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.