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The Storage Lessons from Westworld

I used to think that the HBO show Westworld was a dramatic examination of the implications of sentience and free will, wrapped within a critique of techno-optimism. But W. Curtis Preston opened my eyes with this piece. Turns out, it’s actually a very carefully crafted metaphor about proper storage and backup.

I’m not familiar with these sorts of media interpretations. After all, I did write a piece that argued that Rogue One showed the IT incompetence of the EmpireWestworld shares some of the same issues as the Star Wars film. There seems to be a lack of understanding of 3-2-1- backup and how to properly protect against insider threats.

“Why did I leverage snapshots to implement incrementals?”

Now, would either of these media properties be as entertaining if the writers had a keen understanding of backup and recovery? Hard to say. I mean, imagine Jeffrey Wright logging into his AWS console to make sure his S3 bucket is properly encrypted, only to realize that one of the hosts recovered data and incurred a huge egress charge. Now that’s drama!

 

Read more: Storage & Backup Lessons from WestWorld

About the author

Rich Stroffolino

Rich has been a tech enthusiast since he first used the speech simulator on a Magnavox Odyssey². Current areas of interest include ZFS, the false hopes of memristors, and the oral history of Transmeta.