Article on data rot on CD's

From: Dennis Smith <m1dlg_at_soulwax.co.uk>
Date: Wed Jul 28 18:02:00 2004

it frustrates me to see the company i work for still reliant on nightly
backups (about 1.5gb) of sales data on obsolite drives and tapes (last
mass made around 15yrs ago!) and refusing to change type to a newer
reliable medium because of cost, dispite the cost of replacing them is
less than the cost of one call out for each crash caused by fault
hardware - this amounts to several hundreds ??? each time due to lost
data, and the cost of lost sales while engineers (contracted only)
arrive to reboot and verify data on each tape, this system is over 25
yrs old and it's been patched up so many times it starting to look like
a microshafting took place. it's so old one of the terminals in one
store was opened to find some document dated 1980 slid inside and was
the cause of the extra heat as it had stopped the fan from working and
the extra dust had just caused it give up!

we have major crashes on average once every 3 or 4 months and minor ones
every 2 or 3 weeks. it's a sorry state when the accountant with his
abacus can run EVERY part of the company!

i feel it should be a legal requirement to have data backups and
off-site backups too, but not until i invest in that little data storage
company.......

DJ

M1DLG


Doc Shipley wrote:

> Teo Zenios wrote:
>
>> Shouldn't he have a permanent backup tape every so often in the
>> cycle? If
>> you screw up or delete a file and don't notice it quickly it will get
>> lost
>> in the rotating cycle. The major problem I see companies forgetting is
>> offsite storage of backups in case of fire or something like that. Most
>> companies would not survive a fire because their financial backups
>> would be
>> gone.
>
>
> Just try to convince the owner of a struggling small business that
> the money poured down that drain is well-spent. Yes, he should be
> doing a permanent archive at least monthly, and yes, you should rotate
> tapes *out* after X reads or writes. Value of X depends on the media
> type, and as far as I'm concerned, Iomega's early Travan tapes were
> good for one write, and *possibly* one read.
>
> He was doing a permanent archive every 6 months "or so". He
> couldn't be bothered to buy a new set of 6-8 tapes every month for the
> full backup, and I'm sure he was having trouble finding them.
>
> <rant>
> My company is a Tivoli reseller and service partner, and TSM is my
> boss's specialty. I've heard every reason in the book for scrimping
> on data protection, and they all boil down to the same thing.
> Non-techie management honestly believes that if all their IT people
> are doing their jobs, and all their expensive storage toys are doing
> _their_ jobs, and all that shiney expensive software is doing _its_
> job, tape backups are expensive, obsolete, and useless.
>
> To make things much worse, there are any number of little
> garage-based companies building cheap NAS/SAN solutions, and even more
> storage sales folk from reputable companies, who will tell a VP
> exactly that - that magnetic media is dead. Simply because they get
> commission selling disk space, not tape.
>
> I'm all in favor of disk-based backups, mirrors, snapshots, backups
> to CD-R/DVD-R, etc. They're cheap, simple, and very useful. They
> just don't, can't, and never will do the whole job.
> </rant>
>
> I'll shut up now.
>
> Doc
>
>
Received on Wed Jul 28 2004 - 18:02:00 BST