The Underscore Archives

On 16 Nov 2007, at 21:21, andrew holway wrote:

>> then at the crack of every dawn a man on a bike would turn up
>
> Most business don't generate very much data at all. Certainly not
> enough to warrant man on bike action.
>
> Remember, it is not necessary to take a disk home with you. There are
> utilities that only transfer the changes that have been made to your
> filesystem.
>
> Lookup rsync, its open source and available for windows.

Yep... we were generating about 3 or 4 CDs of data a day: mostly  
document scans (particulars of most properties on sale in central  
London), but some database stuff too.  Hell, I was pushing for the  
original paper archive to be put into safe fireproof storage,  
considering the value of that data... a unique archive of property  
sales information in probably the most important real estate market in  
the world, stretching back 20 years.  Instead, we had it stacked up in  
box files in the office next to the overheating server room.

I ended up getting an ADSL line to the boss's house and rsync'ing the  
images across to a dedicated PC I put there, with it running a  
database slave with a cron to take innodb backups regularly.

It didn't work too well in testing though: the image sync was taking  
quite a long time, and the slave DB could barely keep up for some  
reason.  So, it never got installed; at least while I was there.


Regardless, I think many businesses would pay money for the peace of  
mind of an organised isolated physical backup procedure run by  
experts, even if it was less than a floppy's worth of data a day.   
There's something more tangible about media being physically  
transferred offsite rather than newfangly fairy dust interweb  
bollocks, as I'm sure my old boss would describe it.

I bet I could find a whole bunch of estate agents in central London  
that would subscribe.  I bet I could get them to pay extra if the  
biker had an attache case handcuffed to his wrist, even if it did make  
him crash the bike.

Tom

-- 
Tom Gidden
http://gidden.net/tom/