The Institute for Backup Trauma

fief writes "John Cleese explains why tape based backup solutions will drive a manager insane in a viral marketing bit for Live Vault. (flash required) Produced by the Captains of Industry. Links provided via AdRants" Barely an ad, mostly just hilarious. Also contains Michael Dorn. Use as directed.

Another Zonk?

[OccidentalSlashy]

Who are you, Zonk? Do you run Slashdot now?

That's my uncle's company! (Captains of Industry)

[PowerMacG4]

No joke. His previous company was called Fred and Ted Entertainment, which made similar videos that can be found at http://www.fredandted.com [fredandted.com]

Their whole skit about "Ambulatory Mortosis" is one of their funniest.
http://www.fredandted.com/Mortosis/index.html [fredandted.com]

Congrats, Fred. You made Slashdot's front page. Now let's see if your servers can take the slashdotting...

Re:And now for something completely crappy

[SYFer]

What can I say? I'm a harsher judge of marketing pieces generally. Lines like the boss saying he'd "fire your family... and your ancestors" just seemed like flat writing to me. If you're gonna have a major comedic god like John Cleese in the mix, you should make sure the writing is up to it. I clicked in and absorbed the marketing message, so I've upheld my end and that's my opinion. Those who disagree can take solace in the fact that my harsh opinion has been modded safely out of view as a "troll."

For your convenience

[Kev Vance]

A direct link to the movie: http://www.backuptrauma.com/video/FLV/LVCleese_LG. flv [backuptrauma.com]

Re:Recommendations for online backup solutions?

[vwjeff]

Although not commercial, here is what I do.

I live in Wisconsin and a friend of mine lives in Nevada. He has a broadband connection and so do I. My home server has 2x200 GB hard drives mirrored. His server also has 2x200 GB hard drives mirrored. I can use half the space for my data on both servers and he can use the other half. Every other day at 3am, my server rsyncs over ssh to his. The same occurs every other day when his rsyncs with my server.

We do a full tape backup every week on Saturday and incremental backups every day. I take the full backups to my safe deposit box at the bank.

I guess what I am saying is that if any of your friends or family have a broadband connection, ask if you can use it for backup. Offer them storage space for backup or money to house a Linux box you can use as offsite backup.

If your data is extremely important, make sure you encrypt it. One time my friend thought he dropped a tape in a parking lot. I was conserned for weeks until he found the tape under the seat of his car. I learned my lesson and now encrypt everything that is important to me.

Old School Training Films

[Basehart]

I remember in the late 70's in England my Father coming back from some training course or other raving about the films they had been shown starring John Cleese, and he was always hyped on the fact that Cleese actually made people learn through laughter. I can't remember specifics but Dad worked for Thorne EMI who were in the Security business.

Actually, it pisses me off

[PenguinBoyDave]

I watched the video and even signed up for the FREE poster they offered, which they NEVER sent me!!!! I wonder if my working for a competitor had something to do with that?

Re:And now for something completely crappy

[Anonymous Coward]

I still think you're wrong.

A pinata that releases candy and TAPE?

Oblique references to the Hair Club for Men?

The list goes on and on.

It was good writing, it just doesn't meet your expectations.

Clockwork Orange?

[Kappelmeister]

No, sir, that was a series of clips from a much more famous movie [imdb.com]. It's mostly famous within film geek circles, though, so I took it as something of an in-joke. You see the famous baby-carriage-falling-down-steps scene spoofed all over, like in The Untouchables and Brazil (directed by fellow Pythoner Terry Gilliam). And there's this one close-up of maggot-infested meat that reminds me of the high-resolution gross-out insets in old Ren & Stimpy cartoons. (There goes the rest of my hyphen allowance.)

BTW, the original was silent, and I don't think Beethoven's 9th was what Eisenstein had in mind!

He did one for a company I worked for years ago.

[fugusama]

I think he has a nice little side business doing this. Our president was a Brit and the company had british roots so it seemed to make sense to hire him when we went through a name change. The way its told is they cooked up the rough script and then had him come up from LA in the afternoon. He rolled in, meet everyone, and then sat down, looked at the script and told them its was (insert fav brit slang here). He asked if he could take it back to the hotel to work on it a bit. He then came back the next day with the new script and they shot it in an afternoon. Word has it he got 50 grand for that. Nice bit of change for the work if you can get it.

Tape is better than disk....

[menscher]

Let's see... disks can be taken out by vibration, electric shock, or just by exceeding their shelf life. Failures can be from the drive electronics, the drive motor, a head crash, or simply getting unfiltered air in the drive. Life expectancy is 5 years if you get high-quality drives. They are typically kept online, which means they spend 100% of their lifetime vulnerable to threats from intruders, mistakes, and power surges.

On the other hand, tape has NONE of these flaws. Even if your tape drive explodes in a fireball from a lightning strike, the tapes will be fine, and can be read in another drive.

And yet here's a company trying to encourage people to migrate away from tape backups? Yes, they have a good offering -- remote backups. But that can (and should) be done with tape (possibly to disk first, but with a second copy on tape or other offline media).

Sorry to make the only on-topic post in the entire story, but I just couldn't handle the FUD.

Re:Option 3... SPOILER

[Anonymous Coward]

And then you get a Windows BSOD and, at least for me, my browser crashed. Really.

I thought it was part of the show for a second, until the dialog came up saying Safari had crashed and would I like to submit a bug report.