OT: Tape less Backup System

[Bill Vermillion]

Shakespeare wrote plays and sonnets that will last an eternity, 
but on Fri, Jan 21 18:49 , Fairlight wrote:" 

> At Fri, Jan 21, 2005 at 03:31:23PM -0500 or thereabouts, 
> suspect D. Thomas Podnar was observed uttering:

> > Another interesting set of drives is the new AIT "Turbo"
> > series. Top-of-the-line AIT2 Turbo is very fast, 80/204GB,
> > has cheaper media (no more internal memory chips in the
> > media) and is ~$1,200 street price.

....

> In a corporate business environment, $1200 isn't much. In a
> small business or worse, personal environment, decent capacity
> and performance tape is still woefully overpriced, IMHO.

In personal it is expensive.  But in a small business it's just
like insurance.  And if you figure on only a 4 year life that's
only $1 day.  Being able to get a system up and running in
a matter of hours with all your data current through the previous
close of business is almost mandatory.  

If you lose the data you'll never have to worry about
your accounts-payable as all the vendors will be more than happy to
send you bills - in the meantime you can't send any bills out.

A good crash can take some companies out of business.  

I had one client who balked at the money needed to replace his
QIC tape machine.  He hadn't had backups done for months.
I got him some really good pricing.  He still didn't go for it.

One day I called him and said "I have an idea of how you can pay
for the tape drive and have money left over to spend.  Just cancel
your fire insurance and use that money to buy a tape drive".

He got the idea and bought a drive.

He later sold that company, and when those who took it over
moved from SCO to Linux they backed up the FP on a CD on the MS
machine.   And when the fire struck the data was at least a month
old.  I saw pictures of the fire.  It was BIG - total loss
including the building.

Since all original filePro programming - some of which I'd done
on Profile when RS sold it - used names outside the 8.3 PC
convention - it was going to take at least 200 hours to go through
all the process tables to find which of many seemingly identical
names were not and to figure out their real name.

[Since all the prc.xxxxxxxxx  were truncated to prc.xxx in the
copy to the PC it was a real mess.  He decided to forget it all -
and I think closed that part of the business].

He'd really only need about $700 for a tape drive that was more
than adequate but the support people he acquired when taking the
system back really were about 10 clues short of a pair.

Backups are NOT expensive if you do any business at all IF
the business depends upon the data.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com