[AccessD] Late Lessons from 9/11

[Arthur Fuller]

My local hardware vendor offers 128GB thumb drives dirt cheap. I'm going to
buy one and perhaps a pair. And they are SanDisks. I have an array of thumb
drives, reflecting their purchase date. The most ancient is a
DataTraveller, 16GB. Next is a Lexar 64GB. Perhaps following the purchase I
shall donate them to some worthy cause.

On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 3:47 PM Peter Brawley <peter.brawley at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Fri, 21 Jan 2022 at 13:58, Arthur Fuller <fuller.artful at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> "The 9/11 destruction of the Twin Trade Towers caused Morgan Stanley to
>> lose the source code of their flagship financial application written in
>> Visual Age Smalltalk (VAST)."
>>
>> In the age of Cloud computing, this is not much of a problem. Surely
>> every developer, whether an individual or a a firm as large as Accenture,
>> stores everything off-premises, on Google Drive or OneDrive or something
>> similar.
>> I am a one-person operation, but I manage to store everything of
>> consequence (basically meaning code and documents of various types) on
>> Google Drive, OneDrive and locally, on a 128GB thumb drive, so I can move
>> it between computers with no effort beyond plugging it in.
>> Incidentally, it took a few guys a few weeks to write a decompiler for
>> Morgan Stanley, and they managed to recover a bunch of the original code,
>> but the names of variables proved more problematic.
>> Anyway, I just wanted to state the obvious: hope for the best but plan
>> for the worst. Keep your source code and even compiled apps in a place you
>> can get to from anywhere else. Nothing crucial should be stored locally
>> only.
>> To put it another way, Murphy was an optimist.
>>
>
> Right, the rule is, update remote backups at intervals shorter than the
> quantity of data you can afford to lose. My stuff also includes a music
> server so my number is 2-3TB, too much to pipe or even update across our
> slow rural intertoobs here, so my last resort is a portable hard drive in a
> safety deposit box.
>
> p.
>
>
>> --
>> Arthur
>>
>>
>
> --
> Peter Brawley
> www.artfulsoftware.com
>
> *Where money is speech, speech isn't free.*
>
>

-- 
Arthur