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Neither Rain, Nor Snow, Nor Dark of Night...
Digital_Quartz writes "This week's I, Cringely discusses possible plans for ensuring your data survives Hurricane Frances. I've always though remote backups would be the best solution to a problem like this. Maybe even something as simple as hiding a DVD-R under your desk at work, with all your worldly data on it. How do you secure your precious data against earthquakes, hurricanes, and swarms of locusts?" Reader pillageplunder writes "CNN is reporting: 'Scientists say more storms like Frances -- both very intense and very large -- are likely.' They theorize that warming oceans natural cycles are setting the stage. Some interesting facts throughout the article... Forecasting has gotten better, with a 3 day forecast now having a margin of error or 'only' 200 miles." And an anonymous reader writes "For those peer-2-peer geeks stuck in hurricane Frances, you can now listen to Central Florida Indymedia's coverage of the hurricane. In addition to giving updates about the hurricane, they are playing music, interviews, and relaying other radio stations. Possibly more interesting than the content to Slashdot readers will be the fact that it is being done via peer-2-peer. The java program p2p-radio from p2p-radio.sourceforge.net is being used in conjunction with shoutcast to deliver the content. Details on how to connect are available here on Tampa Indymedia's Website."
Keep a nitro sniffn' DeLorean parked in the garage with a terabyte of storage on board, then, with any amount of Warning, 1,2,3 days, hell, one hour, you best hall ass!!!!!!! of course, in the proper direction. If you have other valuable computers you do not want to leave behind, you will need a trailer and a hitch.
Anyone seen my jagged little pill?
Don't forget the guy from UCLA that is predicting a 6.5ish earthquake in southern california within the next few days.
I set my father and my sister up with linux boxes to act as web server, mail server and storage.
Now, I send 20G to my sister's system (arizona), my sister sends up to my father's system (stuart fl), and my father's system will be sending it to me (Colorad) (Unfortunately, it was not a high priority, but it will be that way once he gets home and cleans up).
Simply trade space with friends.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It looks like Jacksonville Beach is going to be spared the worst of this storm, but as usual, you really don't know where the storm is going to land until the last minute.
If the storm turns towards us at a bad time a lot of people are going to be heading to shelters. I'm heading to our hosting facility. Diesel backup power, redundant Internet connections, built like a bunker, away from the ocean.
My servers are in the safest place I can think to go.
It doesn't take a hurricane to teach website operators about backup problems, though. Worms that infect and destroy hosting service servers, or router attacks that effectively shut a hosting service down for days produce the same kind of collection of panicked webmasters.
Just backing up website data files is only a part of a website backup plan. You really want at least two independent (that means both geographically independent, and not run by the same company -- don't forget the "FBI shuts down hosting company" scenario) DNS servers listed as authoritative for your domain. Very few websites meet even that lone requirement.
You don't have good data backup if you can't demonstrate that you can recover from disaster, and the same is pretty much true for website backup. If you can't show that you can, within at least a matter of hours, have your website running on a machine it's never lived on before and serving "real" requests from the outside world, then you shouldn't really bother reading the fine print about whether your hosting company claims it offers 99.9% uptime or 99.99% uptime.
If you are in business you should be using something like DataSafe, who will take your backup tapes and put them in very safe keeping should you need them.
Not true, there are hurricanes in Wisconson and Minnesota. Of course by the time they make it even the worst of them are minor storms, less powerful than a normal summer thunderstorm. If it wasn't for the weathermen looking for trivia like hurricanes to try to make things interesting we would never know.
There are worse things than saying something positive about the Vikings, you slip in something positive about the packers for instance.
The best camera is the Miami Beach ultra high resolution panoramic webcam. 8000 x 2320 pixels.
thinking of keeping data intact, do you think it's possible to store data in the internet.
if you had enough hosts constantly passing packets between each other it should be theoretically possible to store some information exclusively within the packets during the routing transfer.
Meaning, as soon as the data was passed to a router the node running the host sofware could free the memory space it previously occupied.
imagine RAIS (Redundant Array of Independant Systems). A p2p network on which you dedicate 10mb of disk space.
5mb for your files, and 5mb for encrypted parity files for the other users. (storage amounts here are merely speculation).
If your computer is hit by a comet or a sperm whale falls on it then the documents you saved on this network remain. Just log in with your username and retrieve your documents.
This wouldn't be practical for storage of very large things; say media files.
But it should be well suited for small important files: documents and such.
Now, in this network there would be a good deal of latency while packets are passed between hosts (replication, storage swapping).
During these precious milliseconds these packets carry information. since the data is being routed we can strike it from the host.
There would need to be some serious acknowledgement mechanisms for guaranteeing the integrity of this data as is lives in it's spectre form - and I don't currently see how that would be accomplished.
Nonetheless, it's an intriguing idea.
both the encrypted p2p storage network and the spectred storage.
Maybe even something as simple as hiding a DVD-R under your desk at work, with all your worldly data on it.
Better check your employment agreement before you do that. If you develop code 'on the side' it could be difficult to prove that you didn't do any work on it at work. Maybe the company could claim ownership simply because it was on their premises. Definately could muddy the legal waters - tread carefully.
Concrete Nail Gun, 4 Nails, 4 Lenghts of Chain, one Personal Safe with an attachment point.
Place 250 Gig hard drive inside, packed in bubble wrap and newspaper one foot thick.
Larger, roomier, and probably more readily available than a proper heavy floor safe (I think they sell them at Walmart). Plus, you can bolt most of them down, and many come with fire-resistant liners.
Add a waterproof container and lock your safe, and you can probably evacuate with impunity.
Side note: a friend of mine was researching buying just such an item a few years back, and had literature from a bunch of companies. The funniest brochure had a series of pictures of safes involved in various disasters... they were all the same: big pile of ashes/rubble/timbers, with the scorched-but-otherwise-intact safe sticking up out of the rubble.
IIRC, the same phenomenon was noted in Nagasaki after the atomic bomb was dropped... the four Mosler vaults of the Teikoku bank were found still standing in the middle of the ruins, contents intact.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
I was going to pack my PC in the trunk and take it with me (full tower packed with hard drives) but changed my mind.
I backed up all my critical personal data to DVD and took it with me to our data center near Ft. Lauderdale, Florida where I spent the night on an air mattress in an empty office.
The data center is rated to take a high category 3 strike on the outside of the building (140 mph reinforced glass windows) and up to a category 5 strike on the reinforced concrete data center core. We also have 2 X 1500kw generators and enough fuel to last over a week.
I was actually looking out the window a few minutes ago and you would hardly think there was a hurricane coming. It looked a bit wet but only a light breeze.
We have about 40 people here (the disaster recovery team and their families) and a lot of them brought their pets as well (I can hear a dog barking from an office down the hall).
I should have a great view of the hurricane as it comes through due to the large reinforced glass windows (wish I had brought a video camera) and am not as concerned now that it has been downgraded to a category 2.
The only thing that would suck is if my home floods as I have a LOT of computer and home theater equipment on or near the floor. I have shutters up to protect the windows but there is nothing I can do to stop flooding.
Well I am just rambling on now. There is nothing else to do except wait at this point and at the speed Francis is moving I could easily be in here for another 24 to 36 hours.
"Bleach, unless used in huge quantities (worse than swimming pool water), then let sit for a few hours, then boiled for 10 minutes, will not be effective."
It does not take as much as you think if the water is fairly safe to start with. 2 tbs per gallon and left sit for 30 minutes after shaking is a safe way to sterilize the water. Almost all city water supplies use chlorine is some form to treat the drinking water. Boiling may not be possible as you would not have electricity and open flames in a closed up home is dangerous.
Where I am, the rock filters the water well enough that 100 ft from a septic tank and drain field the bacteria count is in the safe level. Even after Andrew, our water was safe to drink without any treatment.