851–860 of 987 posts
Jim Hacker: How am I going to explain the missing documents to The Mail? Sir Humphrey: Well, this is what we normally do in circumstances like these. Jim Hacker: (reading) This file contains the complete set of papers, except for a number of secret documents, a few others which are part of still active files, some correspondence lost in the floods of 1967… Was 1967 a particularly bad winter? Sir Humphrey: No, a marve…
"The stored data amounts to 858TB (terabytes), equivalent to 449.5 billion A4 sheets" Just so we can all visualise this in an understandable way, if laid end-to-end how many times round the world would the A4 sheets go? And what is their total area in football fields?
Actual football fields please, the International Standard Unit footbal field, used in SI countries.
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To be fair, tape backups are very much ok as a disaster recovery solution. It's cheap once you have the tape drive. Bandwith is mostly fine if you want to read them sequentially. It's easy to store and handle and fairly resistant. It's "only" poor if you need to restore some files in the middle or want your backup to act as a failover solution to minimise unavailability. But as a last resort solution in case of total…
The suits are stingy when it's not an active emergency. A former employer declined my request for $2K for a second NAS to replicate our company's main data store. This was just days after a harrowing data recovery of critical from a failing WD Green that was never backed up. Once the data was on a RAID mirror and accessible to employees again, there was no active emergency, and the budget dried up.
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Companies big enough will lay the fibre. 50-100 miles of fibre isn't much if you are a billion dollar business. Even companies like BlackRock who had their own datacenters have since taken up Azure. 50 miles latency is negligible, even for databases.
The WTC attacks were in the 90s and early 00s and back then, 50 miles of latency was anything but negligible and Azure didn’t exist. I know this because I was working on online systems back then. I also vividly remember 9/11 and the days that followed. We had a satellite dish with multiple receivers (which wasn’t common back then) so had to run a 3rd party Linux box to descramble the single. We watch 24/7 global news…
Latency is defined by physics (speed of light, through specific conductors or fibres).
Bandwidth is determined by technology, which has advanced markedly in the past 25 years.
Even a quarter century ago, the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes was pretty good, even if the latency was high. Physical media transfer to multiple distant points remains a viable back-up strategy should you happen to be bandwidth-constrained in realtime links. The media themselves can be rotated / reused multiple times.
Various cloud service providers have offered such services, effectively a datacentre-in-a-truck, which loads up current data and delivers it, physically, to an off-site or cloud location. A similar current offering from AWS is data transfer terminals: https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/01/aws-opens-physical-locatio...>. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42293969>.
Edit to add: from the above HN discussion Amazon retired their "snowmobile" truck-based data transfer service in 2024: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/aws-retires-snowm...>.
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You should look at the previous president of SK. Maybe a few more too... they frequently land in jail... I'm not sure Yoon Suk Yeol had any shame https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Yoon_Suk_Yeol
The weird thing is 13 days later his temporary successor Han was also impeached, basically because he vetoed two bills doing investigations into Yoon. IIRC, the constitutional court wasn’t fully appointed yet. And also apparently, an impeachment is a simple majority in the Assembly, and appears the DPK (the current majority party) has been impeaching everyone they disagree with. My wife, who’s from Korea, says that L…
Its bizarre how easy it to make smart people on HN just assume people who are doing something weird are just low IQ. Its almost weirdly a personality trait that a trained programmer just goes around believing everyone around him doesnt understand what way the wind blows. Government installation for backups for a government ruled by a weird religious sect, have no offsite backups, it goes up in flames? Well clearly th…
The problem is more likely culture, hierarchy or corruption. Guaranteed several principal security architects have been raising the alarm on this internally along with much safer, redundant, secure alternatives that came with an increased cost. And decision makers who had a higher rank/social/networking advantage shot it down. Maybe the original storage designer was still entrenched there and sabotaging all other proposals out of pride. Or there's an unspoken business relationship with the another department providing resources for that data center that generates kickbacks.
Assuming nobody knows how to do an offsite backup or is plain ignorant of risk over there is arrogant.
While I am sure a huge portion of valuable work will be lost, I am smirking thinking of management making a call, "So, if there is any shadow IT who has been running mirror databases of valuable infrastructure, we would have a no questions asked policy on sharing that right now". I know that I have had to keep informal copies of valuable systems because the real source of truth is continually patched,offline,churn,wh…
Reminds me when Toy Story 2 was deleted and they found the backups on an artist's laptop that was working from home.
technically, it was the supervising technical director.
The only reason this happened (I don't think "working from home" was very common in 1999) was because she just had a baby! I love this story because it feels like good karma – management providing special accommodations for a new mom saves the show.
this is the kind of thing that is so fundamental to IT that not doing it is at best negligence and at worst intentional malpractice. There is simply no situation that justifies not having backups and I think it might be worth assuming intentionality here, at least for purposes of investigation. It looks like an accident but someone (perhaps several someones, somefew if you will) made a series of shriekingly bad decisions in order to put themselves in a precarious place where an accident could have an effect like this.