Break Points
Hurricane Season
Jack Ganssle
7/13/2009 4:35 PM EDT
Four years ago my son started college. In late August we moved him into his dorm. Completely serious, I said: "Graham, you have the best room on campus. If you look over the levy you can see the lake!"
That was a week before Hurricane Katrina. The school: The University of New Orleans.
Once upon a time we believed in keeping off-site backups. Katrina taught us how short-sighted this is. Now we know that off-site backups must be 1000 miles away. Mother Nature has been angry of late, and it turns out she can take out a city.
So can the bad guys. Or, they will be able to before too many years go by. Though it hurts to think about the possibility, wise companies, especially those located in a dense metropolis, are at risk from all sorts of attacks. Lose the building or the city and all of the data preserved there will be gone.
Then there's the threat of EMP. The Wikipedia entry is practically a handbook for designing an EMP attack. Some correspondents claim, and I don't know if this is true, that solar events can cause EMP-like effects.
This all sounds greatly alarmist, but risk management is an essential part of running a team. The greatest asset most of our groups have is probably our IP, represented in CAD drawings and source code. A fire, water damage or a rogue employee can take our all of the locally-stored IP. Other factors, like the ones listed above, can destroy even off-site backups.
Keep a backup in another state.
A lot of folks use the cloud. There are a lot of services out there, like JungleDisk, which encrypt your code and feed it into networks of servers. Your legal group may have issues with this, but it's a technically-attractive solution. One wonders, however, what an EMP-like event would do to a server farm.
Someday the accountants will realize just how much of a company's value is tied up in source code. Till that day we engineers have to protect this vital, and all-too-vulnerable, asset.
Of course, according to a news story on Physorg.com we may soon get non-volatile memory good for a billion years!
Jack G. Ganssle is a lecturer and consultant on embedded development issues. He conducts seminars on embedded systems and helps companies with their embedded challenges. Contact him at jack@ganssle.com. His website is www.ganssle.com.
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krwada
7/13/2009 10:03 PM EDT
What?
- no 5.25" floppies?
- no 1/4" streaming tape backup?
Actually, from what I can see, there is a pretty mixed up set of different ways that folks do backup nowadays. Personally, I use those USB flash drives to just backup the data. The corporations use something much more sophisticated ... I am certain of that!
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Alex OD.
7/14/2009 4:03 PM EDT
You know, simply e-mailing the code to my client gets me a back up at my e-mail provider, and again in my clients PC. Sure, not necessarily secure, but still backed up.
Add to that CD back ups, surely they're EMP proof and flood resistant, but not fire and heat proof.
Some states are pretty small. Imagine being in Luxembourg and having your back up internationally held in Belgium, or the Netherlands, that is still within 100 miles.
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NevadaDave
7/15/2009 3:07 PM EDT
I think that we may be missing the point here - long-term archival storage is a real issue. How do we store important/historically significant documents so that they are accessible 100+ years from now? Paper has actually worked out pretty well, but it's not that zippy for digital data. I use a USB flash drive for my bank account info, and I carry it with me, just in case something happens to my desktop, but I have no illusions about it lasting for 20 or 30 years, but I don't need that much, However, there are many programs written over the last 50+ years that need to be stored for maintenance, revision, or whatever. No matter what the storage medium, modern systems require a system that can read and display the data, and a natural disaster can destroy EVERYTHING. On the other hand, a natural disaster of sufficient magnitude (such as the Yellowstone super-volcano going off)would make concerns about data storage irrelevant, as those still alive would be more concerned with food & shelter!
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Ray Keefe
7/16/2009 1:00 AM EDT
Long term data storage is certainly been an issue for a while. The relative usage lifetime of storage media has been progressively declining as we progress technology.
Rock and stone became paper of various types leading to books and then we had magnetic then optical storage and now FLASH and magnetic storage. I am ignoring lots of interim measure like punch cards.
So a genuine, robust, long term storage solutions till awaits discovery. And them you have to be able to read it when you need to.
It is a concern for systems using FLASH based microcontrollers. These devices have an expected 10 to 20 year life for the stored code. Meaning that a good proportion of them will executing something that is now different to the originally stored code in that timeframe. Statistical outliers will occur earlier and later.
I recently read "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky ) and it featured, as part of the plot, the use of code that had been developed over a period of 5000 years. Which gets you thinking about how long you want you devices to really work for. Agains ignoring issues liek the need to improve efficiency to reduce energy use to assist with polluting the planet and improving the use of natural resources.
Quite a bit to think about.
Ray Keefe
http://www.successful.com.au
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daleinaz
7/16/2009 11:57 AM EDT
I remember reading a study the US government did in about 1985, looking for what archival medium to use that could be guaranteed to be readable in 50+ years. Many gov't records (military service, Social Security, patents) need to be kept that long, or even longer (birth certificates, copyright filings). After a long examination of magnetic tape, disks, microfilm, etc; the conclusion was, PAPER. Printed in human-readable form on acid-free paper, was the only thing they could be sure would be readable in 50+ years.
Of course, not everything needs to be kept that long, if the product was EOL'd five years ago, you may be safe in tossing the schematics and source code.
For personal storage (family photos and videos, primarily), remember that most writable CDs and DVDs use a dye, and fade in 10-20 years, so plan on rewriting them to a new disk every so often. For USB flash drives, most of those use multi-level cell (MLC) technology to increase density, these also have a fairly short guaranteed retention time. Besides, in 20 years, USB will have morphed into something new, and may not be able to read those old devices. How many of you can still read 5.25-inch floppies (~35 years old)? No, how about 3.5-inch floppies (~25 years old)? How much longer do you think DVD drives will also read CDs?
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Matt S.
7/16/2009 3:00 PM EDT
In the days following 9/11, the companies that had set up contracts with total solution providers, such as IBM, were able to be up and running within a short time. The backup providers set up huge camps across the river in New Jersey and literally brought the "lucky" companies back from the dead. These actual events can serve perhaps to show the validity of the cloud storage concept for smaller companies who need to backup just a few terabytes. Indeed, off-site backups far away.
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cloudberryman
7/20/2009 3:36 AM EDT
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