Misc. Ramblings

There's a letter to the editor (Sorry, the link to the letter dies at the end of the day. When will these people learn?), lamenting the loss of her laptop. There is a hard lesson here for her and others like her working on important projects.

Actually, what she's missing the most is the three-years worth of data she gathered for her PhD. From her request for the data, I assume she did not make a backup copy.

The lesson here, of course, is to make backup copies. I say copies because you need to have more than one copy and each copy should be in a distant geographic area - the more distant the better.

To begin with, if you have no copies, you place yourself in a single point of failure situation. As in this case, having her laptop stolen means everything is lost.

If you have at least one copy you have a chance of continuing on. But that chance is lowered if the copy is in the same location as the original. As an extreme example, if the copy was on the same laptop, having the copy wouldn't be of any use. Having the copy on a disk next to the laptop might not be much better if the thief takes the disk or if the problem is a fire that burns the laptop and the backup disk. If the copy is kept in the same house as the laptop, you should at least invest in a fire resistant safe.

But having a safe doesn't do you much good if the problem is a tornado, flood, or earthquake and everything is destroyed. Hence, my recommendation to keep copies in as distant a location as possible. For example, you can use Google's Gmail system with its 1GB storage as one place to backup a copy. Or if you have an ISP that allows a certain amount of network storage you might use that. You could even just snail mail a copy to a friend that lives at least several hundred (if not several thousand) miles away.

As a personal example, when I was working on my masters a couple of years ago, our work group had at least eight copies of our project at any point in time. One of the copies was stored on my host server in Pennsylvania. A second was stored on Hotmail as an email attachment. A third was on a CD at work. Four and five at my house (one on my PCs hard drive and the other on CD) and the other three with the other members of our group on their PCs.

The point is, as the data becomes more irreplaceable, the number of copies and locations should increase. I feel for this student but also wonder why her advisor didn't tell her to make backup copies (one of my undergraduate professors, bless his departed soul, told everyone to make backup copies of important projects. This was back in the late 1970s so this advice is not something new.), or why she didn't see the need to make them on her own. I can only hope she kept hard copies of the data somewhere or can otherwise replicate the missing information. If not, this will indeed be a hard lesson to have to learn.

Aloha!