Our favorite CAD software manufacturer has suffered a hit. Because of a patent infringement suit filed against them by Z4 Technlogies regarding the product activation software AutoCAD employs, U.S. District Judge Leonard Davis of Texas ordered Autodesk to pay an $18 million fine. This of course will not wreck Autodesk, which has revenues in excess of $1 billion, but still, it’s a tough pill for Autodesk to swallow!

We’ve been keeping this subject under wraps: we produce cutting and bending drawings for sheet metal fabricators. Our drawings are created in AutoCAD and coded so that they can be fed directly into a computerized cutting-routing machine. We have a considerable amount of domain knowledge in the subject

We are very careful about backing up our data. There is simply no time for re-doing work in the event data is wiped out due to natural disasters, electrical aberrations, operator error, computer maladies or just plain theft. We pride ourselves in our near-perfect timeliness. We fear the consequences of delivering late.

We have a state-of-the-art backup system — we maintain a separate server just for backing up data into; it has twin 120 GB hard disks, and the software in the server constantly updates the disks so that they are perfect mirrors of each other. If one crashes, the other is alive and well.

We backup our working files into this server every 24 hours.

Recently the hard disk in one of our high-performance workstations crashed due to a power disturbance. That led us to thinking: what stops both the hard disks in the backup server from suffering the same fate?

We therefore decided we would backup the data in the backup server every eight hours onto DVDs, which would be taken away and stored at a remote location. This way we could never lose more than eight hours of work.