[thanatos519]

Backups should be far away, too. Apparently some companies lost everything on 9/11 because their backups were in the other tower.

[tooltalk]

Some foolishly believed that the twin towers were invincible after the 1993 WTC bombing.

Before 9/11, most DR (disaster recovery) sites were in Jersey City, NJ just across the river from their main offices in WFC or WTC, or roughly 3-5 miles away. After 9/11, the financial industry adopted a 50+ miles rule.

[AdamN]

Jersey City still was fine and 50 miles can be problematic for certain types of backup (failover) protocols. Regular tape backups would be fine but secondary databases can't be that far away (at least not at the time). I remember my boss at WFC saying that the most traffic over the data lines was in the middle of the night due to backups - not when everybody was in the office.

[palmotea]

Before 9/11, most DR (disaster recovery) sites were in Jersey City, NJ just across the river from their main offices in WFC or WTC, or roughly 3-5 miles away. After 9/11, the financial industry adopted a 50+ miles rule.

IIRC, multiple IBM mainframes can be setup so they run and are administered as a single system for DR, but there are distance limits.

[ylee]

>Some foolishly believed that the twin towers were invincible after the 1993 WTC bombing.

I was told right after the bombing, by someone with a large engineering firm (Schlumberger or Bechtel), that the bombers could have brought the building down had they done it right.

[zwnow]

Funnily enough, Germany has laws for where you are allowed to store backups exactly due to these kinda issues. Fire, flood, earthquake, tornadoes, whatever you name, backups need to be stored with appropriate security in mind.

[egorfine]

Germany, of course. Like my company needs government permission to store backups.

[IAmBroom]

They deserved to lose everything... except the human lives, of course.

That's like storing lifeboats in the bilge section of the ship, so they won't get damaged by storms.