I purchased an HP MSL2024 and a three year next business day warranty from PC Connection as a tape backup solution for my employer.  The device is an LTO-3 robotic library capable of handling 24 tapes.  Cost of the device - $8,000.  Cost of the warranty - $1400.  But upon connecting the device, the packaging was missing the appropriate SCSI terminator in order to get the device to function properly.  Thus began my long drawn out saga with HP customer services.

InfoWorld magazine reported today on a leak from none other than Jonathan Schwartz (CEO of Sun Microsystems) that Apple would announce the use of its ZFS technology in the next Mac OSX iteration at the WWDC next week. (see here) In fact, it is integral to the new Time Machine feature built into the OS. This set me to thinking. What exactly is ZFS? Why would it be integral to Time Machine? How does Time Machine work?

I had a government customer once ask me about whole drive encryption.  This was before the advent of such devices as Seagate’s DriveTrust drives.  At the time, the only viable solution for whole drive encryption was PGP Disk.

But before we can start talking about solutions, it might be better to give a clearer understanding of how data is encrypted.