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Quantum Backups

Posted by: Michael Nygard on 03/20/2009

Backups are the only macroscopic system we commonly deal with that exhibits quantum mechanical effects. This is odd enough that I've spent some time getting tangled up in these observations.

Until you attempt a restore, a backup set is neither good nor bad, but a superposition of both. This is the superposition principle.

The peculiarity of the superposition principle is dramatically illustrated with the experiment of Schrödinger's backup. This is when you attempt to restore Schrödinger's pictures of his cat, and discover that the cat is not there.

In a startling corollary, if you use offsite vaulting, a second quantum variable is introduced, in that the backup set exists and does not exist simultaneously. A curious effect emerges upon applying the Hamiltonian operator. The operator shows that certain eigenvalues are always zero, revealing that prime numbered tapes greater than 5 in a set never exist.

Finally, the Heisenbackup principle says that the user of a system is entangled with the system itself. As a result, within 30 days of consciously deciding that you do not need to run a backup, you will experience a complete disk crash. Because you've just read this, your 30 days start now.

Sorry about that.

Michael Nygard's complete blog can be found at: http://www.michaelnygard.com/blog/index.html

About Michael Nygard

Michael strives to raise the bar and ease the pain for developers across the country. He shares his passion and energy for improvement with everyone he meets, sometimes even with their permission. Michael has spent the better part of 20 years learning what it means to be a professional programmer who cares about art, quality, and craft. He's always ready to spend time with other developers who are fully engaged and devoted to their work--the "wide awake" developers. On the flip side, he cannot abide apathy or wasted potential.

Michael has been a professional programmer and architect for nearly 20 years. During that time, he has delivered running systems to the U. S. Government, the military, banking, finance, agriculture, and retail industries. More often than not, Michael has lived with the systems he built. This experience with the real world of operations changed his views about software architecture and development forever.

He worked through the birth and infancy of a Tier 1 retail site and has often served as "roving troubleshooter" for other online businesses. These experiences give him a unique perspective on building software for high performance and high reliability in the face of an actively hostile environment.

Most recently, Michael wrote "Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software", a book that realizes many of his thoughts about building software that does more than just pass QA, it survives the real world. Michael previously wrote numerous articles and editorials, spoke at Comdex, and co-authored one of the early Java books.

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