The final disaster recovery solution is a 'doomsday book' -- a laptop with a 100GB drive and enough batteries to run the business for about a day. The laptop is taken offsite every day.

Perry admitted that just sending the tapes across the Bay was not an infallible strategy. "Most of the stuff I worry about in terms of real-time recovery are small kinds of disasters," he said. "The big-time disasters, I tend to think we would be offline for more than the amount of time that having instantaneous recovery requires."