[AccessD] Late Lessons from 9/11

Arthur Fuller fuller.artful at gmail.com
Fri Jan 21 19:38:25 CST 2022


It's only a matter of time before Elon Musk figures out that off-planet
backups are safest of all. 😉

On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 7:07 PM Rocky Smolin <rockysmolin2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I got a 128 from a friend who had a busines of printing on all kinds of
> premiums and giveaways.  Anyway, I helped him shut down his business and he
> had stacks of these 128s.  I tried one - very slow data transfer when
> you're trying to store 10s of GBs. I didn;t think it was practical.  Ecven
> if you do, there's your data backed up next to the machine that's going
> down in the fire.  Along with your 128s.
>
> Offsite is the only way to perfect that security.
>
> r
>
> On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 1:13 PM Arthur Fuller <fuller.artful at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > 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
> > --
> > AccessD mailing list
> > AccessD at databaseadvisors.com
> > https://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd
> > Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com
> >
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>


-- 
Arthur


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