CatalogueWhat you know16 of 36
What happens when a piece of it fails
Your files and your records exist in more than one place, in more than one building, so that losing any single one of them is an inconvenience rather than an ending.
What arrives
- More than one copy
- of your files, held apart from one another
- More than one building
- so a single failure cannot take all of them
- Nothing
- that exists only on one machine, in one room
- The public pages
- held separately from the records behind them
- A failure
- that costs time rather than costing you the business
- No claim
- that nothing will ever stop - see below
One copy is one accident away#
A thing that exists once exists precariously, however good the box it is in. The same thing in more than one place, in more than one building, survives losing any one of them.
That is the whole of it. Not a clever arrangement, not something bolted on afterwards - just the refusal to let anything you own depend on one machine staying alive.
What that actually buys you#
It buys you the difference between a bad afternoon and a closed business. Losing a machine becomes a question of how long rather than a question of what is left, and how long is answered on the page next to this one.
The sentence I will not write here either#
You will be told by somebody that their arrangement does not go down. I will not write that, because things go down: machines stop, a whole region of the internet occasionally has a bad day, and anybody who tells you otherwise is telling you something they cannot know.
What I will write is the narrower thing that is actually true. Nothing you own sits in only one place, so a failure costs time rather than costing you what you have built. If something does stop, you will hear about it - and what one person can honestly promise about that is set out on the page about what is watched, rather than glossed over here.