A Lifetime of Movies
Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher wrote in early December 2010 that his house had been burglarized and his son’s iPod, laptop, and cash, as well as a new jacket and other things were stolen. The thief took a picture of himself wearing the jacket and flashing a handful of cash he had just taken; then, the thief was so brazen as to post that picture to Fisher’s son’s Facebook page. This was just an ordinary crime with a criminal a bit cockier than most. As Fisher wrote, nobody was hurt and most items were replaceable.
The one irreplaceable item was data. On his laptop the son had a log of every movie he had watched in his entire life—“hundreds and hundreds,” along with comments about each one. But he had never backed up that file, let alone anything else on the laptop. “It’s gone—a reminder of the new reality that computers . . . have created, a world in which a document meant to last a lifetime can disappear in an instant . . .”
And how long would it have taken to copy that file to a memory stick?
If the purpose of backup is to protect against disaster, the backup must not also be destroyed in the disaster.
Personal computer users concerned with integrity can take home a copy of important disks as protection or send a copy to a friend in another city. If both secrecy and integrity are important, a bank vault, or even a secure storage place in another part of the same building can be used. The worst place to store a backup copy is where it usually is stored: right next to the machine.
