A lot of people store their backups in gun safes and fire safes and beleieve they are, well.. safe. Unfortunately this is not at all true. Fire ratings on safes are usually referenced to how long before the paper inside ignites... call it 451 F. Hard drives these days have their bit densities so high that the magnetic domains are on the edge of instability. Brownian motion and thermal noise can flip the domains. That, coupled with ever decreasing Curie points, means that hard drives can lose their data well before the temperature in the safe reaches that of a cool sauna. The more modern the drive, the bigger the problem. Some drives these days are speced at storage temps of less than 50C... well below what even a hot car will produce (I suspect that is the root of a lot of laptop hard drive "failures").
A few more potential backup disasters that I am familiar with... Don't store drives and ammo and powder in the same safe... the fire did not get the safe contents hot enough to ignite the ammo/powder but, apparently, expanding gasses caused cause some of the ammo pop apart, flying slug hit another shell, can of reloading powder went off. Doors to safe came off... Backups and lower levels do not mix... one case was a broken water main in the street filled a basement (and two levels of underground parking with water)... guess where the data center was? Another was a fire safe in a house basement. Water heater set house on fire, pipes burst, basement filled with water. Safe rusted shut before the basement could be pumped out. Personally, I keep newest backup in the guest house (OK against most pipes/small fires/burglary), next one in an office around 15 miles away (OK against tornados, etc), next one is 360 miles away (OK against hurricanes/nukes/small chunks of space rock). If it's worth protecting... do it right. _________________________________________________________________ See what people are saying about Windows Live. Check out featured posts. http://www.windowslive.com/connect?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_connect2_082008 _______________________________________________ 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.
