Backup Disaster Stories

Today in ComputerWorld, you can read other people's backup disaster stories. Sometimes it's hard to get motivated by the fear of what might happen to your own data. That's when reading about the painful experience of others can be helpful.

From lightning bolts to technician mistakes, people are constantly finding out the hard way that their backup plan was not nearly bullet-proof enough. The expense of recreating data (or data of losing irreplaceable data) is the price you pay for not doing the preventative work you should have.

This story stimulated my Schadenfreude so much that I went looking for other bad news. How about this little note from Storage Magazine claiming that backups fail either 40% or 60% of the time, depending on which depressing estimate you care to believe.

Here's a fun little Australian story about the scramble to create backup data centers so that one not-so-reliable power grid doesn't delay welfare checks for the entire country. Again. I love the quote about the officials' feelings about how well the backup power they assumed they had paid for worked: "So to say that we were impressed at that moment with the services provided would be a massive overstatement."

And just to leave things on a positive note, here are some stories from Processor about solving backup problems. Of course, is it really a success story when you have to turn to a data recovery service when your hard drive and tape backup system fail simultaneously? Best quote from this episode: "You really have not planned for the worst case scenario unless you have a clear plan for data recovery, should everything else fail."

See Also

• Why an undelete utility might fail when you need it most.

October 17, 2006October