In my IT years I have personally seen snippets like -Firm A 1980's greymouth floods - minicomputer with 2 hard disks. Backup disks were stored on highest shelf when flood was coming. Office furniture floated and knocked some backups off top shelf into muddy water. lower hard disk was flooded and ruined. Upper hard disk was 2 inches above flood line. Upper hard disk was one that had backups land in muddy water. Lower hard disk backups did not fall into water.
-Firm B 1980's Greymouth floods office computer just above water line. Offsite backups in bank vault ruined when vault flooded. -Firm C backed up network to tape and removable disk. PC with crucial data trashed working data, and instead of restoring from backup media backed up corrupted data onto it. Only had one copy of backup media. Tape backups had omitted workstation with data due to network connection lost for 5 months. One 5 month old backup found. Crucial missing data file was found after running chkdsk and examining data in the lost clusters and discovering the lost datafile was contained in one of these. This saved 5 months work being redone. -Firm D employed consultant to install backup software. Consultant disparaged system that was being backed up and previous backup methods, and set up an ultra smart backup system using more sophisticated software. Consultant left his company 1 week later, 3 months later was discovered that sophisticated backup did not include folder where all the data files were. -Firm D had junior operator running payroll package for hundreds of small firms. Run did not work properly, so operator restored from backup to redo the operation, except got confused and backed up instead, ruining that backup. After that did not fix problem, operator worked through all the levels of backups trying to restore from each and backing up instead onto them. Finally stopped when only one good backup remained, requiring two months work to be redone. Operator fired. -Firm E had 2 USB hard drives for complete server backups. 1 of these was swapped with its twin and taken home each day. Data files were accidentally deleted, and at that stage the daily swapped USB drives were found to not be backing up for nearly a year. The other, permanent USB drive backup had a power button that had to be pressed after a power cut to restart it, and it had not been pressed after the previous power cut....3 months before. -Firm F has offsite backup to network provider done over internet each night. both offices rendered inaccessible after Feb 22 earthquake, so no backups available. Eventually server rescued after 5 weeks from building which has split into 3 pieces army rescue staff on standby outside. 5 weeks with no access to data. -Firm G has UPS for server. Severe lightning storm has lightning hit main grid 100+ miles away in high country, sending large spike down line. All computers in office after restart OK except the UPS which is killed dead by the spike, so server crashed too. -Firm H still backs up zipped data to floppy disk. 2 networked PCs, one with floppy disk broken, other PC produces floppy disks that cannot be read in any PC except the original drive. -Firm I extracts data from server still running on UPS after Feb 22 earthquake via Wifi router also plugged into UPS from laptop in street. Front of building is also in the street. Jolyon fails to quote the important part of the sentence - " "Thats a cool idea for an emergency backup after the event." (last 3 words change the sense of the story) -Numerous cases with tape or zip drive backups where backup media could not be read when data was needed to be restored from backup. Main points: -Multiple backup methods are better, in case technology behind any one method fails. -Whatever method is used, backups have to be checked from time to time. -For offsite backups there has to be some thought about having them as up to date with the live files as possible. Many firms with offsite backups in Christchurch after the earthquake decided to not use them until they retrieved their server as the offsite backup was 1 or 2 weeks old and the week or two's work to be redone could not be reconstructed as the paper records also were in the office with the server. In many cases even having the offsite backups even a few hours work behind the live data created immense logistical and legal problems. John _______________________________________________ NZ Borland Developers Group - Delphi mailing list Post: delphi@delphi.org.nz Admin: http://delphi.org.nz/mailman/listinfo/delphi Unsubscribe: send an email to delphi-requ...@delphi.org.nz with Subject: unsubscribe
