One example of a company almost losing media is the Ticketmaster Company. Ticketmaster was a company that sold and distributed tickets for entertainment events line sports games and opera. They almost lost a hard drive server due to the Loma Prieta Earthquake. In the 1980s, servers and data storage were massive machines in size and it was a space-consuming affair. Storing just a few dozen gigabytes of data could take up an entire room. An example of a data storage being used at the time was an IBM 3380 which only could store up to 3 GB of data. One company who wanted to keep constant track of their computer data was Ticketmaster, data comprised of their ticket sales to concerts and events. Each Ticketmaster city had its own independent storage drive. Backups would traditionally be made daily and archived every month. This is a useful strategy for preventing loss due to data deletion, but the separation of the storage drives meant off-site backup was lacking. So, if all of the computers at a particular location were wiped out due to theft or disaster, all the information for that city would be lost.
San Francisco was one such place that had these Ticketmaster drives. On October 17, 1989, the devastating Loma Prieta Earthquake struck the Bay Area. In addition to countless loss of lives and property, all of the machines at Ticketmaster were irreparably damaged. All the data seemed lost forever. It would have been, had it not been for a creative off-site backup that illustrates some of the difficulties of computing in 1989. This would be among the factors that soon prompted Ticketmaster to merge its systems.
Back before the earthquake had struck, the employees formed a plan. Knowing a single theft, fire, and/or tremor could destroy a month of unarchived data, employees had to come up with a solution. Renting a backup spot was costly and ultimately wasteful as the daily disks were about the size of a microwave. So, they came up with what might be the...