Songs about Deduplication
(or: A Study of Pompeii)
One of my favorite songs out on the radio right now is by Bastille, called Pompeii. I love this song because it's the first song of its kind! It's a song about deduplication and how important it is in today's technological world. The song even starts out with the background singers singing, "we dedupe! We dedupe!"Let's take a look at the first couple of stanzas:
I was left to my own devices.
Many days fell away with nothing to show.
And the walls kept tumbling down
In the city that we love
Great clouds roll over the hills
Bringing darkness from above
It's obvious he's talking about the storage where he keeps his data (several devices), and he lost many days of data, due to corruption ("walls [...] tumbling down"). The impending clouds represent the upper-level management about to rain down on him, telling him he needs to restore from backup. And, as if by magic, he beautifully illustrates therecovery from a deduplication server--possibly an appliance:
But if you close your eyes,
Does it almost feel like
Nothing changed at all?
And if you close your eyes,
Does it almost feel like
You've been here before?
How am I gonna be an optimist about this?
How am I gonna be an optimist about this?
With this, we can see how deduplication benefits us, when we compare the differences of the backups, the change is so minimal, that it feels like nothing's changed at all (except for those last little things that did change, of course). His question for optimisim is poetically answered in its repetition: we're subtly told to back up our stuff on a reliable deduplication system.
We were caught up and lost in all of our vices
In your pose as the dust settled around us
Stunned in silence, we realize that we were worried for nothing. Finally, we realize an important truth: we still have to search among the wreckage and figure out what caused the corruption in the first place.
Oh where do we begin?
The rubble or our sins?
Oh oh where do we begin?
The rubble or our sins?
Do we learn from our experience, or do we just continue on and hope we don't lose everything again? We're okay, because we have a deduplication system that works.
Editor's note: Some of you may argue that this is incorrect, that this is not what the song is about, but I make the counterpoint: what's protecting your data?
Lyrics thanks to azlyrics: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bastille/pompeii.html
