Backups in the modern world

On 4 Nov 2010 at 11:14, Terry Stewart wrote: I used to have a memo from a sysop who was given the task of running our customer's benchmark periodically to make sure that it ran with the latest batch of system changes. It was a long process, involving two mainframes, a sea of CDC 844 disk-pack drives and a very squirrely multiple-access controller for the disk farm. Data for the benchmark existed on 21 844 packs and we usually kept one working set and two backups on the shelf, though more could be created from tape if need be (a long process). His account of the night's activities started something like this: "I began the benchmark, when one of the drives went offline, I found that I could not bring it online, so I replaced the pack with a backup, which also did not come online. Suspecting the drive to be bad, I swapped the pack with that of another working drive, which refused to come online..." At the end of the night's mayhem, he'd managed to clobber 7 packs and about 11 drives. His memo was very detailed and it was horrifying to read the events as he recorded them. Sort of prescient of the Iomega "Click of Death", no? --Chuck