Quite the opposite. Use drives from as many different manufacturers as you can, especially when buying them at the same time. You want to avoid similar lifecycles and similar potential fabrication defects as much as possible, because those things increase the likelihood that they will fall close to each other - particularly with the stress of rebuilding the first one that failed.

The thing is, just like software subscriptions, you aren’t buying a piece of software, you’re buying the right to use it. You can be pretty sure that they have legalese in the eula that says that your right to use the software expires with non-use. I wouldn’t be surprised if they can even let it expire by simple deciding to no longer support it.

And what do you think will happen if their license servers ever go offline?

For the longest time I never bought anything digital, but I eventually caved to steam. I still blatantly refuse to join other digital platforms, except gog where I can download the software and it works without any remote server.

Same for music: I refuse to use Spotify. I buy from 7digital and the like, where I can download either mp3 or FLAC.

It’s like the Reddit comment section - if they only allowed civilized people in who actually know what they’re talking about 😁

I really appreciate that it’s not just one take, but several experts get their own summary, and bring their own concerns and interpretations to the front as well. That makes for a nuanced view in just a few paragraphs.

Thank you for this post, I’ve already bookmarked the link and I think this is the most useful post I’ve read this year 💜

Delicious 😁

A drink to his memory!

As if any spyware worth it’s salt didn’t install itself as service with an innocuous name. Something like “Facebook” or “TikTok”.

They should have just plain been disbarred. They were, de facto, lying in court.

Yep. The EU lawsuit forced them to. Also internet exploder is no longer a thing these days 🙂

It’s the MS part that bothers me. That it’s now exclusive is just one thing that makes them shit.

So in one post, you tell me there is finally going to be a new Indy game, AND that it’s going to be owned by MS…

I don’t like you, OP.

I can assure you, they were already fully aware of this. Why do you think they have been fighting tooth and nail to hide the worst effects of fossil fuels for decades?

It was until they shipped systemd. Bloody mess.

When has Microsoft ever done something other than unethical business practices to lock people in?

It does sound like that, but I’m not judging without having seen their content.

I’ve experienced similar things on Reddit in the past; most recently a downvote brigade swooping down on myself and another experience storage administrator in r/hoarders for suggesting things - out of considerable enterprise expertise - on how to make storage on consumer grade disks more reliable and more recoverable.

Mostly I just shrug and move on, though. I’m addressing the OP, not the screechers, and if OP saw the advice that’s all I wanted anyway.

This person seems to take more issue with it, but they’ve taken their own way forward.

You should actually be able to transfer and sell - that’s handled at the tld.

Also, there’s a lifetime to that cache, so if it’s down long enough it’ll become unreachable.

Your domain is “hosted” (in this context, the DNS entries, not the actual content) on one or, ideally, more DNS servers that are known as the authoritative servers for your domain. You can look those up by searching the SOA (start of authority) and NS (nameserver) records for it.

Downstream servers may keep those and other records in cache for a while, usually guided by the TTL (time to live) entry. Once that expires, however, they need to refresh the data from the authoritative servers.

When those are unreachable, that cannot do so, and your domain is de facto unreachable for the internet at large, regardless of your own server actually being up.

You can still reach them by surfing to the actual IP instead, and/or hardcoding the DNS name in your local hosts file or your local DNS server/resolver. That is, of course, not visible to the internet at large.

You could host your own DNS servers to mitigate somewhat, but keep in mind that every level above your domain also needs to know which server is authoritative - my tuxera.be used to be self hosted, so the .be root servers had to know what the SOA for tuxera was.

Honestly, it’s not something to worry about. I didn’t keep up with changes in DNS security, so i switched to route53 (Amazon). I’ve been considering switching again to hetzner.de where i have some servers anyway.

DNS is pretty lightweight (relatively speaking), so it’s probably the last thing to go down if a registrar is in trouble; you’d have plenty of warning signs beforehand.

(Yes, for pedantry, technically a registrar doesn’t even have to offer DNS at all, they just handle ownership and administration at the top level domain, but most do anyway)