Wednesday, November 7, 2007

The Opposite of Backup

In the early 1980s, George C. was IT support on a team overseeing a large installation of workstations. At the time, this was a pretty novel concept. Several Unix site managers applied to help out but wanted "too much money," according to management. Instead, the IT manager rounded up a bunch of recent college graduates (who were much cheaper). Problem solved.

There were roughly 80 workstations that were being installed, each with two 70MB drives. One drive kept the operating system files (which the users couldn't modify), the other was the user drive for work files. Each system was backed up and updated nightly with a three step process:

  1. Back up all files that have changed on each client's user drive.
  2. Replace old files on each client's system drive.
  3. Delete files that are no longer needed from each client's system drive. For this step it'd just remove any files from the system drive on the client's machine that didn't exist on the server so everyone had a consistent system drive.
The tech writers on...

The Opposite of Backup - Worse Than Failure

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