Over breakfast this morning, a former UPS guy now working in government told the story of a friend who decided for various reasons that he’d rather store his data backups on hard drives than on optical media - CDs/DVDs. He cornered manufacturers to find out how long he could expect his data to last if the hard drives were left powered down. No one could really tell him, but eventually he forced the answer that possibly it would be all right as long as he turned them on once a year. Hard drive manufacturers don’t think about this kind of use; they think of their products as being designed to be powered up all the time.

In a large system, how many decisions are made to use technology pieces in ways that were never intended by their manufacturers and that could affect the integrity of these systems?

wg