> And actually I also had a co-op agreement with another site (across the
> city) that had a basically identical box... if we crashed ... I would
move
> my backup tapes and staff over to their site and work from 6 pm to 6 am
> while they would work from 6 am to 6pm... lots of backups and
reloads....
> but it would work...even passed Arthur Anderson's Information System
Review
> process for disaster recovery!!


<soapbox on>

I can't say strongly enough how much I think this is a bad idea.  (I am
really surprised that this would pass a review by Arthur Anderson. On
second thought, maybe I am not that surprised.)

I can think of several reasons off the top of my head why reciprocal
disaster recover arrangements will rarely if ever work.

If you called up Sally Jones down the street and said your computer room
just burned down and you are coming over to restore your data, I think you
will find that the plan will fall apart, reciprocal agreement or not.

Does Sally Jones still have a window of 12 hours overnight to lend you?
How much time is left over after your restore?

Is there enough disk space?

Where are you users going to work? Are they lending you CPU time or office
space as well?

 Most important of all, How does Sally Jones explain to her CEO that they
just lost an entire day's worth of data because the backup she made last
night in preparation of turning the system over to someone else to run
their processing turned out to be bad? Furthermore, with all of the horror
stories surrounding DDS media and the relatively high failure rate, I can
just picture one disaster turning into two.

I know I wouldn't sleep at night knowing that someone else is in my
computer room and I am going in at 6AM to put my system back together.

All of the technical aspects aside, IMHO the political issues and
liabilities are just too great to take a chance. The same rationale
applies for those who take backup tapes home with them and call it their
offsite backup. Yes, it is convenient to take one or two DDS tapes in a
briefcase/purse, but how much liability and responsibility have you taken
on?

</soapbox>

Doug.

Doug Werth                             Beechglen Development Inc.
[log in to unmask]                               Cincinnati, Ohio