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Mike McCarthy is the author of an upcoming FS utility, AirBoss, which you can read about at his http://airbossproject.com forum web site. There you additionally will find articles on a variety of FS and aviation matters. Mike also writes on more general subjects for his http://www.mikeswritestuff.com forum web site. Interested readers are invited to join these web sites to contribute writing and posts of their own.
Cause I am going to reveal the secret of my success
So now you too can share in my continued happiness.
You will know the blissful peace of all the masters of old,
And everything you touch will turn to fourteen karat gold.
MC Mark Griffin, "Truth Is Out Of Style"
I'll cut to the chase. Subscribe to Carbonite or an equivalent service. If you do then what happened to Avsim will never happen to you. Not only will Carbonite make your backups for you automatically while you go about your work, it will send the backups offsite to a Great Computer In The Sky.
The operatives word here are "backups" and "offsite". Let's discuss them...
Why make backups? Because there are two groups of computer users: a) those who've experienced a computer disaster, and b) those who are going to. The only way to cope with disaster is to have made backups in advance, and the only way to ensure that the backups will actually be available when you need them is to have them stored and managed offsite by professionals.
If your rate of data change is relatively low then services like the above-mentioned Carbonite are the way to go. If your churn rate is high, or if you have many gigabytes of data that need to be backed up together as a dated set, then you must ftp your backup data to a hosted web site that you control, or you must record it on duplicate CDs/DVDs and give the media to a relative or friend for safekeeping at their place.
It's as with any kind of insurance. When disaster strikes, either you will have a policy in force or you will not. If not, shoulda coulda woulda will not help you. The only thing that will help you is to prepare in advance for the disaster you must assume is going to strike very soon.
You must look at the problem this way: How much work or data are you willing to lose?
If you're not willing to lose anything then you must back your work up as you go, to a removable flash drive if nothing else, or to a second computer on your LAN. After that you can rely on Carbonite to deal with the changed files on a more leisurely basis, secure in the knowledge that the absolutely latest versions of things will survive a crash of the hard drive of your primary system because they're safely up in Cyberspace.
You think you don't need to make backups? You think you're somehow immune?
Think again. Below I'm going to tell you a couple of war stories. These are simply two of the many disasters that have befallen me during the course of my 45-year computer industry career. However, since the second of these incidents in 1967 I have not lost any important data in spite of a never-ending series of mishaps that continue to the present day. That's because I learned my lessons - make frequent backups, and send the vital stuff offsite.
You can make up war stories of your own in advance of their happening. Use your imagination. Maybe a burglar is going to break in while you're out of your home and steal your computers. (It has happened to me.) Maybe a nearby lightning bolt is going to fry the electronics and scramble the disk recording surface. (It has happened to me.) Maybe your hard drive is going to suffer a catastrophic failure. (It has happened to me.)
Maybe, what if, blah blah blah. The question is not whether a disaster will strike you, but when.
My first disaster occurred in 1965 during the days of punch cards. As a consultant to Shell Oil Company I had written some very complex graphics software for flat bed plotters, in assembler. It ran on punch-card IBM 7094 computers, which were so large and expensive that to get machine time I had to drive from Princeton, NJ to midtown Manhattan where Shell's 7094 datacenter was located. (In current dollars, time on that machine was worth $3,000 per hour!)
One afternoon in the late fall of 1965 I parked downtown and took the subway up to Shell, carrying a 5,000 card tray containing the latest version of my software. I planned to have the datacenter staff duplicate the tray offline before running my assemble/test job on the big machine. That way I would have a backup of the latest version. In anticipation of that happy event I had discarded by previous total backup because the older cards in the set were wearing out and jamming Shell's card reader. So my only backup at the office was a printout of the next-most-recent version of the program, from several weeks back. (Idiot.)
I submitted the duplicate-and-run job and left for home. As I was climbing the stairs from the subterranean data center to the lobby of the building, the lights wavered several times, went out, came back on briefly, and then went out for good. It was the East Coast power blackout of 1965 though I didn't know this at first.
Emerging from the building I saw that all the lights in the immediate surrounding neighborhood were also dark, and I was told that the subways weren't running. I therefore walked from 50th street down to Greenwich Village. (The parking lot I used then is today the world-famous West Fourth Street pickup basketball court where the region's top amateur players meet.)
I got my car out of hock and drove out of The City through the now-dark Holland Tunnel, which was lit only by the headlights of the bi-directional car traffic. Emerging on the NJ side, the lights were still out. I proceeded west to the NJ Turnpike and headed south toward Princeton. As I passed Newark International I saw a pair of NJ Air Guard F86-D fighters parked at the north end of the main runway, the pilots seated in their dark cockpits, clearly on strip alert. (As a nation we probably had gone to Defcon Two though I don't recall any public discussion of this.)
I made it home with no problems but it was, I think, three days before power was restored to the Princeton area. When I went back to the Shell datacenter a few days later to pick up my job, the center staff couldn't find it. It had been lost in the confusion of the blackout. It took me several months to remember all the changes I had made since the old printout, and to re-key all of the 3,500 cards comprising my software, and to get it all tested and fixed again.
But all this incident did for me was to reinforce the importance of backups, which I had already known. I could and should have taken my card deck to another local company for duplication before going to Shell, but I didn't. I was lazy and paid the resulting price for not having made a proper backup.
You'd think that I would have learned about offsite backups from that incident but, in the immortal words of John Belushi, No-o-o-o. It took another equally bizarre incident to hammer that lesson into my brain. Now get this...
My company, ADR, was located on the second floor of a typical two-story brick-and-wood suburban office building. We were right across highway 18 from Princeton Airport's runway 27, maybe two hundred feet from the runway chevrons. So we were quite accustomed to the sound of low-flying GA aircraft on short final.
One noontime in the spring of 1967 I was at my desk working. Most people had gone to lunch but I had stayed behind for some reason. I heard a very loud and sudden aircraft engine burst of power and, already having my PPL, realized that an airplane was in serious trouble on short final. Having gotten low and slow myself on that same approach I realized that a crash might be imminent and I wanted OUT.
As I was starting to run from my office I felt the building shake. I realized immediately that the airplane had in fact hit the building and might very well be coming through our section at any second. I sprang to the nearby head of the staircase that led to the ground floor and took the flight stairs in two mighty leaps. I was out the door and in the parking lot within literally within about five seconds of my having heard the abnormal engine sounds. (It's amazing how fast your mind works in the face of sudden emergencies like this one, and it's amazing how acute all your senses become.)
Once safely outside I turned around. A GA aircraft was stuck in the roof of the building, about a hundred feet from my office, looking for all the world as if it were a lawn dart thrown into the building from above.
Flames burst out of the crash site immediately. I assumed the pilot was trapped in the wreckage and would burn to death. I'd like to be able to tell you that I was a hero, that I entered that section of the building, climbed to the second floor and pulled the pilot free.
But No-o-o-o, I didn't do that. I remember saying to myself "I don't care about the pilot, I care only about me. I don't care that he might be burning to death. I'm not going back into that building for any reason, period end of discussion." I'm not proud of my reaction but at least I'm honest about it. I'm terribly afraid of fire and simply could not bring myself to obey my conscience as it told me to act while there was still time.
But there really wasn't time. Within a minute the entire ridgeline of the wood A-frame roof was on fire. Within five minutes the entire second floor was ablaze, and within ten minutes the roof collapsed. (Princeton Airport being somewhat out in what was the boondocks at the time, the fire department didn't arrive till about fifteen minutes after the crash.)
While all this was going on people were emerging from both sections of the building, ours and that of the company next door. Our own staff on the ground floor had broken out some of the windows of a computer room and, even after the roof had collapsed, were handing disk packs out to colleagues on the outside. Reels of magtape. Trays of punchcards. Microfiche. Paper tape. DECtape. And so on. It was clear that the machine room, with its twin IBM 360s and its PDP-10, was going to be a total loss to some combination of fire and water damage (if the fire department got there in time).
None of this data was backed up offsite. Therefore the people who were braver than I risked their lives to rescue as much of it as they could. If they hadn't, ADR would have gone out of business.
This time I had a backup. In fact, I had duplicate backups, on DECtape, a very reliable ancient computer medium of the 60s/70s. Trouble was, both backup tapes were in my office -- and I had decided not to go there either. My office burned right down to the floor, the fire taking my professional library, and my collection of rock and roll pioneer autographs, all gotten by me backstage at the Brooklyn Paramount Theater over a four year period.
(As Chuck Berry sang in "Sweet Little Sixteen", "Her wallet's filled with pictures. She gets 'em one by one." But I'm a nerd and the autographs I got were on index cards. I got everybody who was anybody except Chuck Berry, who never wanted anything to do with fans. I even got Bo Diddley, another standoffish performer. But I digress.)
The fire also burned up my wallet, the charred remains of which I found the next day. As a result I had what arguably was the country's only legally burned draft card. (This was 1967, after all, complete with protests against the Vietnam War draft.)
Regrettably, totally burned up in my wallet was a picture of my first real girlfriend, 13-year-old Barbsie Fisher. It was the first picture I had ever developed myself. My wife didn't know it but I carried that picture in my wallet for ten full years till it was destroyed. (She still doesn't know about the picture.)
So what happened that day? I tracked the pilot down in the parking lot and got the following story from him . . .
Flying his newly-purchased Bellanca over central NJ, he ran out of fuel at low altitude. (Idiot, you should never fly below 500 feet AGL without good reason, preferably 2,000 feet.) Needing a place to land immediately, he passed up a perfectly suitable open field (idiot) in order to try to make the end of runway 27. Unfortunately this required him to make a steep, high-G turn to the left. (Idiot.)
This intrepid airman had forgotten to turn the magnetos off, elementary if you're going to make a crash landing. When he wracked the airplane around a final slug of fuel reached the engine, which briefly surged back to life at full throttle. (Idiot, you're supposed to close the throttle, too.)
The resulting torque rolled him inverted and he crashed into the roof upside down at about a sixty degree nose down angle. Fortunately for him, the wood roof absorbed much of the kinetic energy of the crash. The remaining kinetic energy was soaked up by the crushing of the steel desk onto which the nose of the aircraft impacted. (At least he had been wearing his seat belt.)
Fortunately, the office into which he crashed was unoccupied - - everybody had gone to lunch. The pilot was unhurt. He opened his pilot side door, carefully unbelted himself in his upside down position and then carefully lowered himself to the floor. He then left the office, frightened but unhurt and unburned. (But it was close. Had he been knocked unconscious he would have died in the fire.)
And so, my friends, Stuff Happens.
Murphy being firmly in control of all things having to do with computers, anything can happen to you at any time. As I said earlier, when disaster strikes you will either have an insurance policy in force (offsite backups) or you will not.
Mike McCarthy
mike@pcgamecontrols.com
http://www.airbossproject.com (under construction)
http://www.mikeswritestuff.com
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