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  5. No Happy Ending To The Fable Of 'Zodiac Island' And The Cloud Storage Provider: Page 2 of 2
Data Centers

No Happy Ending To The Fable Of 'Zodiac Island' And The Cloud Storage Provider: Page 2 of 2

Alas, the tales spun by vendors, analysts and other cloud computing cheerleaders that paint the cloud as an infinitely expandable, reliable and affordable kingdom--where "The winter is forbidden till December/And exits March the second on the dot"--are as fantastical as Camelot itself. WeR1 Production, which produces the syndicated children's show "Zodiac Island," is learning this lesson after Binky the sheep and Sonny the tiger went to the bit bucket.
Howard Marks
April 22, 2011

Even if the affiliates downloaded the show from the same FTP server, I would have saved the final episodes folder, which would have been less than 10Gbyes for SD video, in several places just so I didn't have to wait for the download when I showed it off to anyone visiting the office. I'd probably even go Hollywood and burn copies to DVD or Blu-Ray disks just so I could hand them out to all my less successful friends. Every creative person I know has his or her personal stash of work squirreled away to show friends and family.

The moral of the story is that your data isn't really safe unless it's stored in two places and on two different technologies. Data problems, like fat-fingered admins and software bugs, replicate well across homogeneous storage systems, but have much more trouble crossing from primary disk to deduped disk or tape. It doesn't matter what the contracts say, there must be backups, and those backups must be verified. Even Google backs up Gmail to tape.

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