[LINK] ZDnet: Lightning Strikes Twice in Amazon Cloud

Fernando Cassia fcassia at gmail.com
Fri Aug 12 08:00:33 AEST 2011


On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 18:08, Roger Clarke <Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au> wrote:
> As if having lightning strike its EU datacentre wasn't enough, Amazon
> is now struggling with a software problem that saw some customer data
> deleted.

Reminds me of my first experience with "cloud" and data loss. Of
course by cloud I mean "remote server" as it wasn´t called "cloud"
back then but actually "hosting". ;)

Over the years I had collected tons of Byte magazines. One day I
started the process of painstakingly removing the pages of key
articles that I considered had historical or sentimental value (ie all
those that referred to Amiga computers), also thown in were amusing or
´iconic´ adverts of Windows, OS/2, etc.

So the hundred Byte magazines were reduced to a pile of loose paper
sheets, the size of a coffee table. Over approximately 6 months, I
proceeded to scan 10+ pages per day at high-res (1200dpi) and uploaded
those to my paid Crosswinds.net hosting account.

After each upload, I proceeded to throw the scanned documents into the
wastebasket.

After six months and when I only had a one-inch high stack of pages
left to scan, I logged in to CrossWinds.net FTP server only to
find.... NO FILES.

Where are my files?. I asked tech support. The answer was, more or
less (not verbatim) "Sorry, we had a hard disk crash. The data is
gone. We tried to recover it but we failed. Please upload it again,
and sorry for the inconvenience."

That was my lesson on the power of the cloud (sarcasm). It was 2001.

FC
PS: And no I never again contracted CrossWinds.net for anything. And
yes, I still keep that tiny pile of articles in paper, safely stored
on a binder.




More information about the Link mailing list