Rumors of my death, greatly exaggerated.

Rumors of the demise of my company, also exaggerated.

My disappearance coincided with the death of my personal computer and the company system as well. Backup program that promised gold in a disaster produced excrement. We were able to fill orders with a borrowed computer, but were unable to bill credit cards for a variety of technical reasons. Orders duly sent but not billed. So if you got a bottle and no bill on your credit card, we’ll eventually catch up.

The good news, I now have a computer that’s beyond state-of-the-art. I designed and built a water cooling system for the CPU, among other enhancements.

Pheasant season opened in North Dakota last Saturday. We are over run with birds. Rare that we walked more than a hundred yards without kicking up birds, and that’s without a dog. Two limits in two days. My lifelong near aversion to eating pheasant overcome by a recipe I invented. My wife went back for thirds. That’s like winning a Nobel Prize, the Super Bowl and the lottery at the same time.

More pheasant-hunting coming up this weekend.

I would like your recipe!

Glad you are up and going Roger. The key thing to remember about backups and backup applications is that you haven't made a backup until you have done a test restore of it.

I used to be responsible for a mission critical system and I made people restore the backups on a dummy server every once in a while. No one was very happy doing it and the managers whinged and moaned about the time and the cost and...

When the system went down in a big way and it was back up and running in 2 hours the moaners and whingers assumed that it all happened by magic and were keen to take credit for how quickly they solved the problem. Those of us who spent hours once every month or so restoring the system knew better :-)

So, next time you get up and running don't focus the cash on water cooled CPUs, focus it on a good reliable backup procedure that you test on a regular basis on a dummy server if necessary.