Larry's Off His Meds. …Again

Disaster Recovery and YOU! June 2, 2010

You know, if you’ve spent any time with man made devices, you will learn one thing.  When you need them most, they will go Tango Uniform.  Computers are no different than the plow our forbearers used, at some point it will go bad and when it does, you will need to replace it.

Now, if a plow breaks, the land it plows doesn’t care that you just got Plow 2.0 from the local blacksmith.  But if your computer breaks, it also takes the happy little files that made it useful with it.  All gone…  BYE BYE. Never to have that priceless hacked video of the celeb du jour making her “home movie” debut.

But, if you planned ahead, you probably have back ups of all your important data locked away on another computer OR some form of less fickle media.  So you can make sure your bills get paid and all your files are left intact.  Your files are part of your digital plow.  They are not the field.

Most people know this.  Most people have some important things like pictures or wills on DVD, CD, Flash drives, and the like.  Now imagine it was YOUR JOB.  Imagine there was the fanciful vocation called, oh I don’t know…  An IT manager?

Let’s imagine that job was on this planet to ensure the smooth day to day functioning of computers and their data.  So that when something goes to that great e-Waste bin in the sky, the end users are back up and running in just a few minutes.

If that job existed, part of its sandbox would be to back up ALL the important data.  …Because data is part of the package.  Remember the plow analogy?  So when a computer went plotz, they would simply walk over to the media shelf and pull out a back up of that computer’s data (or at least the important bits).  If they were top notch IT Managers, if the media on the shelf was bad, they would saunter off site and pull some very secure copy of the data for a magical sacred place.  …Probably their own home fire safe.

One thing you would never hear out of the mouths’ of these mythical job holders is, “No one told me I needed to do disaster recovery backups!”  They would never say that for fear of being stoned in the town square for being idiots not worthy of breeding or breathing.

*mutters something about consultants and wannabes and mass graves when he runs the universe*