In this week’s Great Inventions In Backup History we take a look at the backup or “spare” tire.
Driving around town in the early part of the 20th century had its drawbacks. You had to crank your engine to get it going, you couldn’t get where you were going very fast and because the first roads were just glorified dirt paths strewn with horseshoe nails, rocks and potholes. Back then tires had inflatable tubes inside (much like a bicycle tire) that, if punctured, needed to be deflated, removed, patched, re-inserted into the tire, the tire re-mounted and then finally re-inflated before anyone could go anywhere again. (Sound anything like trying to restore from tape-based backups?)
The Thomas B. Jeffrey Company added a feature to their 1909 Rambler that no automobile before had included – a full size, fully assembled, ready-to-go spare tire that could be placed on the car in three minutes. The Rambler’s success was driven by this kind of innovation and a progressive advertising campaign that “emphasized the emotional appeal of the car.” (Hyde)
For many of us our computers are just as important as our cars, and though cars today usually come with a spare of some sort, computers typically only come with one of each part: one display, one keyboard, one hard drive. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could have a spare copy of your data with you at all times just in case your computer failed? Enter IDrive Online Backup – open your own account today and get your first 5GBs of cloud storage totally free!
Using IDrive you can create a privately encrypted backup of your important data that you can access anytime, anywhere with a web browser or supported mobile device and you won’t have to carry around another physical drive!
Read more about spare tires on Wikipedia and stay tuned for more Great Inventions In Backup History!
