You can trust "The Cloud"

[Clare Snyder]

That REALLY depends on HOW dumb the secretary is. I've known some who were dumb enough that a crashed Commodore 64 would have given them a good run for their money - - - -

[Clare Snyder]

Bullshit. All it took was to HAVE an Iomega Zip drive. Had nothing to do with 1.44 (or 720) floppies - and even less to do with politics.

Some of the Zip drives were even universal - and would read 1.44/720 floppies as well as Zip disks.

[Clare Snyder]

That was the rub though - they were FANTASTIC, WHEN they worked - but I soon came to the conclusion they were NOT to be trusted as an archive. They werer GREAT for "sneaker net" data transfer from one machine to another

[Clare Snyder]

Well, I worked for what was at one time the largest distributor of Hard Drives in Canada - and then the largest distributor of CD ROM drives - and sold ( and replaced) WAY TOO MANY Zip drives over a VERY short time.

My feild of expertise for 5 years was CD ROM on the network - back before Windows, UNIX, Novel, or Banyan VINES supported CD ROM natively. We supplied CD ROM "servers" to libraries, universities, and medical centers across Canada.

Our company was also pretty heavy into backup systems and data redundancy solutions and sold the first CD Write and rewrite drives in Canada - back when a CD writer cost over $2000 for a bare drive and the failure rate was somewhere approaching 60% -- - - - ->

[gfretwell]

That was the cheap end of the scale and included in the better packages. We advised everyone to have remote site storage. The 3480 tape drive was perfect for that. A shitload of cartridges would fit in the large safe deposit box at the bank. Usually they would just FedEx them to a remote branch and have them stuffed away there if they had remote branches. "Availability" was all about many layers of protection against all sorts of calamities. Way back in the 60-70s we had customers with agreements to use each other's computer rooms in a disaster. That was real easy when disk packs were portable. Most customers could bring along 6 or 7 disk packs, a box of tapes and run anywhere on a bare machine because you were bringing your OS along with you. That ability pretty much went away with the "Winchester" drives.

[gfretwell]

My sneaker net was using 857mb SCSI drives in AS/400 shoe boxes. If you had one plugged in when you booted, you could hot swap it and the OS would never notice. They are a bit bulky, actually bigger than a shoe box but in the 90s 800 meg was a huge amount of data

[Clare Snyder]

Explain yourself