Backup or die

Did you read about the slightly reality-deprived individual who went on a bit of a pre-emptive retaliation strike against her employer? The media is being rather hard on her, with good justification, but there is another side to the story.

It is alleged that a certain Miss Cooley, of Jacksonville Florida, was reading the newspaper one day, and came across a help-wanted ad. This ad leaped off the page at her, as it sounded like her current job, and it even gave her boss's phone number as a contact. This was all the evidence she needed to be convinced she was about to be fired and replaced. So she decided to strike first.

Ok, stop right there. The first part of the story that isn't being hit in the media, is the fact that they really need to talk more at that company, open the ol' lines of communication a bit.

Anyways, back to the drama. It seems that Miss Cooley wanted to get even with the rotten so-and-so for firing her, so she went into the office to do a little late-night work. And got on their servers, and started doing DEL *.* commands (ok, I doubt she knew to do it at a command prompt, she probably did a shift-delete on the folders in Windows, but anyways...). That, she thought, would serve him right.

She ended up deleting 7 years worth of architect drawings, blueprints, all the essential data that a company like that needs to survive. The value of the data destroyed is beyond the value of the company itself.

In the end, of course, she got caught. The owner of the business appearantly paid out the nose, to send his disks to a data-recovery outfit, who basically unset the deleted flag on all the files and folders. He lost some money and some time, and an employee. She was arrested and fired, as you would expect.

But here's the rest of the story. Why in the name of everything that isn't unholy did not this man have a backup? And a backup of the backup? And offsite storage of at least one of the copies of the backup? I mean, damn! In this day and age, when Life=Data, how can you sleep without knowing you have your data backed up? It blows my mind!

Burning to a CD or DVD is a pain in the butt, I agree. You cannot trust tape, really, and besides, that's the technology of the 70's. Disk-to-disk backup over the network is really the way to go, and if you don't, you are a dadgum fool. I use a disk-to-disk netowrk backup solution, covers all my servers and about 45 desktops to boot. Ask me, and I'll tell you which product I use.

So, I assign 90% of the blame to Miss Cooley, for (allegedly) doing the evil deed. But I assign 10% of the blame to her employer, for not keeping a decent backup!