I once did the old "rm -rf *" in my home directory in college. It wasn't a system I used a lot, so I wasn't missing much, but I went ahead and asked for a restore from tape anyways. I didn't hear anything for 3 days. Finally I caught our head sysadmin in the hallway and asked about it. He said, "the good news is: we're getting a new backup system." The bad news? "Your files are at about gig 7 of the 6 gig tape."
Even this week I've reminded people at work that if you don't test your backup (and restore) system, then you don't have a backup system.
Yes, but too bad that frequent offsite automated backups were still at least a decade off in 1986. At the very least, the network bandwidth just simply wasn't there. Heck, at this stage of the game, 1Mbps was considered to be blazing fast on a LAN. Even Internet backbones were 56k.
i know for a fact that backups were possible in 86 and that's all that would be needed to turn an accidental deletion into a non-disaster
but you're right, networking speed/bandwidth has gotten better since then, but that's irrelevant and I never claimed it hadn't. my point was that there is a simple, well-known solution/palliative for this, so no need for this kind of drama going forward.
yes, and it's funny how your statement is consistent with my assertion that backups existed in 86, and that backups are a good thing. i love "arguments on the Internet" sometimes! :)
Even this week I've reminded people at work that if you don't test your backup (and restore) system, then you don't have a backup system.