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Akeeba Backup for Joomla!

#27859 bits vs Bytes

Posted in ‘Akeeba Backup for Joomla! 4 & 5’
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Environment Information

Joomla! version
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PHP version
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Akeeba Backup version
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Latest post by nicholas on Wednesday, 24 May 2017 06:51 CDT

Takties
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Description of my issue: Bite vs Bytes

I hate to start this rant though, but I can't take it any longer :)

To start off, this probably bothers no one except me and I find that really strange actually. From where i come from, the random use of MB and Mb (MegaBytes vs Megabits / factor of 8 difference) is something to not fool around with. It's bothering me for quite a while now, especially when this is about serious software that should do it right!

Even this screen right now! The line on top of this message says "If the file is over 2Mb" , ok you mean over 0,25MB ? (probably not) , below this message i can add a file with a maximum size of 10MB? - > hey now we are talking about Megabytes? Confusion to the max since my head automatically converts these numbers.

On the configuration tab of akeeba backup everywhere we see Mb instead of MB. I seriously hope this will change in the future.

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
We expect that users of our software have the common sense to understand that we ask them to declare the sizes of files in Megabytes (1048576 bytes), not Megabits (1048576 bits or 131072 bytes or 128 Kilobytes or 0.125 Megabytes). Now why you would think that we'd ask you to declare file sizes in Megabits is still beyond me but I assure you that this is not the case.

Also remember that different countries use different conventions. MB for you means 1048576 bytes but to a French guy it means 1000000 bytes (in their case we'd have to use MiB). To AVOID this confusion the past ten years we are using Mb instead of the original string of MB.

This will not change in the future. To avoid tickets like that I'd have to ask you to declare file sizes in "Megabytes, i.e. 1048576 bytes or 8388608 bits" which, in itself, causes major display issues especially in smaller displays. Or I can just expect my clients to use common sense. I think I'll stick with the latter ;)

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

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