Will this HD swapping work OK What to beware of 4965

A friend of mine works for a large government agency responsable for the wellfare of people in this county. Their computers are run by the state government.

Some years ago, my computer-naive friend complained that they were working long hours overtime to re-enter all the transactions from the previous month, as well as trying to keep current on the new transactions. What had happened was that some "genius" had replaced the program suite they were using to keep track of the cases of all their clients, and the program failed and all the database was lost.

I suggested just restoring it from the backup tape rather than re-entering all the transactions manually. Besides, until all the transactions were back into the system, the clients did not get the checks, so they had problems with eviction (no rent checks), food, medical care... .

My friend had no idea what a backup tape might be, so I explained to her. The next day she informed me there was no backup tape. That was pretty sick. They ran programs under IBM's IMS-DB and IMS-DC system and that automatically journals all transactions. But the genius running the system found he could save the cost of $9.00 reels of tape by turning that off. It comes with backup on by default, so this genius had to take a positive step to suppress it. The turkey probably got merit points for saving $9-day. The overtime to re-enter all the transactions was paid by a different agency than the one running the computers.

Stupidity is not restricted to small companies and private individuals.

-- .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. V PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939. ^^-^^ 11:05:00 up 7 days, 4:07, 3 users, load average: 4.21, 4.29, 4.33