Slashdot Mirror
The Institute for Backup Trauma
fief writes "John Cleese explains why tape based backup solutions will drive a manager insane in a viral marketing bit for Live Vault. (flash required) Produced by the Captains of Industry. Links provided via AdRants" Barely an ad, mostly just hilarious. Also contains Michael Dorn. Use as directed.
No joke. His previous company was called Fred and Ted Entertainment, which made similar videos that can be found at http://www.fredandted.com
Their whole skit about "Ambulatory Mortosis" is one of their funniest.
http://www.fredandted.com/Mortosis/index.html
Congrats, Fred. You made Slashdot's front page. Now let's see if your servers can take the slashdotting...
What can I say? I'm a harsher judge of marketing pieces generally. Lines like the boss saying he'd "fire your family... and your ancestors" just seemed like flat writing to me. If you're gonna have a major comedic god like John Cleese in the mix, you should make sure the writing is up to it. I clicked in and absorbed the marketing message, so I've upheld my end and that's my opinion. Those who disagree can take solace in the fact that my harsh opinion has been modded safely out of view as a "troll."
"...all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness..." yada yada
Although not commercial, here is what I do.
I live in Wisconsin and a friend of mine lives in Nevada. He has a broadband connection and so do I. My home server has 2x200 GB hard drives mirrored. His server also has 2x200 GB hard drives mirrored. I can use half the space for my data on both servers and he can use the other half. Every other day at 3am, my server rsyncs over ssh to his. The same occurs every other day when his rsyncs with my server.
We do a full tape backup every week on Saturday and incremental backups every day. I take the full backups to my safe deposit box at the bank.
I guess what I am saying is that if any of your friends or family have a broadband connection, ask if you can use it for backup. Offer them storage space for backup or money to house a Linux box you can use as offsite backup.
If your data is extremely important, make sure you encrypt it. One time my friend thought he dropped a tape in a parking lot. I was conserned for weeks until he found the tape under the seat of his car. I learned my lesson and now encrypt everything that is important to me.
I remember in the late 70's in England my Father coming back from some training course or other raving about the films they had been shown starring John Cleese, and he was always hyped on the fact that Cleese actually made people learn through laughter. I can't remember specifics but Dad worked for Thorne EMI who were in the Security business.
On the other hand, tape has NONE of these flaws. Even if your tape drive explodes in a fireball from a lightning strike, the tapes will be fine, and can be read in another drive.
And yet here's a company trying to encourage people to migrate away from tape backups? Yes, they have a good offering -- remote backups. But that can (and should) be done with tape (possibly to disk first, but with a second copy on tape or other offline media).
Sorry to make the only on-topic post in the entire story, but I just couldn't handle the FUD.