> Then guess what - people stop using those websites.
Wishful thinking. Sadly, the vast majority of people will be perfectly OK with a website telling them they have to use a recent iPhone or Play-enabled Android phone to do something. This is already the case for banking apps and a huge number of other phone-app-only services.
It's not wild at all. It's just behaving like any other MUA but with an extra step. You have to give GMail your SMTP submission credentials for the sending server of the target domain, then prove ownership of the specific address you want to send as. SPF/DKIM/DMARC works fine, as GMail is just submitting your message on your behalf the way any MUA would.
It is useful for anyone who has a personal domain from which they'd like to send/receive without needing to migrate off Google entirely. My registrar gives a few email addresses with SMTP support. Then I use GMail's send-as to remain in gmail but still use my name@mydomain.com mailbox.
We are a small web development company. I'd say that about 20% of our clients used this feature because gmail WAS their email client. They did't want to use a device-based mail client.
I am happy we will no longer have to support this. Losing the POP access a couple years ago got about half of them to move, and this will kill it off.
To be honest, it seems rather silly to go this deep into probability calculations when your N = 4 (hard drives). I can present numerous wildly-differing anecdotes about how single hard drives I have owned have fared. I have some drives that are 20 years old that still apparently work fine. I've had brand new drives silently corrupt sectors after less than a year in use. Trying to put hard numbers to the probability of failures is a fool's errand. Better to simply assume that components will fail over time, and architect your system to handle those failures gracefully.
That said, I actually agree with much of the final architecture decisions made by the author. BTRFS raid1 with an offsite copy in a geographically distant area is a pretty good solution for the average person's personal documents. Possible improvements would be:
- Multiple offsite copies in different locations
- Hardware diversity (differing models of HDD, host PC, power supplies, etc.)
- Staggered hardware upgrades on a 5-10 year cycle
oh it's definitely a bit absurd, but i felt i needed a workout.... hence this post. multiple sites, hardware diversity, staggered upgrades, cold storage, are all really good ways to improve this, as they pull failure events closer to independence
Life expectancy really depends on how the hardware gets used. I run a small fleet of servers that are heavily CPU / GPU loaded, and the most frequent hardware failure I see is power supplies, with RAM as #2 and spinning HDDs as #3. Each of these (on enterprise-grade gear) has some amount of reporting / monitoring, but it's rarely the case that I get any advance warning before a failure. The RAM is probably the nicest, as it sometimes starts with correctable ECC warnings. Nearly all of the PSU failures have been sudden deaths, with the only saving grace being N+1 redundant supplies usually keeping the victim server alive.
Wishful thinking. Sadly, the vast majority of people will be perfectly OK with a website telling them they have to use a recent iPhone or Play-enabled Android phone to do something. This is already the case for banking apps and a huge number of other phone-app-only services.
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