Offsite tape storage?

Wed Jul 16 13:52:13 PDT 2003

On Wed, 16 Jul 2003, David Wolfskill wrote:
> I never did have occasion to test their timliness for providing the
> canister in the event of an emergency recall, so I cannot comment on
> that.

My worst experience with returned backup tapes was purely due to in
house... uh... "assistance" ;>

The tapes apparently arrived promptly, within 24 hours as requestest.
Unfortunately they never appeared at my desk. When they still hadn't
arrived by the next morning, I started chasing everybody around the
datacenter, looking for them. No joy.

Complained to the vendor - who had a signed bit of paper (where we
couldn't read the signature) that said we'd received them.

Still more chasing around eventually determined that there had been
two sets of tapes requested at the same time. Both had arrived - and
had been delivered to the other requestor. They'd looked at the labels,
noticed that one set didn't have the right name on them... shrugged,
and stuffed them into their tape jukebox.

*Gah*!

Total data loss, since they'd formatted the entire lot of tapes, after
retreiving what they needed!

cheers!
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"A cat spends her life conflicted between a deep, passionate and profound
desire for fish and an equally deep, passionate and profound desire to
avoid getting wet.  This is the defining metaphor of my life right now."