On Wednesday 03 Feb 2010, Dan Dart wrote:
> I don't suppose assuring the users they have RAID arrays will help?
> Thought not. Yes, if anything can't afford to be lost it should be
> backed up 5 times. Once on CD, once on RAID, once on USB, once in the
> cloud, once at your friend's house 8 miles down the road, And probably
> more so.
I appreciate that you are a bit tongue in cheek with this comment, but the
fact is that that the average user will do none of those things; just as most
of the T-Mobile customers had no personal backups. They thought that the
provider would deal with it.
Also, I suspect that Sidekick *were* using RAID. The trouble is that a dumb
admin or some software that goes wild can trash everything because they (it)
thinks that the data being overwritten is the right data. Do you remember the
big Internet outage some years ago when the DNS records were accidentally
overwritten by an out-of-date backup?
I accept that things *shouldn't* go wrong. The problem is that they do, even
in the best maintained systems. If your data is in the cloud, then there is
no point complaining if the provider loses it, because his licence will almost
certainly absolve him from responsibility. On the other hand, if you are
going to do as you suggest, and take your own backups, then you might as well
run your own server and be responsible for the whole stack; OS, Apps and data.
--
Terry Coles
64 bit computing with Kubuntu Linux
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