Cloud Cuckoo Land?

Posted by Mark on Nov 18, 2008

So, the people who brought us Vista have “unveiled” Azure so that now our data and applications can live somewhere else, in this place named “The Cloud”.

Rather than seeing this as a retrograde step, a reverse back to the time-sharing mainframes of the 1970’s and 1980’s, where access to a computer was often via renting a portion of someone else’s, this does seem to be a possible answer to the problems of data storage, application management, and data access, and one that takes away much of the headache of managing ones own infrastructure for the purpose.

But, who guards the guards?
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Catch-22, or “don’t keep the only copy of the software on the tape”

Posted by Mark on Oct 20, 2008

Ever had one of those days where having tried to do everything correctly that nasty stomach churning feeling becomes overwhelming as you realise that there is a major problem and a simple restore could now be a major tape data recovery issue.

You have the backup tape, you have the tape drives, but the only copy of the backup software is within a backup set on the tape and this backup is from 14 years ago and the software is not sold any more.
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More data lost

Posted by Mark on Oct 10, 2008

This time we hear that a contractor has lost a portable hard drive containing 1.5 million records of military personnel, and that it was not encrypted.

Presumably, with the economic crisis being a “good time to bury bad news”, not a lot will happen. Will we ever get the answer to the one rather simple question about what happened?

What on earth was anyone doing copying 1.5 million service records on to a portable hard disk?
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Another one bites the dust

Posted by Mark on Oct 10, 2008

So it looks as though Fujitsu are about to handover their hard disk reins to Western Digital, or so the rumours abound. With IBM out of the picture, Maxtor having gone the say of Seagate how long before we are left with only one supplier for disk storage? Wonder who that will be.
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Altirium launch improved optical media data recovery service

Posted by Mark on Sep 23, 2008

Optical media (DVD, CD, MO disk) tend to fall at the lower end of the data recovery service market in that the the costs for recovery cannot always be justified even though with some problems the work required far outstrips that for a hard disk or tape recovery.
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RAID data recovery leaps forward

Posted by Mark on Sep 23, 2008

Failure of a RAID system can seem like the end of the world for the stressed out people trying to find out what is wrong whilst fending off the attentions of the accounts department, members of the board of directors and probably people from every department who have data stored on the RAID and want to access is “now - thank you very much”.

Traditionally RAID data recovery has been a protracted process because of the greater complexity and the lack of flexibility in those recovery tools that are publicly available. A faster service could sometimes be achieved only by increasing risk by not securing data before starting work.

Now this has changed with Altirium’s latest RAID recovery software the process can be completed within a few hours.
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