How many are equipped for power outages. I've been on the phone for over 5 hours recovering servers from a power loss in Colorado and while were working on them power goes back off again. Seems the grid is even worse than it used to be. How many have generators or some other form of backup power.

I bought a 6 kW gas powered generator last summer. Haven't used it for anything real yet, though.

Want the power to stay on in all but the worst weather? Get into flashlights as a hobby... buy something expensive that you can carry with you. I guarantee the power will never go out where you are. <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

Better question: who knows if thiers works?

Skipping the politics, where I work, half the servers are at a central location. There is NO beta site, anywhere (politics). Back ups are made sporadically, and no one there knows how to use them to recover. They spent a bunch of money on a generator, instead.

Funny joke- when they loose power, the generator that they thought would turn itself on in 0-time doesn't turn on, period. The servers have about 45 minutes of APS, and the switches of squat.

And people wonder where my hair went.

Let this serve as two lessons:
-Have Plan B ready to go just as fast as you do Plan A, and Plan C on warm standby.
-Read the manual, before you need it.

I've seen enough sites like this to wonder if ANYONE does backups and disaster recovery well enough to actually recover from a disaster.

I make my own backups for any project I'm on. Survival isn't just about blades and fire.

An even better question: how on earth did humans survive without power? Unless you are on some sort of life support, then consider every temporary outage a gift. Get used to it and learn from it. That way it won't seem like such a horrible disaster when it happens again-and it will happen again. Have we gotten that soft?

Regards, Vince

It's going to be a loooooooong summer.
And vat vill da poor birdies do den, da poor tings...

c'mon people, sing along with me.

How did humans live without power?

Better question: How did humans live without being totally dependent on other people and services? How did humans live when they had to think for themselves, protect themselves, and feed themselves?

"Soft" isn't adequate -- try melted Jello on a hot sidewalk. If people were dumped into a worldwide "survival of the fittest" situation, there would be bodies lying everywhere, on a truly monumental scale. And I'll bet that most of them would just lay down and die on their own.

Sue (Oh-oh, is my cynicism showing again???)

I'm not a Bible thumper by far, but considering the survival skills of the homeless, and "The meek shall inherit the earth", that line of thought kinda' makes ya wonder just how far off that is <img src="/images/graemlins/shocked.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />.

Lots of interesting posts. Here in Baghdad, when I first got here everyone was working on their laptops linked via peer to peer network into a wireless bridge into a satellite uplink for 1 meg bandwidth internet service. File sharing amongst the laptops was an atrocity. The first thing I did was order a fileserver and a UPS. We do daily backups of all new work onto CDs in open format, so no decoding problems. All the work is done from laptops within various subdirectories in the server. If the power fails, we do a controlled power down of the server with everyone saving off their open work from their laptops within 5 minutes. Then we take our laptops with us to a new location with power. We lose grid power here daily. All the network systems are on UPS power as well. If I wanted to, I could keep my laptop going and still access the internet for another half hour after the grid goes down. All this assumes that our generator has not kicked in within 5 seconds of grid failure. Usually, before we can even get started on shutting down the server, the generator has taken over.

What prevents us from staying in the office and working during a power failure ain't the computers, it is the loss of AC, which turns this little room into a sweatbox in about 10 minutes.

The little birdies here don't fly around much during the heat of the day. If they do, their little beaks are wide open and they pant, just like a dog would, only very quickly. It is odd.

The homeless know how to survive in an environment rich with fresh refuse. In a crisis, the refuse supply would likely dry up quickly, and without the ability to stockpile any resources, or to acquire more somewhere else, I think the homeless would be in great peril. Nope, their survival depends far too much on the excesses of others, and that would not be the case if things went sour. That's another reason I don't like urban dwelling. The desperation that you would face would look like something from "The Omega Man".

I don't in my home, but am not that concerned with it, as all my needs can be met sans electricity. The only significant electric I use is for the computer and lighting. I'll live without both.

My work, on the othe hand, really should have learned it's lesson after the power outages a few years ago - but it would appear that no lesson was learned - no generator was purchased, the emergency lighting was not improved, etc.. I guess if those who pull the purse strings aren't directly affected a problem doesn't exist.

I love power outages. Especially at work- it also kills the phone system. Lock the door, ignore them.

I was merely asking, in a round about way, how many of the new generator users know how thier gizmo works.

We do all we can here, despite the sillinees above us.

Then again, we are a tech college. If it gets bad enough, from a computer point of view, we deputize the computer enginnering and e-commerce students. :P

Sad thing is, we also have civil engineering and construction practices & management programs here, and when the roof blew off the dining hall in a sotrm, they were threatened with dismissal if they tried to get on the roof to fix it. All these guys have thier own tools, and it is a flat roof, no major safety issues. Just some pinhead who is full of thier own authority flexing thier muscles so they can feel good, rather than worrying about what needs to be done. *shakes head* Threatened to be thrown out of school becuase they wanted to lessen a leak in thier dining room's roof.

Sounds like a prime candidate for a "DARWIN"

Fair enough. At my work, the backup generator goes on. If it doesn't, then I call the Facilities people. The backup generator here is diesel and the size of a large SUV. I don't touch it. If it doesn't kick on, I go home. Woo-hoo!

Regards, Vince

RE Backup plans that work...

Most places, I'd say no, but I know a couple of the banks down in the Wall St area did OK post 9/11 (like were switched to a backup site BEFORE the 1st tower came down)

I've seen some real good disaster plans. Ran into a guy I went to college with on 9/12/01, on his way to his office - he's his companies CIO (smallish company, but still multi city). He says that when the 1st plane hit the WTC, he turned around, grabbed the disaster plan book off the shelf, opened to "Terrorism, NYC" and implimented the plan he had worked out a couple of years before, and revised regularly

Of course, his backgound as both a Computer Science major, AND as a police officer and then MIS specalist of a Major Police department didn't hurt him

So, when was the last time YOUR company pulled a full up disaster drill?

Benjamin,
First - thanks for what you are doing over there.

One question for you - you say backups to CD in open format - GOOD idea, the question is, how are you doing this? It's something I've wanted to impliment at home for a while

Charlie

I arrived to work one day early in this year to find there was nothing but emergency lights. Had to go home and work from home on th vpn for the day, we don't have generators but do have alternate sites so we can all operate from vpn for any length of time.

Around here, everyone uses XP, so we do our backups with XP's integrated burning software.

Your friend is a man after my own heart. Sitting under my desk is a file box. It is affectionately known by a name I can't say here, but it is labled OSP. Inside is a number of manila envelopes. Each is labeled for a set of parameters. I know what is in there, but I will tear the right one open if the time comes, just becuase I know I "know" what is in there. Maps, check lists, that kind of thing. It gets updated every six months, or if I move. There is a red folder with maps of the various ways for me to get my folks. Yellow folder is for site B.

And every so often, I "sand table" the plans. I work out subplans for varous things like weather, people bailing out of suburbia, that kind of thing.

For now I am using the manual method. I go through all the datafile subdirectories and anything with a new date/time stamp I drag and drop into the cd burner application.

I am going to get an automated application that will look at the end of the day at all the datafiles automatically, select the ones that have a new date/time stamp, and send them to the cd without needing my scrutiny. Should save me some time.