Saving a file "in the background" -- How?

[Steven D'Aprano]

Chris Angelico wrote:

> Sounds like a lot of hassle, and a lot of things that could be done
> wrongly. Personally, if I need that level of reliability and
> atomicity, I'd rather push the whole question down to a lower level:
> maybe commit something to a git repository and push it to a remote
> server, 

How is pushing something to a remote server more reliable than writing to a
local drive?

> or use a PostgreSQL database, or something of that sort. Let 
> someone else have the headaches about "what if AV opens the file". Let
> someone else worry about how to cope with power failures at arbitrary
> points in the code. 

That "someone else" is still you though. And "use a PostgreSQL database" is
no solution to the problem "how do I reliably write a 250MB video file?".

Or for that matter, a 2KB text file. Databases are great as databases, but
they aren't files.

> (Though, to be fair, using git for this doesn't 
> fully automate failure handling; what it does is allow you to detect
> issues on startup, and either roll back ("git checkout -f") or apply
> ("git commit -a") if it looks okay.)

I don't see how this sort of manual handling is less trouble than using a
proper, reliable save routine. To start with, what do you mean "detect
issues on startup" -- startup of what?


-- 
Steven