I Was Told To Make Backups, Not Test Them. Why Does That Make You Look So Worried?
The Register, Thursday, February 6th, 2025
Shabby admin invented 'transparent tape' - a terrible storage medium but a magic tool for unlocking IT budgets
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Lionel" who recounted a story from a moment in his career that saw him serve as "senior developer/L2 help desk/the guy taking care of hardware for a mainframe software development team."
Lionel's role sprawled into that range of responsibilities "because almost everybody else on the team thought that Intel servers, PCs, and laptops would rob you of your soul."
But the 80-strong team of mainframe devs Lionel worked with couldn't escape the modern age entirely because the server that backed the code they created was an Intel box.
"Source code was stored on an SMB share on a large Intel server on which a backup was taken daily onto an 8 mm tape drive," Lionel told On Call. "We even kept weekly and monthly backups, just for good measure."