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In the current issue of MicroTimes there is a survey of 300 corp and
govt managers on the causes of loss of data. These people said that the
vast majority of data loss is caused by accidental deletions - i.e.,
HUMAN error. Viruses accounted for only 3% loss.
What is pertinent about this article, though, is the managers'
experience with backup data. Only 48% said that backups provide complete
protection. And 64 percent said that they had experienced faulty
backups.
And of course there is the case of Stanford University about three years
ago. One system crashed, losing several years of students' and
facultys' work. Their systems people attempted to restore the system
from backups, but the backups were faulty. And since they had simply
restored to the original hard disks, they wrote over what data may have
been recoverable! Years of work were completely lost. And of course
the people had not made their own backups (and here we're talking about
mostly text, which can be saved on floppies.)
If you are trading real-time, then you should have a real-time backup -
a second system ready to go. I can't say that my second system is
always up-to-the-tick ready, but it is close. And I know that the
backup data is good because after I copy it I can start TS and see it !
As a lesser backup, one could copy the entire Hard disk and then install
that one upon failure of the other, but that is time-comsuming.
Connecting two computers with Windows networking costs only about $50 -
you don't even need a hub for two computers!
donc
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