Article on data rot on CD's

From: Joe R. <rigdonj_at_cfl.rr.com>
Date: Sat Jul 31 21:49:05 2004

At 12:02 AM 7/29/04 +0100, you wrote:
>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!

   Welcome to big business in the 1990s! That's the reason that Martin
Marietta, IBM, HP, Tektronix (just to name a few) are all going to hell!

    Joe
Received on Sat Jul 31 2004 - 21:49:05 BST