Flashes of Panic

When you do systems administration and are professionally paranoid, you think a lot about backup policies. In particular, you think about off-site backups. What’s the point of having a copy of something, for example, if you’re storing it in the same place as the original? If you’re backing up your financial data, and the house burns down with both original and backup, what was the point?*

This explains why my department head from my pre-grad-school job sent me email today asking whether the safe deposit box key they found in a drawer in my old office was mine. It also leads us to a corollary to the off-site-backups policy: remember where you stored the backup.

* Of course, there is a point to keeping backups close by, and that’s that off-site backups are inconvenient for restoring files. Most professional paranoids advise a borderline-obsessive-compulsive regimen which involves frequent (e.g. daily) backups stored on-site, with less frequent (e.g. weekly) backups stored off-site, thus avoiding the convenience-vs.-safety conflict with overkill, attempting to both have the backup cake and eat it too.

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