Backups - why you should

[Robert Brockway]

On Fri, 15 May 2009, Giles Orr wrote:

> Three days after Robert Brockway's talk about backups, Slashdot posts
> a high profile story about hackers taking down a site - and completely
> destroying it because the site owners didn't have off-line backups.
> Off-site would have been good, but in this case even off-line would
> have saved them:
>
> http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/15/0138204

Hi Giles.  Thanks for the link.  Interesting comment from one guy about 
how he backed up a server his employer told him not to, and saved the day 
when people were using it for storage.  Remember the slide about disks 
normally having more useful data than we think ;)

This morning I remembered an important point about backups that I forgot 
to put in my talk.  This is a good time to mention it :)  I'll be adding 
it to the slides.

I often hear comments about how Mr Smith or Mrs Jones couldn't be expected 
to keep good backups as they know nothing about technology.

News Flash:  "Backups have nothing to do with technology".

We use modern technology to do the backups for our systems based on modern 
technology, but that is because it makes sense to do that.

In reality, backups are as old as language.

Medieval European monks used to spend a good deal of their lives hand 
copying important texts.  This allowed for the disemination of information 
but it also allowed for retention (backup) of the information in the case 
of a disaster.  The monks were fully aware of this.  If a monastery burned 
down the surrounding monasteries would make copies of their texts in order 
to repopulate the library that was lost.  This was a form of enlightened 
self interest as the next monastery to be lost might have been theirs.

It is largely thanks to the disciplined backup procedures of these monks 
that so many texts survive to the modern day.

Even memorising an oral tradition is a form of backup.  Before the 
invention of writing it was the only option if information was to survive 
beyond a single human lifespan.  Naturally this format has reliability 
problems but then so do so many modern formats ;)

Cheers,

Rob

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