I recently made an important connection between my vocation and my ethnicity: Jewish grandmothers are the original science-fiction writers. You see, the business of being a science fiction writer is (for me) all about imagining the snowballing consequences of one or two otherwise unremarkable events or artifacts — sf writers ponder three problems: "What if?" "If this goes on…" and "If only…"
Now, take my grandmother. She's a worrier. Last time I was in Toronto, I was picked up by my folks and driven up to York University, to attend my brother's graduation. We were meeting my grandparents there. My mom — who taught for years at York and has a couple of degrees from that august institution (whence I dropped out of after one semester) — just had a hip replacement and was on crutches. My grandmother called her cellphone and mine, three times, to make sure that we knew which lot was closest to the tent where the convocation was being held. Each call was more angst-ridden than the last, and it was clear that she was working herself up into quite a lather. You see, she'd asked the three critical sfnal questions: what if they park in a distant lot and my daughter has to crutch half a mile to the tent? If only they knew about this other lot! If they do park in the distant lot, surely my daughter will critically injure herself en route to the tent. I have no doubt that my grandmother vividly imagined a plethora of horrible outcomes, each scarier than the last. She seized upon a tiny detail and extrapolated to a distopian outcome that made Orwell's worst nightmare seem like a Teletubbies episode. Never mind that my mother knows every inch of the York campus, and that my grandmother has been there maybe half a dozen times in her life — it was vital that she communicate this message, otherwise the worst would certainly come to pass.
And here I am, a pathological worrier in the guise of an sf writer. For me, the worry revolves around backup. I fear the coming infopocalypse, the day that my place is burgled and my half-dozen-or-so computers are stolen, the big quake, the fire, the flood. My fiction lost forever. My financials, so painstakingly spreadsheeted, gone. Likewise, my e-text collection, 60,000 archived emails going back to the early 90s, and 10GB of MP3s. I take backup seriously.
My network is backed up to a 70GB tape every night, and once a week, I swap the tape into a safe-deposit box, along with a backup of my Visor on a backup cartridge. But that's not really good enough — what if the hemisphere is destroyed? That's why I also encrypt my data — my entire body of written work, my financials, and an image of my Visor's ROM — and upload it to a server in Australia once a month. Just in case.
I'm highly opinionated on the subject of backup. In order to be a proper backup, you must:
- Copy every byte on every drive on your network (otherwise, you're relying on busy, distracted human beings to identify all of their critical files)
- Yes, every byte. Rebuilding all your preferences, your bookmarks, your serial numbers — that's a giant pain in the ass
- Take your backup offsite. An onsite backup is an archive. The infopocalype will destroy your home. Be prepared
Backup is tricky. Used to be, I could back up a 10-computer network on an 8GB tape. Every computer I've bought in the last 18 months has shipped with at least 10GB of hard-drive. It's getting harder and harder to fit a whole network onto one tape (and putting it onto two tapes is a non-starter, since you'll have to remember to swap the tapes once cassette one is filled). Not to mention getting that whole backup accomplished overnight, when you're not actually attempting to use your computers. That's why I'm so excited by this, LaCie's screamingly fast new 70GB FireWire tape drive. You can back up 7.2GB of data per hour with this thing. Overnight backups for the whole network!
