it's sold as harder to copy (and easier to revoke when you're doing layoffs - which shouldn't have been a really challenge for card-based systems, they're just old and didn't keep up.)
Yeah, that article was silly. Yes, setting up a new phone is a giant annoying exercise in yak shaving, but that’s to be expected when transferring to any device.
That said, I’ve had to unlock a door with a dedicated phone app, and it’s always way too many taps even if the app hasn’t randomly logged you out because your session is a month old or because your phone restarted to store an update. (Even more if you prefer to keep Bluetooth off -which among other things saves on battery.)
The system had RAID, so disks could be replaced without taking anything down.
We never had a catastrophic failure, but yeah, and hour of lost data wouldn't be the end of the world. For regular maintenance we would just coordinate with the QA team to pause testing temporarily. (Testing was only around-the-clock near a product release.)
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