The Backup Plan

Do you have a backup plan? A Plan "B" you can fall back on if your first attempt fails? I'm a pilot. Backup plans are part of our DNA.

As we take to the runway and I advance the throttle, you're thinking, "It sure is loud in here!" I'm thinking "If the engine quits now, I'll just stop on the remaining runway". As I lift the nose and we take to the air, you're thinking, "Here we go!" I'm thinking "If the engine quits now, I'll just land straight ahead". At some point you'll be able to pick out familiar landmarks in the city and you think "They look like doll houses!" while I'm thinking "If the engine quits now, I'll land on the freeway". An airplane may disappoint a good pilot, but it will never surprise him.

This week I stand in the eye of a storm of demands upon my time, talents and technology the like of which I have not seen in years. At home, my wife and I are trying to buy a house. We have arranged financing pre-approval and scouted about a dozen neighborhoods. We have reluctantly increased our budget by another ten percent or so and, finally, found a house we both like. We wrote an offer and it was accepted and now we need to move ahead and secure our financing (4.75%!) and start down the road of un-plugging everything from hovel-A and installing it into hovel-B at the appointed day and time.

At church, I have recently become president of our board of trustees. We're staring down a bunch of repairs and enhancements to our building and looking at a capital campaign of about a million dollars. Also, the fourth and fifth grade Sunday school kids would like to put on a little play. I'm going to be spending a lot of evenings at home on the telephone and in e-mail, rounding up support for this and that and making our case.

And here at work we are about to jump into a whole new paradigm on the Web. We are going to move away from a primarily HTML-based and Dreamweaver-based template program to leaning more on Drupal. Training for the older technologies and some of the gee-whiz features people have added over the last year and more will be moving more to a video on demand model. Here's how to install the Templates files. Here's how to install the image-swapper. That sort of thing.

So into this storm comes the first indication of just how brittle a lot of technology is, today. I have my computer wake up for me about five minutes before I arrive, every morning. Our Chancellor is all about saving money these days, and while it won't probably save a single job or graduate a single kid, I turn my computer off overnight since I was told to. Well, yesterday I came in to find that Things Were Not Quite Right. I had access to my Web browser, but couldn't open up my hard drive and edit a document there. I had access to any application in my Dock, but everything else was locked away from me. I could not even restart from the menu, because the menu was gone.

Last month I signed-up for our incremental backup service. It works hand-in-glove with the Apple TimeMachine backup service. Except when it doesn't. Since I have had my trouble, I have asked around and not found a single user who was happy with the integration of our scripts and Apple's software. When challenged, the script author admitted that there were problems when a Mac tried to go to sleep in the middle of a backup, etc.

So now, when I need to be able to guarantee access to my files, I may not always be able to. And I may not know it isn't working until I actually need it all to work.

So I'm spending this week re-thinking the whole process and working on bringing up reliability a few percent.

What is your Plan B, if what you're doing today fails?