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:

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.

From Bob Cramer’s “Backup to the Future” weblog:

Here’s one for the backup bestseller list: John Cleese of Monty Python fame stars in “The Institute for Backup Trauma,” a web video advertising LiveVault’s disk-based backups. (And as if to illustrate what the video says about the drawbacks of tape backups, Ameritrade has had to admit to 200,000 customers that their financial data has gone missing along with a backup tape.)

“Viral video,” as this type of ad campaign is being called, could be the best thing that’s happened to the backup industry. It’s certainly the best thing that’s happened to LiveVault: they’d had 150,000 new product downloads as of Monday. I’m sure the folks from TapeSucks.com are cheering.

You can see the video, developed by Thunder Sky Pictures and the Captains of Industry, at www.backuptrauma.com. You’ll need Macromedia Flash Player to view it, but there is a version oriented toward dial-up connection speeds.

One does get the impression from the video that it’s only tape backups which fail, and this, of course, is not true. Hard disk failures are very common things—they’re the main reason that we need backups. In this respect, LiveVault may be dancing on the edge of truth in advertising.

Microsoft, too, is getting into the disk-based backup business with its Data Protection Manager for Windows Server 2000 and Windows Server 2003. There’s a free 680 MB beta available for download and a press release on the subject on the Microsoft website. Unless you’re an IT manager for a large organization, though, you’re going to have much more fun with LiveVault.

And go ahead, click the third button. I dare you.