On the End of the Space Shuttle

Image from National Geographic

Earlier this week, the shuttle Discovery’s lifted off for the last time. Hopefully it will return safely to Earth on March 7th, and after that it will probably end up in a museum somewhere. The end of its flight will mark the effective end of the space shuttle program, and we don’t really have anything lined up to replace it.

Some people seem to think that this is a tragic loss for the United States. Personally, I don’t think the end of the shuttle program is such a horrible thing.

I’ll admit, I’m biased; my dad works for JPL, and JPL doesn’t really do any manned missions. That said, my opinions here are my own and should not be construed as his or anyone else’s but mine.

In order to ask why it’s bad that we’re losing the shuttles, we must first ask why we had the shuttles in the first place. Mainly, they’re for moving things from the ground into low-Earth orbit. Those things might be people, or satellites like the Hubble Space Telescope, or pieces of the International Space Station (ISS). People are usually along for the ride to help deploy the equipment aboard, or to put it together once they’re in microgravity, or do experiments and run tests either in the shuttle or aboard the ISS.

In my opinion, those satellites, that space station, those experiments and tests, are in the service of one overarching goal – to do good science. I don’t think that necessarily requires putting people in space, though.

This isn’t to discount the contributions of the manned space program; the fact that we’ve been able to keep people in space for long periods of time mere decades after first sending anyone into orbit is a remarkable testament to human achievement. We also know that, eventually, we’re going to have to leave the planet (if we wait long enough, after all, the sun is going to eventually burn out), and seeing how people react to time in space helps to figure out what challenges we’re going to face in our eventual exodus.

That said, it’s unclear how much of our unanswered questions can’t be answered on the ground. Suppose that the goal of the manned space program is to put a man on Mars. A successful manned mission to Mars depends on advances in materials science, propulsion technology, and the production of clean, plentiful energy, as well as studies of the psychological and physical effects of months of isolation with only your flight-mates for company. None of these things require shooting people into space. Asking what the loss of the shuttle fleet will do to our chances of getting to Mars first is like asking how your child’s first word will affect their chances of getting into college. It’s not even clear how we’ll get there yet, let alone when that’s going to happen. In all likelihood, any mission to Mars will have to be multi-national; it will simply be too expensive in terms of money and resources for any one country to handle alone.

If you’re worried about America’s supremacy in space, you shouldn’t worry all that much just yet. NASA remains the most advanced space program in the world. We paid for most of the ISS. We’ve got ground- and space-based telescopes and imagers and orbiters that have traveled to the outer edges of the solar system and explored the planets. We’ve got probes running around the surface of Mars. If the goal is to do good science, all these things are doing good science right now and in that respect, the US is second to none.

Next, let’s look at relative cost. According to nasa.gov, it costs about $450 million to launch a single space shuttle mission. The total budget for the shuttle program over its lifetime exceeds $160 billion. By contrast, the entire cost of the Mars Exploration Rovers – building, launching, landing and performing the primary mission – was $820 million (at least according to Wikipedia). The Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn cost the US about $2.6 billion for the whole package (again, Wikipedia). These missions have been doing good science for years for the cost of shooting humans into space for a matter of weeks.

Another criticism of the shuttle fleet’s retirement is that it will discourage young people in the United States from becoming scientists and engineers. I have an admittedly cynical view here.

When I was a kid, the shuttle program didn’t make me want to be an engineer. It made me want to be an astronaut. If you see a fighter jet streak by overhead and you’re 10, you don’t think “I want to build jet engines!”, you think “I want to fly jets!”  What cultivates a desire to become an engineer is an innate fascination with how things work and a strong desire to either understand why things work, or build things that work, or both. What got me excited about engineering as a kid was my dad showing me up-close pictures of Jupiter and Saturn and knowing that he helped build the thing that was out there, really far away, taking those pictures.

People who weren’t as fortunate as I was to grow up in an environment where interest in science and engineering is cultivated can face the cold hard truth – that so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) disciplines are where the money is and where the jobs are. In the current economic environment, that’s as much motivation as they’ll need if they’re even a little bit interested. Not that they should be solely motivated by money, but it’s a pretty good incentive.

If we’re only in the business of putting people into space for the sake of saying “America puts people into space all by ourselves, look how mighty we are”, without regard to why precisely we’re putting them there or what they expect to accomplish, we’re wasting our time and energy on a vanity project. In short, chill out – America is still doing stuff in space and we’re still doing good science. As long as our representatives in Washington understand that the space program isn’t just the space shuttle and don’t completely strip NASA of funding, that’s unlikely to change in the near term.

Backups Revisited Part 2

In this post, I’ll focus on the practical side of backups.

Last time, I asserted that in order for a backup to really be a backup, your data has to be automatically replicated on two different drives using two separate filesystems on two different computers that are geographically separated, and one of those backups needs to be able to go back in time by at least 24 hours.

Satisfying all of these criteria at once usually isn’t free, but it doesn’t have to be hard, and you’re probably closer to a workable solution than you think.

In this post, I’ll examine a few possible solutions and point out some non-obvious ones. This isn’t meant to be comprehensive, but rather serves to give a general flavor of the state of backup solutions.

Built-In Solutions

OS X’s Time Machine fits some of our criteria for backups, but falls short in others. You can back up to two different drives,  the filesystems are distinct, and you’re able to move the Time Machine drive back in time if needed. Backing up to other computers with Time Machine is possible, but it’s unsupported and not very reliable (at least in my experience).

Using a network-enabled USB drive or a Time Capsule is essentially equivalent to backing up to another computer (they’re practically little computers themselves), but that costs a good deal of additional money. Unless you really know what you’re doing and are willing to take the time to make it work (and keep it working), making remote backups work with the Time Capsule is not really feasible.

Although I’ve never used it personally, Windows 7′s Backup and Restore feature appears to be feature-for-feature equivalent to Time Machine, but without Apple’s high-gloss glittery front-end. If you have a Professional or above license, it can backup to network shares, which is an improvement over Time Machine but requires you to pay more for the OS itself, which is kind of a drag.

You can use rsync by itself on pretty much any platform or with any one of a plethora of (usually OS-specific) front-ends. rsync can push files to pretty much anywhere and it supports incremental backups, so you could definitely satisfy all your backup demands with rsync, although it would take a little bit of work to get everything set up.

Sneakernet

If you’ve got a USB drive and are willing to lug it back and forth, there’s a relatively inexpensive way to come pretty close to an optimal backup solution. If you leave your USB drive at work, take it home and do backups every Monday night and bring the drive back to work on Tuesday, you’ve got your bases mostly covered. The problem here, of course, is that you have to remember to take the drive home with you, your backup granularity is kind of coarse (if your drive dies, you lose at most a week’s worth of stuff), and there’s a small window of vulnerability when your USB drive is at home. You get geographic distance for free, though.

Enter the Cloud

There are several companies that have recently started to offer so-called “cloud backup” services that provide you with some amount of storage space to which you can back up. Notable companies in this space include Mozy, Backblaze and CrashPlan. With cloud backup services, you easily satisfy all of our desirable backup properties simultaneously (unless you happen to live next to one of their data centers, of course), but it will usually cost you and doing the initial backup over the wide-area Internet may take weeks or months. Most services will ship you an external hard drive to which you can do your initial backup, but you have to eat the cost of a hard drive (~$100-150) for the privilege of writing to the drive and mailing it right back.

In my opinion, the standout favorite contender in this space is CrashPlan for one simple reason – they allow two computers running CrashPlan to back up an unlimited amount of data to each other for free. So if you and your friend both want to run backups, you can back up to each other.

Unexpected Surprises

If you care about your photos, you’ll want them backed up. If you share your photos on a site like Facebook or Flickr, you’re most of the way to an ideal backup of those photos. The only major drawbacks here is that restoring your photos isn’t trivial (you have to re-download them, although there are applications that will help automate that process) and you might incur a loss in quality when the site scales your image down. If you don’t mind those things though, these are great inexpensive ways to backup.

“But what about our time travel requirement” you might ask? If you’re editing photos, you might care about reverting to a previous edit. Most of the time though, you take pictures, upload them and never modify them again. Static data like pictures or music, where individual items never change but the set of items is expected to grow larger, is easier to back up because as long as you never delete anything the time travel requirement isn’t necessary.

My Setup

I have three computers that I care about – my desktop, my laptop and my home theatre PC. My desktop has an OS X partition and a Windows 7 partition and my laptop runs Debian in a VM, so I need to back up five filesystems in total. The HTPC has external storage drives that hold movies and music.

I admit that I break my own rules a bit – the external media drive on the HTPC is a RAID 1 with no other backups. I know, scary right?

Every system runs CrashPlan, even the Linux VM on my laptop. All systems backup to two places. The first is an old external drive attached to the HTPC. The second is a workstation under my desk at UCSD. Since I had an extra drive lying around, my desktop’s OS X partition also runs a Time Machine backup on a second internal drive.

That about covers it. Next week, something not related to backups!

Backups Revisited

I can’t overstate the importance of doing backups. Your data is important, and it should be protected. For the next couple of posts, I’m going to do a deep dive into backup strategy and how the changing face of computing is changing the way we have to think – or in some cases not think – about backups.

Why bother with backups?

Simple: someday, your hard drive will die. Backups are not like insurance; what you are preparing for is not a hypothetical situation. This is where I start to sound like a jabbering paranoid, but trust me, it really sucks to lose data.

I wrote a post a couple of years ago that examined a couple of different ways to do backups. I’ve changed my opinions somewhat since then, so hopefully this adds something to the points raised in that post.

What is a backup, really?

It’s easier to define what a backup is by defining what a backup isn’t.

I should preface this by saying that anything is better than nothing.  You may not be able to feasibly satisfy a backup by my definition for all of your data, but the more of these points you’re able to hit, the better off you’ll be. With every layer of protection you put in place, the probability of losing data goes down. It never quite goes to zero, but it gets pretty close.

Your data is not truly backed up if:

• Your data isn’t stored on two different drives.
• Your data isn’t stored on two different file systems.
• Your data isn’t stored in two different computers.
• Your data isn’t stored in two geographically distant locations.
• Your data isn’t duplicated automatically.
• You can’t make at least one of the copies go back in time.

Two different drives is a no-brainer: if a hard drive fails, the data on that drive is probably gone forever. Putting your data on two different drives allows your data to survive the failure of one of them.

I say “probably gone forever” because I’m purposefully ignoring filesystem-level recovery systems like Norton Ghost and drive-level recovery services like Disk Doctors. I’m doing this because they cost lots of money and time and are not necessarily guaranteed to work.

Storing your data on two different file systems protects again stupid mistakes and computer compromise. If someone logs into your computer and deletes your data or a software bug hoses your file system, even if that data was stored on a RAID 1 array, it’s gone. It’s better to treat a RAID 1 array as a really robust single drive rather than as a complete backup solution by itself.

Storing your data on two different computers is an extension of the same protective strategy. If someone logs in to one computer and deletes data on all the drives on that computer, that data is gone unless it was stored somewhere else. Similarly (and somewhat more commonly) if your power supply goes kaboom and melts your computer and all the copies of that data are inside that one computer, that data is gone.

If you only go this far, you’re pretty well-protected against the loss of a single drive or a single machine. The next layer of protection, backing up in multiple places that are separated by distance, protects you against catastrophe, i.e. your house is destroyed or you get robbed.

If you’ve gotten this far and are diligent, the only things that are likely to kill your data are a major natural disaster or lots of different things failing at once.

The next point, automatic backup, is really a question of convenience. Personally, I don’t want to spend all day babysitting different copies of my data. You should find a backup solution that works automatically and reliably in the background and, more importantly, tells you quickly when it’s not working. The whole situation falls apart if you think you’re doing backups but you’re not.

The last point, time travel, is something that I think a lot of people overlook. If you do something stupid like delete data that you didn’t want to delete accidentally, it’s possible that the automatic backup system you’ve got in place will back up your mistakes and delete the backed-up copies of the data as well. Going back to an arbitrary past copy of your data isn’t really all that necessary in my opinion, but you should at least be able to go back in time 24 hours. Most backup systems allow you to do this, at least to some degree.

Paranoia In Action

Next time, I’ll give some practical examples, differentiate static data from dynamic data, and show how your data is probably easier to back up than you think.

Getting Rid of Old Tech

Lately, I have become the middleman for my parents’ old technology. They took their recent remodel as an opportunity to get rid of some things that they didn’t use anymore. Cameras (both still and video), DVD players, stereo equipment, iPods and computers – most of it between 5 and 15 years old – came to rest on the floor of my apartment. Some of it, I ended up using myself; speakers, for example, don’t ever really become obsolete. The rest of it couldn’t just sit in my apartment forever, so it had to go.

One of the big ways that I’ve been able to sell some of this old tech without a lot of hassle is by using tech resellers like Gazelle and BuyMyTronics. Sites like these will buy your old tech for a price based on their estimates of its resale value, its condition, how many accessories you still have, and so on. They then turn around and sell these products, either for parts or as a whole unit depending on its condition, to third parties. Sometimes they’ll send you a box to ship your stuff in, but they’ll always provide a pre-paid shipping label so you don’t have to pay to ship it. This cuts out much of the hassle associated with sites like eBay; just fill out a form, print a packing slip, put your stuff in a box and ship it. A week or two later, you’ve got a check in the mail.

One drawback with sites like Gazelle is that they won’t always take older items and you’ll probably get a little less for it than you would had you sold it on eBay or Craigslist. For stuff that resellers won’t take, I usually turn to friends and co-workers next. If Gazelle deems an item worthless, I’ll either give it to a friend who wants it or sell it for a few bucks to someone I work with. I really prefer staying within my immediate social graph this way to turning to something like Craigslist or eBay because, frankly, it filters out the crazy people.

I once had a winning bidder on eBay ask that I pack her item in a box and pack that box in a larger box “because the mailman steps on our boxes and that’s the only way it will arrive intact”. Seriously? If this is true, your mailman is a jerk. The facts that most of these e-mails WERE WRITTEN WITH THE CAPS-LOCK KEY ON did not help my confidence at all.

I’ve had multiple Craigslist ads yield nothing but phishing e-mails and missed “I’ll pick it up tomorrow at X” appointments. I’d much rather handle getting rid of this stuff on my timetable, and am always kind of apprehensive about giving my address and phone number to a total stranger. I could exchange money with these people in neutral locations but that somehow seems even weirder; I’m selling an iPod, not making a drug deal. When given the choice between eBay (and its cut of my profits) and Craigslist, I’ll almost always choose eBay for reasons like those.

My final avenue for getting rid of old electronics is donating them. Usually, this happens to really old, but still usable, computers. Sometimes (like if you’re trying to get rid of CRT monitors) donation sites simply won’t take them. At that point, I usually bring stuff to the local e-waste recycling center. I think it’s important that old electronics are responsibly recycled, so I try to use reputable e-waste recyclers whenever possible.

Bottom line: if you’ve got old tech to get rid of, your friends might be able to get more life out of it. If not, you can probably make more money from it than you think. If you can’t, please don’t just throw it away.