Data Backup Horror Stories

Since yesterday was Halloween, I thought it would be fun to share some data backup horror stories.? I’ve collected these from mostly reputable sources. ?Enjoy!

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Shafted!

An IT specialist was reviewing a large company’s computer practices in order to make recommendations.? The tech asked the COO to see where their backups were stored.

?He was told that their backups were to tape and they were all stored in a locked metal cabinet on the other side of the building.? As they approached the cabinet, both of them heard a loud buzzing noise.? Then it stopped.? Then it started again.? The IT tech asked the COO what the noise was.? “It’s the elevator,” he was told.? “Where is the elevator shaft?” the tech wondered.? “It’s right here, on the other side of the wall from the tape storage.”

?Turns out the movement of the elevator’s electric motors back and forth next to the tapes had erased them all.

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Toy Story 2

An unnamed (name withheld to protect the innocent) accidentally deleted the production copy of Toy Story 2 during production.? All of it.? Everyone panicked, and checked the backups…which didn’t work.?

What saved the day was that one of the teammates had created a copy of the animated film and taken it home with her on maternity leave.? It was this copy that saved the day.? To infinity and beyond!

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Hardware Failure – Mirrored Drives

“I was using my store management software on a computer that was equipped with two hard-disk drives working like mirrors. The idea was that if one drive broke down the data would have been safe on the other one. The problem is that one drive became faulty and its mirror drive simply read the faults and duplicated them, becoming faulty itself; years of accounting date were lost! It turned out that I had to get a new computer and input all the data manually in it, and it took me weeks. I wouldn’t wish this scary story to happen even to my competitors.”

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Burst Pipes and One Backup

One company we know was very diligent about creating regular backups. Good, right? The problem was that they created just one copy, stored in a datacenter basement that suffered a burst pipe. The flood wiped out all their archived data. This is why redundancy is so crucial when it comes to having more than one set of backups.?

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Don’t become a victim to disaster horror stories like this.?

Contact Verified Backups at 636-328-7147 for a free backup audit.