Disaster Recovery: A Tape Survival Story
Computerworld is running a feature on how Estes Express Lines survived Hurricane Gaston dumping four feet of water into their data center. Dick Cosby, Estes’s systems administrator, is quoted as saying “You are out of your mind if you think you can live without tape. It makes zero sense to put up an all-SAN solution with data de-duplication. It is very expensive and not nearly as reliable.”
I had dinner with Dick at an IBM event a year ago. We spent most of dinner talking about how Estes had recovered from the hurricane. I was extremely impressed by Estes’s ability to fully recover even though the magnitude of the disaster outstripped anything they had planned for. These guys have earned the right to make observations about what does and doesn’t make sense in a disaster recovery/business continuance strategy. Unlike most of us in the vendor community, Estes has been there, done that, and lived to tell about it.
Anti-Hacking Your Life
I’m a geek, and like all good geeks, I love new shiny gadgets. I like creative and unexpected uses of technology. I like things that pander to my short attention span, distract me just long enough to wreck my train of thought, and then fade away into obscurity. Needless to say, I’m a GTD victim.
I enjoy all the usual lifehack sites. I’ve read David Allen’s books. I’ve used Remember the Milk, Nozbe, Sandy, Jott, and others I don’t remember at the moment. I’ve done paper based productivity systems, online productivity systems, systems on Windows and systems on Mac. The only consistent thing about them is the fact that they’ve generally survived for about a week before I’ve moved on to the next new shiny system. I’ve managed to fall into the trap of spending more time tweaking the system than actually doing anything.
Apparently, I’m far from alone in this respect. I recently found The Growing Life, a great site that helps put things into perspective for gadget obsessed geeks like me. A recent post, The Life Hack Misnomer, is one of my all-time favorites. I’d already figured out that I needed to step back and reassess my approach to productivity, but Craig kind of drove the point home.
I’m not likely to stop reading Lifehacker, and I’m certain that there are new and shinier gadgets waiting to distract me. I am, however,
Extreme Data Recovery: Salvaging Data from the Space Shuttle Columbia
I clearly remember the morning of February 1st, 2003 when I heard that the Space Shuttle Columbia had been destroyed over the central United States. It was a vivid reminder of the dangers of space exploration. In addition to the loss of life, all of the data from the on-board experiments was also presumed lost. Now, five years later, one of the experiments has been completed thanks to a remarkable piece of data recovery.
The CVX-2 experiment stored its data on a 400MB Seagate hard drive. The drive was recovered from the debris, and although badly damaged by re-entry and impact, engineers at Kroll Ontrack were able to recover 90% of the data on the drive. This allowed the CVX-2 researchers to complete their experiment and bring a 20-year research effort to conclusion.
Hat’s off to the engineers at Kroll Ontrack. This is a feat on par with IBM’s recovery of the Space Shuttle Challenger’s flight data recorder tapes.
Source: Blocks and Files (includes a photo of the hard drive)
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