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.
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don’t make the mistake that one guy did
the office was in the North Tower — The “offsite backup” was in the South Tower
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I dump stuff on undergrads. They’ve got to be good for something.
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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.
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Real men don’t use backups, they post their stuff on a public ftp server and let the rest of the world make copies.
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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 _
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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:
- Look shocked and terrified.
- Yell.
- Scream.
- Pull hear.
- Bang head to wall.
- Sit quitely sobbing a corner.
- Kick the cat.
- Replace HD (if necessary).
- Reinstall software.
- Kick cat again.
- Redownload mp3s, movies, games and pron.
- Feed cat.
- Mail goatse.cx pictures to random innocent people as an act of pointless revenge.
- Make futile threats to a deity that if it happens again “the cat gets it”.
- Continue life as normal.
Now what could possibly go wrong with my plan?
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I have a rosary backup policy. My prefered saints to pray to are Mary, Don Bosco, St. Ignatius of Loyola and St. IGNUcius.
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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.
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Here’s what I do when I need to back up:
- Depress the clutch pedal.
- Put the gearshift into “Reverse”
- 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.
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I zip all my files and name it “Naked pictures of (insert star name here)”. Then I publish the torrent. Cheap distributed offsite backup.
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And please, whatever you do—If your hard drive fails, don’t kick the cat. Or the dog, either.
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