On 31 Mar 2010 at 7:36, dhbailey wrote: > David W. Fenton wrote: > > On 30 Mar 2010 at 15:59, dhbailey wrote: > > > >> I won't use the internet for storing my > >> backups -- nothing's truly and verifiably secure on the > >> internet and nothing's to prevent some such company from > >> going out of business just at the time when I need to > >> restore those files to my hard drive. > > > > You seem to be under the impression that one backup is ever > > sufficient. It's not. In my 20 or so years of work as a computer > > tech, the only time anybody has ever lost anything that wasn't > > recoverable from a backup was because multiple levels of backup > > failed. > > > > To me the perfect example of this was the failure of the Roosevelt > > Island Tram in NYC a few years ago, where riders were stranded > > hanging in the tram over the river for hours and had to be rescued. > > The tram had a main motor and two backups. The main motor failed, and > > the backup failed. The second backup was in the shop for repairs, so > > people ended up stuck. > > > > Two levels of backup failed. > > > > You are not safely backed up if you have only one backup strategy -- > > have at least two if not more. And any loss of one backup should be > > irrelevant. > > Did I say that I only had one backup strategy? What gave > you that impression?
The fact that you put such an emphasis on the possibility that an online backup service could go out of business is what gave me that impression. This shouldn't matter, any more than if one of your backup DVDs became unreadable. It is not by any means a reason to reject online backup services out of hand. > All I said was that online backup > storage at companies in an industry with huge business > failure rates wasn't part of that strategy. > > Multiple hard-drive backups on-site as well as multiple > copies stored off-site are part of my strategy. But > trusting that data to industries which may be gone when I > need access the most isn't part of my strategy. But you're *not* trusting your data to them in the sense of depending on them to restore the data if you have redundant backups. Questions about security and accessibility (which you certainly raised) are completely different, and still something that "cloud" computing can't really answer for (and probably never can completely). > And while I can see your logic that the loss of any one > backup should be irrelevant, if several backups fail for > some reason and the last chance is an on-line business which > folds the day before I try to retrieve my data, that won't > be very helpful will it? And yet I will have spent all that > money over the months/years paying them for the storage of > my data. As I said, every time I've seen a loss due to a backup failure it was because what was needed instead of the N redundant backups was N+1 redundant backups, so your point there is valid. I would see online backup as a backup of backups. The latency problem is less of an issue if it's backing up less data, and one way to do that is to use it just as a backup of your backup sets. In that case, you'd be letting your normal backup software do the selection of files to backup, and then just backing up the (compressed) results to the online service -- in that setup, your online backup is serving only as a backup for your backup (and, of course, not the only one). -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
