Friday, May 20, 2005

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My parents just suffered near-catastrophic data-loss due to a hard disk crash and no current backups. Near-catastophic because a technician was able to recover much of their data, and some was also on old backups. But some critical stuff was lost. This got me thinking about consumer backup. Of course, I am familiar with all the rules of corporate backup--multiple copies, incremental backup, offsite storage. But in the consumer space, I think we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Everybody I personally know who has suffered a mass loss of personal data has suffered it because the hard drive has failed--not because of fire, flood or theft. So why don't the PC vendors offer an option for full RAID duplexing to an identical, redundant second drive? That way, the backup drive would be an exact duplicate of the main drive. Any failure or damage to the main drive, and you revert instantly to the backup drive. It seems like this would add between $50-$150 to the purchase price of a PC. Expensive enough, on this low-margin product, that it would have to be an option, but cheap enough to be very viable, it seems to me. I think there would be a market for it. For a while, it would be a great product differentiator. It also might incrementally motivate more frequent upgrades, since now, when you run out of drive space, adding a drive would mean losing the auto-backup functionality--maybe that would mean time to buy a new PC. 9:54:06 AM    comment []

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The unexepcted logic people deploy can be intriguing. I read a letter to the editor about carpool lanes, in which the writer complained about their use by parents transporting children. His logic seemed to be that the "real" justification for the lanes was to induce would-be solo rush-hour commuters to double-up. Since the parents would have been transporing their kids anyway, they really shouldn't be entitled to use the HOV lane! 8:49:06 AM    comment []