForm-style docking. Yes, I understand the other layouts are far more flexible and worth learning. I took the time. I still find them less intuitive. So, why punish WinForm developers making the transition? Keep the cool new layouts and add better support for docking layouts as well.
As it stands now, for me, WPF is an interesting toy for occasional play. I use it when I want some really flexible layouts...in line-of-business apps. Or, when a customer requests it. Or, when I play with UWP. Otherwise, I still use WinForm.
Its a real shame. I'd prefer to move full time to WPF, to ease the wear-and-tear switching back and forth causes on my poor brain. Come on MS...finish what you started!
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Eric Lynch wrote: I need to constantly resort to editing the XML
XAML - I was full time in WPF and have never used drag and drop to get controls on a view  I had forgotten how easy winforms UI layout is. Thankfully I have never been into graphics, purely LOB work and I still run up against performance issues.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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I've never used the UI designer, and do everything in XAML. Even Blend still scares the hell out of me to this day, and I'm a proficient WPF/XAML developer.
Writing XAML is no different to a web developer writing HTML - nobody uses drag'n'drop interfaces on that platform. Admittedly it's easier to see your changes by just pressing F5 in the open browser window, rather than have to run the app...
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I haven't done anything in WPF for a while so I'm not sure if it works the same there, but while starting my 1st UWP app a few months ago I discovered that I could live edit the xaml while the app was running and have UI changes show up immediately in the app. On the plus side, no need for that pesky Alt-F-S, Alt-Tab, F5 to see changes; on the minus at times VS would interrupt the live editing to complain that a half typed bit of markup was generating a parse error.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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