[sclug] My disk esplode

[Tom Carbert-Allen]

Dickon Hood wrote:
> I treat laptops -- and the Mac Mini, Apple TV, and other
> similarly-afflicted devices -- as having caches, not storage.  I suggest
> you do the same.
>   
Thats ok for you work from home types, but when you travel the world 
with only carry on luggage and limited network connectivity that can be 
an issue. Hence why this laptop has a second spinning attempt at a bit 
box in it for mirroring. Although I can always drop it while it's 
writing to both disks. But I do Rsync back to mirror's in the office in 
the UK which rsyncs to my home and a dedicated server in the USA when I 
get the bandwidth

The problem is other less technical people, current companies director 
of sales lost files from a laptop which had never even been in the 
office and blamed IT for not "sorting it out" even though he insisted 
they had to give him the smallest thinkpad known to mankind (hence one 
disk). I finally got the CEO (who travels more than me) to use a 2.5" 
USB disk with an auto rsync on connect scripts I wrote him after he lost 
his hair over a thinkpad disk failure.

There are other data loss problems though. Current companies best IT 
phail, sales guy left the whole bag, laptop and backup drive on a plane 
(it was his 6th flight in less than 48 hours in his defence). We did get 
it back 4 days later which was very lucky.

So the bottom line is still the same limitations we face in many area's 
of IT:

Non technical users complaining about sub-optimal solutions (loosing 
data from single spinning disks when they should have had RAID)
Poor backhaul bandwidth (for backup or sending stuff from customer site 
directly back to office instead of carrying home on laptop)
Poor high speed wireless coverage (for remote backup without even 
finding somewhere to plug in)

Backing up to three disks in three locations in three continents in real 
time is the real mans data storage.

TCA