On Tue, 26 Aug 2008 03:34:11 +0000, Mark Sims <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >Pointless overkill? Ask those people in New Orleans what happens when >originals and backups are kept in the same city. I know of several (ex) >businesses that wisely kept their backups in different buildings there... all >were lost. > >Ask my friends in Jarrell, Texas (or what's left of them after a tornado >leveled the city)... one friend kept backups at his and his parent's house... > a lifetime's work lost... not to mention a lot of friends and family. > >All legitimate disaster plans specify that backups (and contingency operating >sites) are not to be kept in the same geographic area. Failure to do so in a >corporate setting would expose you to major liability claims. It's a big old world out there and if you look hard enough, you can find something to justify most any plan, regardless of how outrageous, if a single occurance is acceptable justification. Of course, by that standard we all should walk around wearing Kevlar helmets. After all, there has been a single instance of someone being hit by a meteorite in recorded history. If I'd lived and operated a data center in NO even before Katrina, I'd have considered flooding to be a high percentage risk and done something appropriate about it. If I lived in the high desert, I'd not worry too much about flooding. The silliness in your "advice" is that you offered up one of the most extreme "solutions" as generic advice and said that anything less was no backup at all or something to that effect even though you don't know my or any other list member's circumstances. Let's see how your advice and its associate expense fits my situation since I'm the one you replied to. I'm retired so total loss of my data would have no financial impact. A huge sentimental and legacy impact, in terms of both my writings, designs and digital photos. Interestingly enough, all those types of data are backed up multiple ways including on a set of DVDs resting in a friend's safe who lives a few miles away. My past design work is completely static, my photos mostly static and my writings a little less static so updates to that collection need be done only a couple of times a year. They'd only be needed if my cabin and its contents suddenly and completely disappeared somehow. I live in a cabin on gentle sloping ground about 200 feet above the Tellico river. Short of The Great Flood 2.0, water on the ground cannot reach my place. Period. That takes NO-style flooding off the table. The basement of my cabin sits on bedrock. The combination of the gradual slope and the mere skim of topsoil takes land slides off the table. In my basement there is one of the largest gun safes made, one that I can stand up in. It is set through the concrete block wall, back into the soil bank behind my cabin so that the door is flush with the wall. In other words, like a vault. The safe itself weighs about 2 tons. The bottom few inches are filled with another ton of concrete and the foot of the safe is embedded in about 3 yards of steel-reinforced concrete, some of the steel welded to the safe's body. The lockworks are US government crypto-certified. I paid a bunch extra for that quality of lockwork. The combination lock is a Sergent and Green crypto-grade unit and the key lock is a Medico high security one. Both locks must be manipulated to open the safe. Inside the safe is another smaller "valuables" safe, also secured with a S&G crypto-grade combo lock. It was intended for jewelry but I use it for backup media storage. Even sitting in the open it has the highest UL fire rating available. Set back in the dirt bank, it is impervious to fire. The safe is both alarmed and booby-trapped. (certain immaterial-to-this-discussion have been changed for obvious reasons.) I installed this safe years ago when I traveled a lot to protect my gun collection. It makes a damned fine data safe. So let's evaluate the risks Risk Covered? Fire check Earthquake check general flood NA local flood check* explosion check land slide NA B&E check** Tornado check Riot check Nuclear attack check*** Nosey neighbors check * broken water pipe, etc. The basement is drained by gravity plus my alarm system has a leak detection facility that kills power to my well pump. ** adding to my protection against breaking and entering are all my heavily armed and dangerous neighbors. We put teeth in the term "Neighborhood Watch". *** of any nearby strategic target such as Oak Ridge. Can't imagine anyone nuking Tellico Plains :-) Even if they did, I'm still 25 miles and a mountain range away. My lights-out server sits inside the safe with the power and ethernet cables brought out through suitable secure penetrations. I put the server in the safe after the experience of a previous fire. My backups were good but the hassle, time and cost involved in setting up a new server made using available space in the safe for this one a no-brainer. Also sitting in the safe is another laptop just like this one. I stay on the trailing edge of technology so buying a second one cost me almost nothing. This totally eliminates the risk of even an hour of down-time if I break this laptop or it just quits. I swap them occasionally to equalize the wear and tear and to keep the capacitors in the power supply well-formed. There is a small CO2 cylinder in the back of the safe equipped with a spring loaded, solenoid tripped valve. The valve came directly out of an Ansul automatic fire protection system. If triggered by an external thermal rate-of-rise Fenwal switch, it provides a steady flow of inerting gas, good for a couple of hours. This setup is a lessons-learned from my house fire when steam and acidic smoke got past the "air tight" gun safe seal and damaged thousands of dollars worth of guns, even before the fire was completely out. I had the safe open even while the firemen were watering hot spots and my guns were already corroding. Insurance paid OK but some of the guns were literally irreplaceable so I still suffered great loss. Ansul systems can't be reused so the valve setup is a throw-away item at most any used restaurant supply company. The CO2 bottle is an off-the-shelf 20 lb soft drink dispenser cylinder. So. Given my setup, tell me what risk I'm exposed to that would make shipping backup media a hundred miles away and paying someone to store them make economic sense? I think that I have a very well thought-out and complete data security system but I'm always open to second opinions. John -- John De Armond See my website for my current email address http://www.neon-john.com http://www.johndearmond.com <-- best little blog on the net! Tellico Plains, Occupied TN I don't speak Stupid so do speak slowly. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
