On brief reflection, I realise this is a very personal response, and doesn't really work at a level where you're working in the capacity of sysop at a medium to large company. But the question is a bit ambiguous, and this is slashdot, so pleh!

10 years is not that long, but more to the point, if I am looking for a file on media that is so old, then it must be archived not backed up. A backup is something you keep if you want to safeguard against loss of data on whatever you use as an active data store. An archive is somewhere safe you keep something when you no longer have a regular need to access it, but may still need it in the future. The methods and media for backups and archives are often the same/similar, but in the case where you have something archived, one would assume there is no "live" copy and therefore the archive should itself be backed up.

Given the rate of storage capacity expansion and my comparatively pedestrian storage requirements, my archive policy is that it stays on my computer, and simply doesn't get accessed. That way it's always backed up using my most current backup regime (rsnapshot at the moment), my "archive" isn't really an archive at all, and I don't have to worry about the media getting old, because it's guaranteed to be on my most recent media - the media I use daily.

THANK YOU!

This is so far from a secret it's not even funny. Imagine if we'd only just discovered what those two pins on the connector did?

Hell, even the breakout board the guy (who's original, non full page ad-encumbered article can be found here) bought has the bloody serial pins labelled.

It's not remotely surprising that an embedded device has a UART on it. It's even less surprising that a device designed to interface with very simple dock devices has a UART exposed via its peripheral connector.

What is surprising is that the combination of breakout board and RS232 line driver somehow managed to be bigger than the phone.

Oh, I just realised what "non-pharma drug provider" means. I make no such investments.

Half of these I don't even need to consider:

Health insurance - We don't pay directly for healthcare here because we are communists.
Birth control pill prescription - I'm male, but ignoring that, contraception is free
Current account with non-pharma drug provider - I don't know what this is but I assume it's somehow related to the two I've just mentioned above.
NPR membership - Why would I want to be a member of the North Pennsylvania Railroad anyway?

Of those that are left, I don't own a car, live in a city that you can walk around quite easily and don't use a gym.

So all I have to choose between is my mobile phone or my landline/broadband. I'll take my landline thanks - there's plenty of public wifi around here (or friends willing to give our their WPA PSK).

This is true, but Verizon could operate with a certain sense of... decorum. Plus, I doubt they lose that much money in early termination due to deceased individuals.

Why would a corporation care about a grieving widow, unless there was some sort of bad publicity to arise out of... oh dear.

Perhaps now the overworked, underpaid developers who did this can get back to work on flash for 64-bit Linux.

And while I'm in a bitter mood... It still amazes me how flash can be so horribly inefficient even at video playback. Ancient VLC versions play back H264 with far less CPU usage than current Linux flash does. I do wonder how Adobe manages to achieve this disparity in performance.