As I write this, it is abundantly clear that for the little law office on the prairie, Persephone has not yet returned to Demeter’s loving arms and the only technology I’m actively searching for is a front end loader with a longer reach.
Out here, the size of the clean up technology is fairly accurate gauge of a winter’s severity; a mild winter may never rate more than a simple snowplow to push the snow from the drive (FYI, when it is more convenient to refer to your driveway’s length in fractions of a mile than in feet, shovels are automatically obsolete), a normal winter’s driveway clearing may require hauling out the skid loader or a snowblower (this is a device that is attached to the backend of a moderately sized tractor and capable of chewing an 8’ wide path through your average snowbank or small compact car), and then there are severe winters.
These are the winters where the snow banks on the sides of the road turn 2 lane country roads into single lanes, driveways start to resemble a bowling alley with the gutter bumpers inflated, and sidewalks are simply trenches that occasionally open on to crosswalks and the technology escalates to the front end loader as the goto tool – it’s not that the other tech won’t clear today’s snow fall, its that we’ve moved from managing the single event to managing an entire season’s worth of events. A severe winter means that we’re not just moving snow off the drive, it means that once it’s off the drive it will need to be moved somewhere for semi-permanent storage, someplace that won’t interfere with daily operations and won’t turn into a small lake once spring decides to make an appearance.
All of this is, to my somewhat but not entirely unthawed neurons, a somewhat useful but terribly stretched analogy for data storage strategies and technologies.
When it comes to sweeping data from the electronic version of your drive (be it an inbox, a desktop, or a hard drive), where you put the detritus is a fair gauge of the data’s importance. The ephemeral bits, like that animated gif from lolcats, can be safely stored in the equally ephemeral and almost ubiquitous USB stick drive (preferably, that 1 Gb bit of swag you got at last month’s convention).
For the useful but relatively static and replaceable, one hauls out the backup software and drops these files into a once-a-month schedule. I know, not very strategic but it is better than loading this junk back in from original sources (you do keep the original sources some place off-line don’t you).
Then there is that mission-critical stuff. You know, the stuff that, should it vanish into the dimension of lost coat hangers and single socks, will turn your hair gray, your stomach into knots, and bring the dark side of the PR board down upon you. The stuff that deserves the big guns – a RAID array and incremental backups to both internal and external locations. Just like a severe winter’s snow, this is not about simply keeping our electronic desktop clean, it is about managing the semi-permanent storage of our business’ life blood and when it comes to electronics, semi-permanency requires redundancy. Remember:
- 97.3% of hard drives last 3 years
- Optical media averages 25 years before stored data becomes inaccessible
- Magnetic tape averages 100 passes before degradation begins
- Someone always wins the lottery
And the goal is to make sure that should you win, the melt won’t turn your thriving practice into a puddle.
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