Motivation to Back Up: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 06-27-08

Hi, my name is Gavin Impett and I’m here to provide you with your weekly motivation to backup. I met Sallie just over a month ago at a Podcast Meetup. I’m starting a video kitty-match-making, used cat service, www.kittysingle.com for the San Francisco Animal Care and Control, Toni’s Kitty Rescue ,and anyone else who’s willing to show me their, ahem…adoptable—meaning ready for love—cat.

This had the immediate effect of bringing my current web host to its knees, and I decided to find a new host, which meant I needed to not only find the “back up site” button on my cpanel, but also learn how to use it, since I’m packing up and moving on.

So I sent Sallie and email to Sallie, saying more or less, “Here I am, dutifully backing up my site. Golly, I wonder what this ‘destroy all data button’ does. I wonder if anyone I know knows anything about backing-up and stuff. You wouldn’t have any thoughts on that backing-up subject, would you Sallie? Help me, for the love of god, I’m on my knees here.” To which Sallie replied, “Hey, I have an idea: you could write this week’s reminder.” Maybe I was too subtle.

Fair enough and as it turns out, I am uniquely qualified on the subject of backing up. Some years ago, I attended a Wilderness Medicine with my Physician girlfriend in the mountains above Aspen. (There’s nothing like listening at 9,000 feet to a lecture on the symptoms of altitude sickness, checking off the symptoms, and saying, “Yep that’s me, I got that. I can die up here! Rockin’!”)

An Army doctor gave us his lecture to the troops, on the subject of the differences between frostbite and trench-foot. He made a joke about his medical title and what the Army really thinks of its soldiers. My sweetie leaned over and explained, “He’s a veterinarian.”

“You don’t see trench-foot too much these days,” he said, “that’s why the war in the Falklands was so great. This guy was in a water-filled fox hole for a week. When we took his shoe off, his whole foot came off. Next slide please. Now if that doesn’t make you change your socks, nothing will.”

Let's just say, the photo left an impression. The reason I mention this seeming digression is it comes to the subject of backing up, I am uniquely qualified on this subject, not unlike the Army doc dealing with something now rare, but once common and responsible for the loss of millions.

I was one of the first human beings to own a computer. No, not the Atari, but the now long-forgotten Apple IIc. When the San Francisco Museum of Modern art had a display on ancient computers, my IIc was older than anything on display. I remember laughing at people who wanted common monitors for their computers and attended the very first computer art class offered at San Francisco State University. While every other student was figuring out how to make squiggly lines move in random patterns in the class, I attempted to see if it was possible to write a short story on one of these computer things. With AppleWorks, you could write about 400 words before the Apple IIe ran out of ram.

In those days, you had to save the file to a floppy—a real floppy, mind you—and if you were smart, you backed up to a second floppy that you stored next to the original so it wouldn’t get lost (not so smart). Then someone pointed me to AppleWriter, which allowed me to have a forty-page file, and life was good. So I wrote, backed-up, tried to remember which was the original, which was the back-up, and so on. One great happy adventure, except when the power went out, or I hit the magic delete-the-only-record-of-these-forty-pages button, which happened on more than one occasion.

Since those happy, innocent days of floppies, I have learned the obsessive joy of backing-up to 5.25 disks, CDs, DVDs, MyBook. My current jones is for a Blu-Ray (50 gig a disk!) burner.

My obsession for back-up stems from the two simple facts. First, I can no longer have printed copies of everything. Video, photos, blogs, websites, are not printable in any functional way. Many of my files can now only exist on hard drives and servers.

The second reason dates back to when it was time to move on from my trusty IIc, which if you held the conversion box just right, could still print to the old dot-matrix. I needed a better quality printer and it was time. So I printed everything I had written on the IIc, walked into the Apple Store, money in hand, and asked a fateful question. “Mac supports IIc files, right? I will be able to convert these files over, right? Apple makes both products, right?”

So I walked out of the store, bought a PC and haven’t looked back. In fairness to Apple, many of their support people and Mac aficionados everywhere have assured me over the years that it is possible to convert IIc files to the Mac format. In my defense, I will say, no one I have ever spoken to or contacted on this subject has actually attempted or managed to accomplish this task. Apparently, the necessary hardware is stored in a secret mountain village in the Himalayas that appears only every eighty years or so, because next to Apple’s file conversion secret is the secret to eternal life and world peace and 90 per cent of the world’s computer users just aren’t worthy.

Now if the next slide doesn’t make you back up your files to a usable format, nothing will.

Technorati Tags: KittySingle,Apple IIc,file conversion

Putting the Humor Back in Backups: FileSlinger(TM) Backup Reminder 05-23-08

Is this the late-late-early show or the early-early-late show? Looking at my calendar and asking myself what the chances are that I'll manage to write a second column by Friday (when I have to get up at 4:30 AM to get ready for the BACN meeting at 7:30 AM), I decided just to post-date this and send it out now.

Last week TechTarget sent me a link to an “e-zine.” I don't know why they called it that; there's no sign that you can subscribe and get new issues. It's essentially a white paper and probably the reason I got a phone call and an e-mail message from a hapless salesperson at ASEMPRA whose marketing department doesn't know enough to put a “Don't contact me” checkbox on its download forms.

Anyway, the white paper is called “New Tools for Better Backups,” and, like most white papers, it focuses on enterprise technology: deduplication, storage resource management, VM (that's Virtual Machine) Backups. The kind of thing that gives most of the folks who read this blog a serious case of My Eyes Glaze Over.

But in the midst of these articles was a full-page ad for the latest installment from the Backup Trauma Institute:

“Are you looking to gain control of your company's digital information?

“Or maybe your sanity?

“Well, you're in luck because now you can get ‘Friendly’ advice from a professional who's truly passionate about helping you manage your data — Dr. Harold Twain Weck. That's right, John Cleese is at it again as Dr. Twain Weck to give you friendly advice on your most critical digital information protection and storage challenges.”

First, if you've never visited the Institute for Backup Trauma, go check it out. This award-winning campaign for LiveVault's Continuous Data Protection services appeared in April 2005. It makes two major points: how much trouble a company can be in without reliable backups, and how problematic tape is as a backup medium.

Three years later, Iron Mountain owns LiveVault and John Cleese is dispensing advice of dubious friendliness regarding some important questions about compliance, security, and whether there is, in fact, a mountain of iron. My favorite question is “How can I get our executives in trouble?” but my favorite answer is “How do I keep Mr. Wiggles from destroying electronic evidence?” That one expounds on some really creative ways to destroy a hard drive.

Even though Iron Mountain's solutions are aimed at the enterprise and may not be immediately useful to you, the Friendly Advice Machine is an entertaining diversion—and one that makes me glad I don't have to worry about compliance, discovery, and managing millions of e-mails.

Technorati Tags: Iron Mountain,LiveVault. John Cleese,Friendly Advice Machine,Backup Trauma

Backing Up to...Paper? FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 01-25-08

After last week’s discussion about the relative merits of paper and electronic storage for text and photos, I was particularly intrigued to come across a blog post about paper as a backup medium. Someone has actually gone and invented a program that will back your data up in the form of zillions of squares of tiny black dots (90,000 per square inch of paper at 300 DPI). You can get all of about 5 KB of uncompressed data on a page if you’ve got a 600 DPI laser printer. (Inkjets don’t work as well for this.) To restore data, you need a high-resolution scanner.

Now, I can remember when a Mac’s entire operating system ran on a 4 KB diskette. And I’m sure some of you remember the days when computers were the size of a building and ran on punch cards or punch tape. But given the size of even a short Microsoft Word document these days (last week’s Backup Reminder is 57 KB), you’d be well advised just to print the file, then scan it into an Optical Character Recognition program.

So you won’t be too surprised that this program, PaperBack, was created as “an open-source joke.” But it’s a real program, and Karl Gechlik over at Ask the Admin went and tested it. He backed up a 13.7 MB program called PC Tools AntiVirus Free Edition to an 88-page, 100 MB PDF file. Is there an antonym for “data compression”?

I passed this link along to the Ur-Guru with the comment “Now that is weird.” His response (as so often) made me feel slightly foolish:

No it’s not, actually.

Do you remember how my exit-slip looked, the one I got not the last time but the one before, when I left the US? That paper thing with all those weird dots like a mashed up barcode in blocks? Same thing.

Various of those things have been used to store data as “print,” so extending it to full sheets makes sense.

Sure enough, as soon as he mentioned his travel documents, I realized that I’d seen something similar when printing my own Southwest boarding passes. (You can do a Google image search for “print boarding pass” if you’ve never seen one.)

But the next comment really surprised me:

I once wrote a tool that did something similar, trying to compress actual data into color bitmap images. The idea was to print in color and scan them back in as a backup but scanners and color reproduction was not good enough [in 1997] for the full 0-255 range of integers and as a result it wasn’t viable or practical for large amounts of data.

It was, however, very viable at 0-32 ranges of color (RGB per pixel or dot printed at up to 600 dpi) as a means of encryption and to travel with data that would not appear to be data. :-)

I’ve talked about encrypting backups occasionally, but I’ve never thought about attempting to disguise my data as something other than data. Though I will say that if I were a customs inspector and someone had a heavy suitcase full of paper printed all over with tiny black dots, I’d start to suspect that something funny was going on.

If you have a funny story about backup—or a tragic one—and would like to write a guest column for this newsletter, just e-mail me.

Technorati Tags: PaperBack,Ask the Admin

Note to Buffalo: Hire a Proofreader

A client of the Ur-Guru's just bought a Buffalo DriveStation Duo USB drive. Kudos to him for taking care of backups, but when he installed the software, he found something a bit less than reassuring in the dialog boxes:

In case you didn't catch it (I didn't, the first time), the RAID setup utility is asking the user to restart WiDNows instead of WiNDows. This is doubtless a typo, and while it probably doesn't indicate anything about the RAID software, it's not encouraging.

Badly written user interfaces and documentation suggest that the manufacturer is cutting corners and the product may not be reliable. If you're using free software downloaded from a small start-up site, that may not be such a big deal, but Buffalo Technology is a major corporation and the DriveStation Duo is not a cheap piece of equipment.

Hiring one editor/proofreader to polish the documentation is probably more cost-efficient than employing only programmers with fluent English, but however you choose to do it, make sure your software is literate.

Technorati Tags: DriveStation Duo,Buffalo Technology

What the Top 10 Data Disasters of 2007 Teach Us: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 12-14-07

Every year Ontrack Data Recovery posts a list of the top 10 data disasters they've had to clean up after, and every year I write something about them. I noticed a big difference between the 2006 and 2007 lists, though. Four of the 2006 Top 10 disasters were damaged laptops, two were external hard drives, and three were internal hard drives from desktop machines. Only one of last year's dramatic tales involved data stored on something other than your typical spinning-platters hard drive: the SD card in a camera that wasn't as waterproof as advertised.

In 2007, only one dropped laptop made it onto the list. Instead, Ontrack was busy rescuing data stored on USB sticks and inside of cameras. There were also three external drives, up from last year, and one set of nearly-melted CDs.

So what can we learn from this change, apart from the fact that Ontrack can recover data from all kinds of storage media?

The first lesson is that data is easier to lose than ever before, because it's more portable. USB sticks are extremely handy devices, but because they're small, they're easy to lose--or to put through the wash or drop into the baby's applesauce.

The SD cards used by digital cameras and other portable devices are even smaller, so easier to misplace. (The 1 GB card that the Ur-Guru got for his MP3 player was so small it practically required tweezers to insert.) At least people are in the habit of thinking about cameras as fragile, and there are probably a lot of ways to seriously damage a camera without actually doing any harm to the data on the card.

USB sticks, on the other hand, often take the form of key chains, and people drop or throw their keys all the time, when not actually sitting on them or tossing them to the bottom of a bag. Flash drives are far better equipped to survive being dropped than drives with moving parts, but that doesn't make them invulnerable.

As for ordinary hard drives, their lives are full of danger. ION Backup's Howie Hard Drive series of videos shows a human-sized hard drive dodging traffic at rush hour, hanging out with the punks after school, and escaping the office. In 2007, Ontrack rescued data from drives that were infested with ants, dunked in acid baths, and soaked in WD-40. (No, that was not all the same drive.)

The moral of the story is, as always, treat your data with care. In particular, be kind to your backup drives. Carry external hard drives in padded cases. Consider keeping USB sticks on lanyards or clips so they can't fall onto the pavement or into the sink. (Come to think of it, this might be a good idea for your cell phone, too--my mother dropped hers in the dishwater once.) And always check your pockets before doing the laundry!

Read the complete 2007 Data Disaster List.

Technorati Tags: Ontrack,data disasters,USB sticks,SD cards,Howie the Hard Drive,ION backup

Visual Guide to RAID

The Ur-Guru mailed me a copy of this image, which I've cut into chunks to fit onto the blog. It's a visual demonstration of the different RAID configurations, using water coolers. You can get the original photo on Zachary Tirell's Flickr Page.

I Can Has Backup? FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 12-07-07

You know what they say about bloggers: all we write about is our cats. This cat actually belongs to my housemate, but she's fond of sitting on my wrists while I type—which is what she's doing right now. Just in case you were wondering, cat hair is not good for your computer.

I first discovered "lolcats" about six months ago, via the online postcard service Delivr.net. If you want to waste a few hours and get some laughs, type "lolcat" into Flickr or Google image search. Most lolcats want cheeseburgers, but my lolcat, of course, wants a nice warm hard drive to sleep on. The drive in question is the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini, and it wasn't all that warm, actually, until she put her furry chin on it. Perhaps she was enjoying the gentle vibrations from the spinning drive.

I wanted to stay on the lighter side in today's backup reminder. This can be a bit challenging, because there's nothing inherently funny about backups, and nothing funny about data loss, either--at least, not when it happens to you. It took John Cleese to make lost or damaged backup tapes funny.

A while ago, the Ur-Guru sent me a link to a site called Computer Stupidities. The site collects stories about "clueless computer users." Some of them do appear to have been pretty clueless, but the mean-spiritedness of the site bothers me. The one good thing about the stories, for those who are not geeks, is that whatever stupid thing you've done, someone else has probably done something worse.

You could look at the backup stories as cautionary tales, many of them amounting to "Read the *#%@!! manual," except for one thing. Very often, there isn't a manual, or the manual is useless, or the manual is written in gibberish by someone illiterate, or the manual is written by programmers for programmers. Most people who use computers these days are not programmers.

Ignorance on a particular subject is not stupidity. The Ur-Guru is brilliant with computers, math, and physics (you have to know math and physics to develop 3D visualization software), but you should have seen his first attempts at cooking. I had to show the man how to wash carrots.

What's obvious to me isn't obvious to him, and vice versa. I remember well my mortification when he asked me why I wasn't using keyboard shortcuts on Windows, since I used them on my Mac. I hadn't known that Windows had keyboard shortcuts. I'd only started using PCs a few months before that, and then only because that's what they had in the department I was working in. So I absolutely sympathize with those people who thought all you had to do was stick the tape in, and the backup would happen automatically.

These days, many backups do happen automatically. The point of the Rebit is that you plug it in and it starts backing up your computer, and keeps doing so as long as it's connected. Many other backup programs only need you to tell them what to back up before they start taking care of business for you. As I've been composing this reminder, my Mozy backup and the backup to my Maxtor Shared Storage II have both run. There's a little green icon in my system tray telling me the Shared Storage backup was successful, and if I mouse over the Mozy icon, it tells me my files were backed up one hour ago. (Yes, I am taking way too long to write this.)

When I switched to the Mac from the university mainframe, back in the late '80s, I described it as "The world's only user-patronizing computer." I was young, snotty, and arrogant, and had developed a certain macho attitude after learning to use the decidedly user-hostile word-processing program on the mainframe. Contrary to America's Protestant work-ethic heritage, however, there's no moral value in difficulty.

Most people are using computers to help them do something else. There's no reason they should have to become computer experts. Software should not make us feel like idiots. (Kathy Sierra has written some great stuff about this.) And computer consultants shouldn't treat us like idiots. I've talked to a few tech support people in my time who took a "You shouldn't worry your pretty head about that" approach to my difficulties, and I was not amused.

Fortunately, there are also a lot of helpful, supportive, hardworking IT guys (and gals) out there. You can "has backup," and you deserve to be treated with respect and to get explanations that you can actually understand. If what you need is the product that's easiest to use, you don't have to be ashamed of it. And if what you want is the product with the most features, you should be able to get that, too. But they probably won't be the same product.

Technorati Tags: Rebit,Mozy,OneTouch 4,Shared Storage II,automatic backup,usability,lolcat

Is Your Data Leopard-Proof? FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 07-27-07

Sometimes things converge. Then they usually fall on your head. So far this week’s convergence has not resulted in any injuries, but it may provide my readers some amusement and even be of some use.

The first thing that happened was that I got 1) a blog comment and 2) a couple of e-mails from Nic Darling, “the marketing guy” at UniversePoint, the company that makes ION™ Monitored Backup, which I’ll be reviewing in a future Backup Reminder (probably next week or the week after). Nic directed me to the list of “inane design suggestions” he made to the CEO when first hired by UniversePoint. The suggestion that particularly caught my eye was number 4:

“The software should be leopard proof. I realize that this will be difficult as leopards can swim AND climb trees, but I know you can manage it. (Man, I just really want to stamp NOW LEOPARD PROOF on a software package).”

One reason the idea of “leopard-proof” backup software appeals to me is outlined in an article in yesterday’s Wired entitled “Disaster Planning is Critical, but Pick a Reasonable Disaster.” The author, Bruce Schneier, points out that an effective disaster preparedness plan isn’t the one that equips you to ride out a quarantine in the event of the avian flu pandemic which never materialized or enables your company to continue to function after a direct nuclear strike which obliterates the entire continent (in which case you and your customers are probably all dead anyway). “In general, you can only reasonably prepare for disasters that leave your world largely intact. […] Disaster planning only makes sense within the context of existing society.”

Backing up your data is only one part of disaster preparedness, but the same basic principle applies. Most of us can’t provide for every conceivable contingency, but some contingencies are more likely than others. If you live in California, like me, it’s reasonable to plan for both earthquakes and fires. If you live in the southern US, it makes sense to plan for hurricanes. In most places, it’s worth considering the possibility of theft, though the security of the building which houses your computer equipment will affect the likelihood of that problem.

All of those possibilities are a good reason to have some form of off-site backup. What form that takes and how often you update those backups depend on your budget, the frequency at which your data changes, and how valuable it is to your company.

So where does leopard-proofing fit into that scheme? The Ur-Guru and I did meet a leopard once, but it was much more interested in the flock of wild turkeys walking through the field than in coming into the cabin to chew on our computers. Even apart from the difficulty a leopard would have getting into a data center, it’s hard to see what motivation the creature would have for taking a bite out of a hard drive. None of my computer equipment is even large enough to provide a reasonable heat-source to a leopard.

Making the equipment cat-fur-proof, now, that would be an accomplishment. It’s a challenge to hermetically seal a computer case and still allow things (like your network cable) to be plugged in. And I suspect most of my readers are far more likely to face marauding housepets than hungry leopards. So it’s worth making sure that your backups are safe from furry family members.

Which reminds me, Seagate has clearly made an effort to make its FreeAgent Go drives positively cuddly. The stickers sealing the anti-static wrap on the drive and its USB cable are bright yellow and say “Hello!” The installation guide says “This won’t take long” on one side and “Please enjoy” on the other. Oh, and let’s not forget the sticker on the outside of the box that says “160 Glorious Gigabytes.” (I am not making this up.)

When I bought the X drive, it was an unformatted, naked drive from Toshiba which I had to install in an enclosure and then figure out how to format. No such worries with the FreeAgent Go. Unwrap it, connect the two-pronged USB cable, and presto! You have a drive. Actually, you have a Welcome Screen and a Start Menu courtesy of Ceedo, and the option to install the FreeAgent software and to set up your drive like a giant U3 USB stick.

That’s not what I want this drive for, and indeed I’m not sure the built in sync function is really what I need, either, but the fancy options don’t detract from the ease of use and storage capacity. It seems like quite a sweet little drive, and I expect to write more about it when I’ve had time to use it more.

My only objections are aesthetic. The exterior of the drive is black, mostly, but one entire end of the thing lights up in a shade of yellow-orange reminiscent of road signs and school buses. Why this color, which I would expect people to associate with the need for caution, I don’t know. And I’m not sure what inspired the dark brown-and-yellow-orange FreeAgent interface or Ceedo theme. Has Seagate been taking design tips from UPS?

Although, come to think of it, yellow and black is a color scheme associated with leopards.

You see what I mean about convergence?

Back Up Your Brain

Not satisfied with mundane backups of computers, Unusual Software has come up with a tool called "Backup My Brain 1.0." In addition to your memories and professional skills, Backup My Brain promises to preserve your phobias, addictions, and bad habits.

Once installed, Backup My Brain 1.0 shows a screen displaying Homer Simpson's brain in a vise and plays a series of slightly eerie tones. (If used without earbuds, Backup My Brain 1.0 has the added benefit of driving the cat off the laptop.) As it progresses, warning messages come up: "Neuron chain read error! Please, contact your neurologist to fix this problem!"

The program is absolutely free, but does come with a warning: "Brain restore technology is still in development."

Backup My Brain 1.0 joins such notable products as the CD/DVD Rewinder and Detect Satan 2.0. Check out the complete line of "humor ware" for a good laugh.

Top Ten Reasons to Back Up Your Data: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 11-17-06

OnTrack Data Recovery has just published its third annual Top 10 list of “most remarkable data loss disasters.” Naturally, these are OnTrack’s top 10 successes; I don’t imagine they’re any more eager than the rest of us to publicize their failures. In many of these cases, backups would have saved these people their data recovery fees.

Most data loss occurs for mundane reasons, like drive failures and human error. It’s not that rare for people to drop laptops or cameras, either. (Heck, mine came close to having a foot-thick fence post run through it.) If you drop them from really high up, like a helicopter or a mountain peak, you might qualify as remarkable. And by now merely driving over a computer hardly raises an eyebrow: you have to drive over it with an airplane.

Some of these computers and hard drives suffered truly bizarre mishaps, and the funniest cases are those of self-inflicted damage. In 2004, a man tried to flush his laptop down the toilet. Another tried to repair his hard drive by sticking it in the freezer. In 2005, a woman attacked her computer with a hammer. (That was also the year of “The dog ate my memory stick” and “The cockroaches got my laptop.”)

This year’s top ten list doesn’t feature any deliberate computer abuse, though the professor who used WD-40 to stop his computer from squeaking was apparently suffering from academentia. And just why a hard drive should seem like a good place to leave a banana, I don’t know. It’s clear that the reason data recovery experts suit up isn’t just to protect the data.

Of course, none of these things is funny if it happens to you. It’s even less funny if you have to send your drive to a place like OnTrack and they can’t get your data back. So remember: don’t take a hammer to your laptop without backing it up first.

2006 Top Ten

2005 Top Ten

2004 Top Ten

Student Arrested for Backup

From The Collegian:

Back in December of 2005, a student at the University of Richmond contacted the campus help desk for help backing up his personal files, but they didn't provide storage in those quantities, so they sent him to the campus computer store, who could.

With an astonishing degree of naivety, the student then requested that the technician take special care to back up the "kiddie porn" folder. No slouch, the tech called the police as soon as his would-be customer was out the door, and the now-ex student has now been indicted on 16 counts of possession of child pornography, which is a felony in Virginia.

Naturally, I'm glad the kid is getting put away. Child pornography is revolting. But many of us have things on our hard drives which we don't necessarily want strangers to see, even if they aren't illegal, immoral, or fattening. These are the files you should encrypt before putting your hard drive in someone else's hands or backing your files up online.

Now if only all those banks who keep losing backup tapes with our financial information on them would do that...

FileSlinger ™ Backup Reminder 06-02-06: Slashdotting Backups

This isn’t actually what I planned to write about today, but I couldn’t resist. I haven’t laughed this much about backups since the first Backup Trauma video.

The creators of the Slashdot.org geek news forum chose its name “to make the URL silly and unpronounceable.” That hasn’t kept it from becoming a web phenomenon and the source of all kinds of lingo that has found its way into the blogosphere as well as elsewhere on the web. If you get “Slashdotted,” you’re famous—or infamous. And if you post a question on “Ask Slashdot,” you’re going to get lots of answers, many helpful, some irrelevant, some downright crude, and many of them extremely funny.

On Wednesday, May 31, someone going by “higuita” asked “What practices and policies do Slashdot users implement for backups they perform at their office?”

Since he asked specifically about policies for a company with about 1000 workstations and 20 servers, the practical answers aren’t likely to be useful to many of the readers of this newsletter (even the Ur-Guru). But some of the *other* answers are definitely worth passing on.

***

don't make the mistake that one guy did
the office was in the North Tower --- The "offsite backup" was in the South Tower

***

I dump stuff on undergrads. They've got to be good for something.

***

My backup strategy consists of hoping that my hard drive doesn't fail before I get a new computer/hard drive. It's worked so far, even with a laptop.

***

Real men don't use backups, they post their stuff on a public ftp server and let the rest of the world make copies.

***

Who bothers with backups? I've personally never wasted any time backing

A fatal exeeption 0E has occurred at 0137:BFFA21C9. The current application will be terminated.

* Press any key to terminate the current application
* Press CTRL+ALT+DEL again to restart your computer. You will lose any unsaved information in all applications.

Press any key to continue _

***

I don't bother with backups. I've got a airtight policy in case of a HD crash or any other form of data loss:

1. Look shocked and terrified.
2. Yell.
3. Scream.
4. Pull hear.
5. Bang head to wall.
6. Sit quitely sobbing a corner.
7. Kick the cat.
8. Replace HD (if necessary).
9. Reinstall software.
10. Kick cat again.
11. Redownload mp3s, movies, games and pron.
12. Feed cat.
13. Mail goatse.cx pictures to random innocent people as an act of pointless revenge.
14. Make futile threats to a deity that if it happens again "the cat gets it".
15. Continue life as normal.

Now what could possibly go wrong with my plan?

***

I have a rosary backup policy. My prefered saints to pray to are Mary, Don Bosco, St. Ignatius of Loyola and St. IGNUcius.

***

We use what we call a "finger drive" (not to be confused with thumb drive). After a catastrophic failure, we are all driven to finger pointing.

***

Here's what I do when I need to back up:

1. Depress the clutch pedal.
2. Put the gearshift into "Reverse"
3. Slowly let out the clutch pedal while pressing lightly on the accelerator pedal

It works really well, and I can almost always recover from those backups too.

***

I zip all my files and name it "Naked pictures of (insert star name here)". Then I publish the torrent. Cheap distributed offsite backup.

***

These are obviously some very creative people. Of course, if they’re really using any of these techniques, I think we should all be very afraid.

And please, whatever you do—If your hard drive fails, don't kick the cat. Or the dog, either.

Ontrack Data Disaster League Table

British data recovery company Ontrack has published its 2005 League Table of the funniest and most frightening real-life computer crises of its customers, from the laptop full of cockroaches to the dog's favorite memory stick.