Not scarred at all - happily nostalgic! We worked out that the machine had an IBM PC compatible mode, which allowed us to boot from floppy disk to play Commander Keen. I recall that lots of other software didn't work correctly (the emultation/compatibility must have been pretty poor) but back in 1994 it kept us entertained on rainy days when we weren't allowed outside to play.
The problem with physical drives is that they can (and do!) fail. The authors point is surely that the backup would need to be checked periodically, and drive failures dealt with.
Does magnetic media like this (especially spinning disk) suffer from bit-rot? What about the possibility of mechanical failure?
I'd never rely on mechanical disks as the one and only backup of any data critical to me - a two tier approach of mechanical for fast retrieval, and cloud/online backup seems to be the safest bet.
The reporting is very poor also - if the backups don't run, you arent alerted to failure or success, they just dont appear on the emailed reports. Many a server has not been backed up because of this...
