Data Longevity Management
<sigh> yes, I really did that...
Part of my reason for leaving the RBS was that I had a great idea for a business.
Since forever 99.999% of people using computers have been terrible at backing up the data that is most important to them.
You’re probably saying “oh shit” in your head right now.
Don’t feel bad, you’re in the cool group who are going to lose everything one day and blame someone else.
You’ll get the shits when your computer help person of choice is unable to magically restore that which you have neglected your whole life.
It’s like expecting a doctor to reverse your morbid obesity because you’re on your 5th heart attack.
But I digress.
I had decided that I would try to create and run a Data backup business.
In my infinite IT guy marketing and design wisdom, I called it “Data Longevity Management”.
Partly because it was what I was offering and mostly because it was the same initials as my name.
And, before you ask, yes, thank you. I did design this little beauty of a logo <ahem>.
$4000. I spent $4000 on a DAT drive – a Digital Audio Tape drive that I planned to use to visit customers and backup all their data, keep it safely off-site, and restore it when things inevitably went pear shaped.
That’s a lot of money now, let alone back then in the early 90s.
What the hell was I thinking?
This was a terrible idea!!
As it turned out the drive was slow, unreliable at recovering data and continually malfunctioning.
I couldn’t offer customers anything better than they already had.
How not to back up with floppy disks.
About the only job I remember from Data Longevity Management was one that Tony brought to me/us.
Yeah, he wanted to work with me on it (or something like that).
Anyway, a real estate agent had had a machine crash and their main customer database etc. went with it.
They had been diligently backing up onto floppy disks using a commercial backup program installed by a previous IT person.
They handed us the box of 10 floppy disks and said, “we backup to these every week”.
Great!
But no matter how we tried we could not get these disks to be recognised by the program that created them.
We could, kind-of, see that they were supposed to be the right disks, but the data was encrypted and that was as far as we could get.
In an attempt to work out what was going on we asked the person performing the backups what exactly they had been told and what they were doing.
Here’s what they said:
“The computer guy said run this program [points to program on PC] and when it says to put in disk 1, put in disk 1. When it says to put in disk 2 put in disk 2 and so. He gave me this box of 10 disks.”
Did that number of disks grow with time?
“Yes.”
What number did it get to?
“12”
So where are the other 2 disks?
“There aren’t any more disks.”
What did you do when the program asked for disk 11?
“I just put disk 1 back in”.
Oh crap!! And disk 12?
“I put disk 2 back in.”
Well, you are stuffed then.
There’s nothing we can do. Sorry. Your data is gone.
Amazingly they just shrugged their shoulders and took it on the chin.
I still wonder where the breakdown in communication happened there.
Did the person doing the backup ask a question when disk 11 first showed up and got shotdown by their supervisor?
Did they ask to buy more disks but weren’t allowed spend the money?
Were they really so clueless as to think that re-using disks 1 and 2 wouldn’t destroy what was already on them?
If the answer is yes to that last question, remember this is still relatively early days of computers in small business and almost no-one was IT savvy.
Why wouldn’t the mysteries of computers include some magical way of using a disk twice? (coz it kinda does).
For me, working out that someone would do that was a good lesson.
Tony and I had spent (read wasted) a lot of time on this by taking the problem at face value.
I doubt that we got paid for all that time.
Tony saw it as a challenge and wouldn’t back down.
Even then I really didn’t want to spend as much time on the issue as we did.
It wasn’t working. How many ways are we expected to attack this problem when clearly there’s only one outcome that’s good?
I seem to be genetically wired to want to make people happy and solve a problem for them.
I even feel sorry for a lot of them because it simply isn’t their fault.
And, as much as I learnt and tried to reign in this compulsion, to this day I still spend more time on customer problems than I should.
This does not make for a successful business model in the long run.