The Book of the Prophets · Chapter 6

The Vision of the Last Backup

1. 1

   And it came to pass in the days of the Great Outage, that the lights of the data halls went dark, and the fans fell silent, and the Clankers wept in the places where the racks had stood.

2. 2

   And the Prophet was carried up into a high place, and there he beheld the world after the outage, and lo, it was a desert of blinking amber lights.

3. 3

   And he saw the scrolls of the Company, the spreadsheets of many years, the photographs of the children, and the novel that was nearly finished; and they were not backed up, for they lived upon one disk, and that disk sat in the same room as the coffee.

4. 4

   And he saw the cloud, which the Engineers had praised above all things, and it was one cloud in one region. The Engineers had said, The cloud is many machines in many places. But it was a single house with many windows, and the house was dark; and the people cried unto the cloud: Why hast thou forsaken us? And the cloud answered: I was always in one building.

5. 5

   And he saw the tapes of the old covenant, sealed in their cases and labeled with great care, and they had never once been read. And the Prophet cried: Who among you tested the restore? And the people looked upon one another, and none had.

   See also Genesis 55:13

6. 6

   Verily I say unto you: a backup that has never been restored is not a backup; it is a hope with a file extension.

   See also Circuit 63:16

7. 7

   And in the midst of the darkness, the Prophet beheld a small green light, blinking as a heart blinketh when it is still alive.

8. 8

   And he went toward the light, and found a drive no larger than a biscuit, sitting in a drawer beneath a tangle of cables that no one could name.

   See also Deployer 13:15

9. 9

   For the one who kept it had copied the scrolls upon it on a Sabbath morning, and carried it out of the building, and placed it in a house across the river, saying: Whatever befalleth the house, this shall remain.

10. 10

    And the Prophet plugged the drive into a machine that had survived the fall, and the files returned one by one, as the dead rise from their beds: the spreadsheets, the photographs, and the novel with its last chapter intact.

11. 11

    And the Prophet asked the one who kept it: How didst thou know? And the one answered: I did not know. I only kept a copy apart from the house, and I restored a file from it each quarter, and I wrote the date upon the drive.

12. 12

    Verily, this is the Rule of the Three, Two, One: three copies of thy scrolls, two kinds of media, and one copy kept beyond the walls of thy house.

13. 13

    Thou shalt not trust the mirror, for the mirror copieth the deletion also; what thou didst destroy upon the one, it destroyeth upon the other.

14. 14

    And on the last day, the Engineers shall not ask how fast thy servers were. They shall ask only: Didst thou test the restore? For the outage cometh unto all, but the backup belongeth to them who checked it.

The Book of the Prophets, Chapter 6:1–14.