[ale] Engineering Archaeology
jon.maddog.hall@gmail.com
jonhall80 at comcast.net
Thu Jan 15 15:01:17 EST 2026
OK, since this has migrated to the concept of (non) backups....
My first job out of university was for Aetna Life and Casualty, at that time the largest commercial user of IBM equipment in the Free World (which goes to show if you put enough qualifiers in your statement you can be the biggest and best of anything).
In any case we had 500,000 12" magnetic tapes in our tape library on site, with another 100,000 "backup" tapes for long term storage in a salt mine in Idaho....in 1973.
We dedicated a (small) mainframe computer just to keep track of what datasets were on which tape and where that tape was....on a machine, in the library or out in Idaho...
The tapes were numbered with a nine digit serial number starting with 000000001 and going to whatever tape number we were at. [Yes, I know, we should have started with "0"...but there are reasons we did not.]
One day I was at a terminal for this mainframe and out of curiosity I typed in the number 000000001 just to see what it said. "Tape 000000001 is not known." was the response. I typed in "000000002" and "000000003" and got the same response.
However "000000004" had the response (and my syntax may be a little off after 50+ years):
"Tape 000000004 is in Idaho. It is a 7-track, 512 bpi tape and has the xxxxxxxxx dataset. Retention date is 9999999 years." Effectively "forever".
I went to my boss, laughing and said "How could they ever read that tape? Magnetic bleed through would make it unreadable after a few years."
"Yes", he said, "but they unwind and rewind the tape every few years to take care of that."
"But what tape drive could they mount it on?" I asked.
"We thought of that too. We have a seven-track tape drive in the salt mine wrapped in bubble wrap".
"But what machine will they hook that tape drive up to, what OS will that machine run, and what operator will be alive to run the software?"
My boss looked at me with a twinkle in his eye, but his finger to his lips and said "Shhhhhhhhh".
md
> On 01/14/2026 6:39 PM EST Jeff Lightner via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
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> One company I worked for initially installed Datapoint systems at client sites. Those used the old 5 MB spinning disk packs. We would train the night shift to do a nightly backup.
>
> If a site went down and we couldn’t get current data going again we’d have to tell them to put in the previous night’s backup so we could restore it. Usually that meant loss of up to 24 hours of data they’d have to reinput manually.
>
> One site on being told to insert the previous night’s backup put the phone down to “discuss” the request. After some whispering they came back to say they hadn’t done a backup the night before. We then said that wasn’t good and they’d have to go back to the one done two nights previously. Again they put the phone down and started whispering amongst themselves. They then came back to tell us they hadn’t done one then either. To forestall further back and forth we asked them the last time they had done a backup. To the best of their knowledge it was some SIX MONTHS earlier. We restored that most “recent” backup and they had to spend a week or more trying to get everything back manually. After that they seemed to understand the importance of backups.
>
> That company had moved on to UNIX systems by the time I joined so luckily I didn’t have to deal with the Datapoint stuff for long as sites upgraded. Once they sent me to Birmingham to do one of the conversions. We actually had PC running either SCO or AT&T UNIX that had a card with a Datapoint coax connection on it. In our offices the then senior tech showed me exactly where to attach the cable to do a download and conversion. However, this site apparently had a much older Datapoint that didn’t have the connection I’d need. Accordingly, they had to input data on the new AIX system by hand. That was one of the early AIX systems that used port monitors rather than standard tty stuff so making our terminals and printers work with it was another chore which luckily I now had time to do as it wasn’t in our original plan to deal with that.
>
> Sometimes backups save people from themselves. A site in Beverly Hills using HP-UX went down. It seemed we were going to have to reload the OS, the application on which our code ran and our code from scratch before they could even think about recovering data. They told us they didn’t have any of the installation media we had left during installation so my company flew me out there with media to do the reinstallation. Once onsite I was taken to the server room. There I found the media they said they didn’t have, including the previous night’s data backup. Using the original OS tape I was able to boot up. Luckily I had asked folks at the office to find the old root password and had gotten it via phone on my arrival. I was able to repair relatively minor issues with the OS, reinstall the application and our code then recover the previous night’s backup. All of that took me 3-4 hours but was a far cry better than the original multi-week outage for which we had prepped them. The GM was so ecstatic he offered to pay for a tour of the city. Being young and dumb I turned that down. As I told people later sometimes it is better to be lucky than smart.
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> From: Ale <ale-bounces at ale.org> On Behalf Of Jim Kinney via Ale
> Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2026 5:32 PM
> To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts <ale at ale.org>
> Cc: Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [ale] Engineering Archaeology
>
>
>
> I once had to do a drive recovery on the laptop of a cfo who swore up and down he was handling his own backups. They were getting audited by the IRS when it went down.
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> Backups? You know the answer.
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> I managed to recover almost all of the drive and crucially the data needed for the audit.
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> Cfo got backup religion and did a full image every day at lunchtime from then on. He also did not flinch when I was handed a very large check for my time.
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>
> --
> James P. Kinney III
>
> Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.
> - Speech 11/23/1900 Mark Twain
>
> http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/
>
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 14, 2026, 3:43 PM Jon "maddog" Hall via Ale <ale at ale.org mailto:ale at ale.org> wrote:
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> > Crayons are basically wax too, and suffer the same fate if the writing gets too hot.
> >
> >
> > You really can't win...back to "rm -rf"
> >
> >
> > I did that one time and it was going along fine until the "rmdir" command was deleted.....things went downhill from there.😂
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > md
> >
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Jan 14, 2026 at 11:22 AM lollipopman691 via Ale <ale at ale.org mailto:ale at ale.org> wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > OTOH, wax and stylus still works. At least until it gets too hot.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/newly-discovered-ancient-roman-writing-tablets-provide-snapshots-roman-era-020857
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > * CHS
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > On Tuesday, January 13th, 2026 at 10:42 PM, Jon "maddog" Hall via Ale <ale at ale.org mailto:ale at ale.org> wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > >
> > > > Sorry, but as an archivist I can vouch for the fact that the simple use of crayons alone is not good enough. You need archival quality paper, or better yet, crayon on some type of stable stone. Modern day acid-washed paper falls apart after only a few decades.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > On the other hand, have you ever taken a good look at ancient stone tablets? Some are really hard to read....
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > On Tue, Jan 13, 2026 at 8:00 PM Jim Kinney via Ale <ale at ale.org mailto:ale at ale.org> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > You just nailed it.
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > Crayon
> > > > >
> > > > > THE backup tool
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > Hahahaha!!!
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > --
> > > > > James P. Kinney III
> > > > >
> > > > > Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.
> > > > > - Speech 11/23/1900 Mark Twain
> > > > >
> > > > > http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > On Tue, Jan 13, 2026, 6:42 PM Steve Litt via Ale <ale at ale.org mailto:ale at ale.org> wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > >
> > > > > >
> > > > > > On Sat, 10 Jan 2026 14:39:21 -0500 (EST)
> > > > > > "jon.maddog.hall--- via Ale" <ale at ale.org mailto:ale at ale.org> wrote:
> > > > > >
> > > > > > > One of my fears about e-books, the web and documentation that can
> > > > > > > disappear as easy as "rm -r *", is that we will lose a LOT of this
> > > > > > > information and not know where we came from and how we got here.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Good backups allay that fear. What I fear is that over time current
> > > > > > physical and software formats are replaced and disappear. I can't read
> > > > > > my QIC tape backups anymore. I can no longer read my cptools floppy
> > > > > > backups: Hell, I don't currently have a floppy drive installed. With
> > > > > > cases no longer accommodating CD/DVD/BluRay, how long will it be until
> > > > > > those become very difficult to get. I have nothing to read my old VHS
> > > > > > video tapes. I have no way to recover any files from my ancient Kaypro
> > > > > > 2x, even if I did have a floppy drive.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > It's very important to take old backups and convert some of them to
> > > > > > newer formats every once in a while.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > LOL, I still have a crayon picture I drew in 1955 of my trip to the zoo.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > SteveT
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Steve Litt
> > > > > > Featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful
> > > > > > Technologist http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques
> > > > > >
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