[Info-vax] One wonders why people bet their companies on Microsoft based

[Richard B. Gilbert]

Bob Koehler wrote:
> In article <df1d80a1-d34e-442a-8e6b-2c8ad8690bb2 at 37g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>, BillPedersen <pedersen at ccsscorp.com> writes:
>> The loss of data on the T-Mobile Sidekick network is due to a "massive
>> server failure".  Servers run by Microsoft/Danger. I do believe that a
>> server environment running OpenVMS is much less likely to have a
>> "massive server failure" than one based on MS products.  It also
>> sounds as if there was no "backup" environment here so obviously there
>> was no planning for a "disaster" which is exactly what they have.
> 
>    Danger may have been using Microsoft RAID, and failing to also
>    back up to offline storage.  We've seen failures of MS RAID due to
>    errors in MS software (yeah, big surpise there) writing trash over
>    all copies of the data store.
> 

Far too many people think of RAID as a substitute for backups!  It is 
not.  It usually protects against a failure of a single disk.  It does 
so very well as long as you notice when one member of the set has failed 
and replace it promptly.  It provides no protection against deleting or 
overwriting the wrong file!

Backup n. What you should have made yesterday!