#data-integrity
82 episodes
#3790: Server Distro Showdown: BTRFS, ZFS & Pragmatic Picks
Why filesystem support often picks your distro — and what "support" actually means in practice.
#3782: Ezra the Scribe vs. Hardware Failure
What ancient text preservation teaches us about modern backup strategies that hardware redundancy can’t fix.
#3776: ZFS Mirroring: Why Your RAID Card Is the Weak Link
A hardware RAID card makes ZFS less safe. Here's why an HBA and a simple mirror are the real upgrade.
#3766: How Mossad Stole Iran's Nuclear Archive from a Warehouse
Inside the 2018 Mossad raid that seized Iran's nuclear archive from an air-gapped warehouse in Tehran.
#3748: Your Backup Is Probably Corrupted Right Now
How to catch ZFS pool degradation before your backup faithfully preserves garbage for weeks.
#3747: How to Pick an SSD That Won't Die in Your Home Server
ZFS degradation warnings are scary. Here's what to replace that drive with — and what spec numbers actually matter.
#3713: How a Real PI Manages Thousands of Photos
Phone camera rolls don't cut it. Here's how real PIs organize, tag, and store thousands of evidence photos per month.
#3644: What Criminologists Actually Do (It's Not CSI)
Criminology isn't detective training. It's a social science that studies why crime happens—and whether the system works.
#3466: Digital Archiving for Freelancers: Workflows & Risks
Why "keep everything forever" is more dangerous than "delete nothing" for small businesses.
#3399: Why Mail a Disc to Your In-Law?
Cloud backups are durable. Physical backups give you sovereignty. Here’s why both matter — and how M-Disc fits in.
#3324: How Companies Actually Measure Their Carbon Emissions
Spreadsheets, supplier calls, and accounting choices that can change your reported emissions by 10x.
#3223: Handcuffed to a Petabyte: Urgent Physical Data Transfer
When data moves faster by plane than fiber, couriers handcuff petabytes in reinforced cases across oceans.
#3217: When a Truck Beats the Internet: Shipping Data at Scale
Why FedEx sometimes beats fiber for moving massive datasets across the country.
#3179: Counting Lights to Measure Empty Skyscrapers
How researchers and citizens use window light counts to estimate real building occupancy.
#3033: 3,000 Episodes, 3 Copies: Is This Backup Setup Enough?
Three copies, two clouds, one NAS. But is this setup truly protecting 3,000 podcast episodes?
#3024: How to Incrementally Back Up Google Photos to Your NAS
Build a quarterly backup pipeline for Google Photos using the Library API, hash deduplication, and your NAS.
#2935: Notebooks vs Scripts: The Real Tradeoffs
Why data scientists love notebooks but engineers distrust them — and who's right.
#2923: Structured Outputs: Taming AI's Token Lottery
Why prompt engineering isn't enough to get consistent JSON from LLMs.
#2883: Correlation Beyond Pearson: 5 Techniques You Need
Pearson, Spearman, Kendall, partial, distance correlation — when to use each one and why most people stop too soon.
#2875: How Polls Actually Make Samples "Representative
The secret behind "representative samples" — and why the margin of error is just the beginning of the story.
#2854: What Our Analytics Dashboard Reveals About Hidden Audiences
Hilbert uncovers suspicious spikes in podcast data. Are they covert ops or just university students?
#2774: Open Data That Actually Works
The gap between open data promises and reality, and the rare cases where it actually changes policy.
#2694: When AI Agents Write Your Backup Scripts
Borg, Restic, and Kopia compared for whole-server incremental backups on Ubuntu Docker hosts.
#2556: The Weird Myths of Solid-State Storage
No moving parts, no sound waves — just electrons trapped in silicon. How solid-state drives actually work.