As paperwork quickly disappears from our drawers and digital data storing becomes increasingly crucial in everyday personal and business life, not everyone realizes how important could be to know where your back-up servers are physically located.
Think about all those letters you have on your web-mail provider account.
What happens if the service disappears for one reason or the other. Where or who can you turn to to recover them?
This might not be an issue one thinks about every day, but many Aussies might have had the taught last wednesday.
On Sept. 2nd, Australia disappeared from the www for a whole hour, between 7.50 and 8.50 am local time reported the Sydney Morning Herald. Telsta, by far the country’s number one ISP, suffered from a major crash which affected home, business and mobile internet customers.
Telstra customers could not access any international sites or Australian sites containing international links. Since Telstra’s customers also include most down under ISPs, most of the country was affected.
The problem apparently was caused by Telstra’s international gateway, which lost the ability to find the domain names of international websites.
The technical difficulty was most likely solved with the classic home-style turn-off-turn-on-the-switch procedure.
No damage done, but we should all stop and think that even though our stuff feels like it’s on our computer, it’s actually not. Thousands of miles usually separate us from our mails, documents or pictures.
A safe data storage provider should be able to indicate precisely the server’s location and be transparent on panic data recovery procedure.
