Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends:
First, thanks to those who have made comments and suggestions. I’m working on following up on them for future issues of this newsletter.
This past week I had a heart-rending chance to experience what not having backups can mean—but I’m not ready to talk about it yet. It’s still too painful for me, and I doubt very much that the client it happened to wants to see it here so soon. I don’t even know yet how much the data recovery people were able to get back.
So I thought I’d tell a different story instead, one about how far a man will go for his backups, and why.
About a month ago, the Ur-Guru bought a new workstation, a machine of unbelievable power and speed, never mind storage space. (The old workstation had developed mysterious hardware problems which caused it to reboot every few minutes.)
Now, as it happens, he has had nothing but problems with this machine. Real Geeks have computer trouble too. I won’t describe everything that’s gone wrong, but it’s been an absolute nightmare, requiring several replacement parts, and so he hasn’t been able to properly install and use it.
The Ur-Guru owns more computers than I can count, including a pretty good model of laptop and the once top-of-the-line machine that his mother now uses to surf the web. One might think that with all these computers sitting around, hooked together in a network and running a 24/7 mail/web/ftp server, one of them might be able to serve as a backup and allow him to get some work done.
The problem with that theory is that those other computers aren’t sitting idle. To quote the Ur-Guru himself, “Right now I can’t even host local Ghost images since the machines are all hosting the massive backups for the new workstation and new server.”
Which means that the Ur-Guru is unable to do any work and has at times been barely able to complete an e-mail message.
Why would he do that? Why are the backups more important than the possibility of getting something done in the present?
When I asked, he gave me the following answer:
“Well, these backups do contain my life’s work of data and many years of configuration buildup, source code, book collections, you name it. I have backups on DVDs and CDs but if I have to roll it all back to a new working machine from those it would take me many weeks of sorting (and backing up the data in its current form is no option unless I buy 80 DVDs and spend time writing the data to all those).
“The only way for my data to be properly backed up is to have it on another machine, two other machines in fact. The server and backup server. I could turn the backup server into a workstation given a few days time but I would then have to rely on just one machine hosting the massive backup and that…that’s too damn scary, especially after all the computer failures and crap I have been experiencing the past months. I just KNOW murphy would come for me if I do.”
Given my own recent experience, Murphy probably would. In fact, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that there is no natural limit to the number of things that can go wrong with a computer. There will be limits to the number of backups you can store, but please, for my sake as well as your own—make them.
And if you or someone you care about has no backup system in place—call me!
Until next week,
Sallie
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