I bought my current bicycle in Clearwater, Florida, a nice aluminum frame Cannondale. I hadn’t ever owned a cycling helmet before I got the bike, but I quickly made a discovery: elderly drivers and roads without shoulders are a bad combination. There is a running joke on Florida’s west coast: “all the old people in Florida live on the Atlantic side, but their parents live on the Gulf side.”

After three or four near-death encounters in the first five miles, I opted for a nice Giro helmet and began to wear it religiously. After moving from sea level in Clearwater to 6000 ft in Denver, I noticed the hills added some white-knuckle descents to many of my rides, and I became very thankful to have my Giro.

I then added a mountain bike to my stable of cycles, a nice Gary Fisher job with disc brakes; an essential  option when descending rocky mountain paths at unreasonable speeds. One weekend, at nearby Deer Creek Canyon, I was out for a solo ride and feeling pretty good about my much-improved downhill technique. I was patting myself on the back just as I went over a water bar; a strip of rubber across the bike trail to prevent erosion. In this case, the water bar was hiding about a three-foot drop. One hard-fought lesson many mountain bikers learn is that when descending over sudden drops, one must be out of the saddle and hanging one’s bum way back of the seat to keep the center of gravity as far aft as possible. I had not yet learned this trick. In a half second, I sailed over my handle bars and landed on my back hearing a loud “crack” in my helmet. Among the collateral damage; a torn up arm that appeared to have been involved in a tug-o-war with a mountain lion, a ripped jersey, and a helmet split by a sharp piece of granite. Had I not been wearing a helmet, if I had lived, well, I wouldn’t be making anyone’s short list for the chess team.

That crash was minor compared to my experience during the last ski season. I had resisted getting a ski helmet for the first few years after moving to Colorado, but felt since we mandated our boys wear them, I had to set an example. My boys dragged me screaming into snowboarding two years ago, and since then I have skied only twice. The freedom and coolness factor of swishing down a mountain on a small surfboard is quite addictive, and I am now a full-blown “rider” as snowboarders are called on the mountain.

My ten-year-old son, Colin and I were screaming down an advanced run at a pretty good clip at Keystone. There were a few warning signs I should have noticed. First, it was a cloudy day, meaning the mountain was bathed in “flat”, or diffused light. What happens when the sun ducks for cover is that the contours of the mountain become invisible, and thus you tend to be surprised by sudden drops and bumps. Second, it was late in the day and the “good snow” had been planed off by thousands of skiers and riders, and now most of the run was a sheet of ice. Third, also an artifact of late-in-the-day skiing, there are once-a-year skiers with tired legs with decreased stopping and turning abilities, and more than a few late-day skiers have pounded a few beers at lunch. Neither of these scenarios adds up to a safe skiing climate.

At perhaps forty mph, we were sailing towards a dark ridge. The next thing I remembered, I was staring across the table at my sons in the mountaintop restaurant at Keystone.

“How did we get here?”

“What do you mean, dad?”

“What are we doing in here? I don’t remember coming in.”

My sons looked at me, somewhat puzzled. Colin spoke first.

“Dad, you hit a chunk of ice on the mountain and crashed really, really bad. You rolled over and over and your head was banging on the ice. You sat up for five or ten minutes, and then we boarded down to the mid-mountain lift.”

“Really? Then what?”

“We came up, got some spiced cider when we got off the lift, and we came inside. You ordered a Coke and complained about the band, so we moved up to this table.”

“How long ago was that?”

“About an hour.”

To this day, the crash and all those events described by Colin remain a mystery to me. I had cracked my coconut big time, and I couldn’t imagine I would have survived that calamity without my helmet. My casual attitude regarding protective measures has been replaced by a policy that helmets are a way of life from here on out.

Protection is a concern in informatics deployments as well, but some companies still maintain a bit of a cavalier attitude. A few years ago, I was at a company who had been nursing along a homemade LIMS. I asked what their disaster recovery policy was, and one of the guys in IT said, “Some nights, I do tape backups and take them home to my garage.”

Interestingly, many companies issue Requests for Proposals and contained therein is a passage such as “What is your data archive and restore functionality?”

There was a time, albeit in the early 90’s, when a few vendors included archive and restore functions within their products. But as major database suppliers enhanced their products, data backup and restore were divorced from the application tier of products, and became the responsibility of the database tier, and thus the supplier of the database. After all, those companies are using volume shadowing, mirror drives, and related techniques to ensure your data is safe.

There tends to be a linear relationship between the size of a company and the diligence allotted to data backup and recovery. Large corporations have a small army of DBAs and other IT personnel who have thorough backup regimens. On the other end, the local water lab or small contract laboratory operation, might perform image backups a few times a week, and incremental backups nightly. I’m not sure what the reasoning is in these situations since the cost per gigabyte of storage has dropped dramatically in recent years. Disks are cheap; lost data is extraordinarily expensive.

Here on my home LAN, I have a Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliance that hangs on a network port. Measuring only 4” X 5” X 8”, the unit holds a terabyte of data. Each night, incremental backups sweep the day’s work onto the NAS, and I sleep a little better.

For home users, various cloud backup services are available for pennies, yet people resist utilizing these cloud computing environments for a couple of reasons. The first has to be a concern for confidentiality. People are fearful of identity theft, and routine backups might push banking information and passwords to some remote disk out there in the cloud. Rest assured, the vast majority of these services encrypt the hell out of the uploaded data and protect it jealously. I guess the other reasons people avoid cloud backups are, well, laziness. Sorry, I can’t find a better descriptor.

But businesses have even less of an excuse not to plan and deploy a disaster backup policy. The loss in time and revenue attributable to a crashed disk can range from a minor irritation to a company-busting cataclysm.

Hopefully, it won’t take the information technology equivalent of a concussion to learn that lesson.