Oliver’s night job at the university computing center is to change the tapes used for overnight data backups on the server. While waiting for each tape to complete, he’s able to work on his thesis using a word processor on the same server. Is there a problem with this arrangement?
Ollie’s thesis may not be backed up as reliably as he might wish. A backup program may pass over a file that is currently open for writing, as the state of the data in such a file may be indeterminate.