Fire at Dan Wesson

I'm glad no one was seriously hurt.

I can't think of a worse time to be temporarily out-of-business for a firearms manufacturer. Please pray for all those workers who would appear to be temporarily out of a job.

dang...

Even in this, the "Digital Age" whenever I hear about a manufacturer and a fire I wonder about paperwork...

"...yeah, it's tough to nail that down, you know DW had a fire back in -12."

Even in this, the "Digital Age" whenever I hear about a manufacturer and a fire I wonder about paperwork...

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Its a legitimate concern. It SHOULDN'T be an issue these days, but a lot of places don't take the possibilty of bad things like this seriously. Any data should realistically be digitally stored and replicated off site (and with cloud storage/backup these days there's no legitimate excuse not to other than laziness).

mgmorden said:

Its a legitimate concern. It SHOULDN'T be an issue these days, but a lot of places don't take the possibilty of bad things like this seriously. Any data should realistically be digitally stored and replicated off site (and with cloud storage/backup these days there's no legitimate excuse not to other than laziness).

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Well, sort of. It depends on their computer system, and how much computer system they can afford. It seems like with a couple of notable exceptions, most gun companies are not huge. If they can afford a cloud option, then they would be fine from a data perspective. But if they can't and it's a small operation, then daily onsite backups with a weekly offsite copy could be the standard program. In which case they will lose data, and how much depends on the most recent usable tape... hopefully they didn't lose too much.

Well, sort of. It depends on their computer system, and how much computer system they can afford. It seems like with a couple of notable exceptions, most gun companies are not huge. If they can afford a cloud option, then they would be fine from a data perspective. But if they can't and it's a small operation, then daily onsite backups with a weekly offsite copy could be the standard program. In which case they will lose data, and how much depends on the most recent usable tape... hopefully they didn't lose too much.

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I think you have a misconception on how much cloud storage costs. With Google Drive for example you can do off-site storage of up to 400GB of data for $20 per month.

To put this into perspective, I work as a DB admin for a county government. Our entire assessment database - a record of over 100,000 parcels, sketches and photos of all buildings and structures upon them, notes, and change records associated with ALL of them totals a whopping 25GB. Our database tracking our building permit issuance along with all associated documents, plans, etc going back to 1998 is less than 30GB.

We can afford to store 7 snapshots of all THAT data offsite in a cloud option for $20 per month. I guarantee you no manufacturing company's records will rival that amount of data (not any one that claims to be a "small" company anyways) and there is no company small enough that $20 per month is going to be a significant expense.

Its just pure laziness when electronic documents are lost due to physical problems.

So...MSRP on their 1911s will increase another 60%?

Sure, cloud storage is cheap, I'm saying the whole distributed application (ERP) can be pretty spendy in the private sector. This can be doubly true if, like so many places, the ERP is a homegrown application with zero maintenance costs to a vendor. Not trying to start an argument just saying it may not be as simple as "no excuse" for everybody.

You also need to consider the band width necessary to move the data, generally the upload bandwidth is much smaller than the quoted download badwidth. So, with a medium business connection (30M down, 2M up) you may be looking at a week of time to upload your data, running 24 hours a day.

Also, if you have information that is covered by government regulations, you need to be aware that all of the storage is not necessarily in the US and therefore are not protected by US laws. Also, many of these companies have lost or allowed unauthorized access to some data.
(General statement, I have not investigated Google) so just be careful about reading all of the fine print.

400G is not really very much data. My laptop has 2.5 times that and it is several years old, just program sources and test data. About the smallest disk you can buy today is 500G.

Wow. This thread went from zero to nerdy in 5.2 seconds.

Well, there goes my shot at not having to pay $2k for an RZ10

400G is not really very much data. My laptop has 2.5 times that and it is several years old, just program sources and test data.

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It is and it isn't, depending on formats. If as video data, it would not be much. As text data, it would be an amazing amount.

As small as DW was, their foundational (completed digitized designed and such) and systems data should have been in off site storage already. Daily operations probably could have been backed up to a simple tb drive and weekly, monthy, or quarterly backed up to a 10 tb external and portable tb drive and taken off site without wired or cloud storage and the slow uploads. Yeah, it is a be pedestrian, but much faster and quite functional.

400G is not really very much data. My laptop has 2.5 times that and it is several years old, just program sources and test data. About the smallest disk you can buy today is 500G.

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As stated, it depends on the content. Entertainment content such as video, audio, and games distort the view of how much data storage takes. Also, typically programs themselves are not backed up. You only need to backup the core data, which is much smaller. When you take the systems that I was referencing earlier if I took the entire OS, database program files, and there is well over 400GB of information on each system (closer to 1TB on one), but the core database is the only thing that needs to be backed up and stored off-site, and its a pretty small fraction of the total amount of information on the computer. Everything else is reproducible. Think of it like your house - you don't buy a backup television set, fridge, stove, or a copy of Moby Dick because all those things are easiliy sourced again. You DO however want backups of your photographs, hand-written letters, deeds/titles, etc. Those things cannot be replaced, and those are the things that are focused on. You could have a 2000 sq-ft house and all the absolutely vital information that HAD to be preserved would likely fit into a small chest. Its much the same with computers.

Also, as to the problem of bandwidth: differential backups . For situations where you can't move much data at a time you simply store only the things that have changed since the last full backup. If they're only inputting a dozen or two MB per day of new information then that is the only thing that needs to be transferred to the off-site storage.

All this is speculation though. They may very well have had good data retention and safeguard policies in place.

Anyways, I'll refrain from further computer talk. Back to guns .

I'm also glad no one is hurt. I would rather read about a price increase than serious harm to anyone there. Insurance, Carbonite, etc will keep everyone happy in the meantime.

Yea, I'd use Google Cloud (In your Dreams), they are not as secure as I woud require my information to be. There have been several breaches of their security.

Look before you leap.

SkyDrive looks pretty secure thus far.

Let's re-open this whenever there's some news about DW. THR isn't a computer tech forum.