This is, to put it mildly, utter bullshit.
You can store a decade of email for a million people—call it 10-20Gb each—in a 10-20Pb storage array that costs under £1M per year (and is constantly getting cheaper). 10 year old emails are *cold* storage: drives not even spinning most of the time: you only really need 5-10% of it available on demand.
The environment agency are gaslighting us. One wonders who put them up to it?
https://social.lol/@robb/115016579150112511
I asked earlier for ideas on how many emails I need to delete to save one litre of water.
Might be useful to know 😉🤷♂️
"don't want to delete those emails and photos to save water? no problem, upgrade your Google Account for a premium and you can save all those precious moments in our state of the art energy and cooling efficient data centres"
It’s even worse than that. Old emails will be cool storage. Cloud providers are really power efficient for this. But when you delete things, that invokes doing a load of compute, which consumes power.
I doubt it’s intentional gaslighting though. It’s far more likely to be ignorance.
If everyone installed an adblocker then that would save a lot of electricity and eventually water, but I notice that wasn't suggested...!
"How companies blame you for climate change"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20220504-why-the-wrong-people-are-blamed-for-climate-change
A lot of this stuff is symbolic without actually doing the maths about what works.
It's also about shifting responsibility to the individual.
Building new reservoirs would be more efficient than water butts.
Data centres use evaporative cooling because it's cheaper to use tonnes of potable water to cool stuff than to run a refrigeration loop at that scale. But not a lot cheaper, not really. Tax the use of potable water for cooling and data centres will switch, rapidly, to non-evaporative cooling.
At a former workplace, I was investigated and reprimanded for misuse of email.*
Because I had 4 emails other people had sent me. Emails that were jokes, not work-related.
My alleged crime? I had read the 4 emails, and then I hadn't deleted them. So I was wasting resources. Email storage costs!
*I was actually investigated because my supervisor complained to the director that a manager was bullying us. So the director decided investigating the victims was not a waste of resources.
It got the "electronic systems" on the list but under the radar of the functionaries and politicians who are heavily invested in crypto currencies and AI
Maybe they asked an AI ..
i like to think i did my part by rejecting the additional cookies 🙃
Still, using 35 TB drives, you could have a 8 disk NAS with storage capacity in excess of 200 TB and have it be double fault protected against failures. That would get you up to 10k+ users at 20 GB quota each.
That's not strictly true.
Long term storage of email data is not Byte per Byte cost.
First, you want to make the data redundant, that's usually x3 for raid 5
Second you need some sort of offline backup schema.
Third, you probably have ability for live backups, a beefy SAN with fibre backbone.
Fourth, all that kit is connected via high speed networking that's always powered.
Fifth, if you want any degree of reliability and scalability, you are not running a single server with single raid. You're running multiple racks.
And the cherry on top, all that shit is in a computer room that runs at constant 20C and shuts down after 30minutes of AC failure.
No infrastructure email is kept on a single NAS.
Also, how exactly does watering plants with kitchen water use any less water than using any other tap? Are they talking about garden hoses for full lawn-sized gardens? Because that's giving some real Marie Antoinette vibes.
To say nothing of millions of people out looking for emails to delete.
And your old emails? You could throw 8, 10, 16TB up there and they're all consuming ZERO power. Not 'negligible.' ZERO.
Because you simply can't operate at that scale and keep everything on all the time. Just failure rate ALONE.
So all those infrequently accessed blocks get moved to disks that sit there turned fully off for weeks, months, *years* at a time until someone accesses them.
They’re using it as an argument for adding functionality to email to allow senders to delete mail they’ve sent you out of your mailbox.
They say that nobody would _ever_ use that to destroy commitments or contracts or anything else inconvenient.
Mmm. But the point surely is that is costs actual electricity now to delete something from a disc catalogue and more to secure-wipe the data, but it costs no electricity to keep it unchanged. Though it does to migrate data to new RAID volumes or between servers, eventually. I don't know if anyone has typical figures for the comparison.
Not only that, but in milder climes aka NW Scotland you can run your own server and help heat & dry your house thereby, using only a couple solar panels.
-- Though personally I have always stuck to local storage with POP accounts for email, and only load lower-res images to my webserver. (On the whole I'd rather not run a public server on my own IP.) I only need to switch a RAID backup box on when needed.
I think the LLM mind parasites have gotten to them
If not already I guess they'll be announcing savings by replacing experts with AI soon?
It is, I repeat, gaslighting.
