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So You've Lost a $38 Billion File
smooth wombat writes "Imagine you're reformatting a hard drive so you can do a clean install but then realize that you have also reformatted the back up hard drive. No problem. You reach for your back up tapes only to find out that the information on the tapes is unreadable. Now imagine the information that is lost was worth $38 billion. This scenario is apparently what happened in July to the Alaska Department of Revenue. From the article: 'Nine months worth of information concerning the yearly payout from the Alaska Permanent Fund was gone: some 800,000 electronic images that had been painstakingly scanned into the system months earlier, the 2006 paper applications that people had either mailed in or filed over the counter, and supporting documentation such as birth certificates and proof of residence.' Using the 300 cardboard boxes containing all the information, staff worked overtime for several months to rescan everything at an additional cost of $200,000."
For that kind of money, I'd probably just send the HD to data recovery specialists.
How did they figure these files were worth $38 billion when it only cost $200000 to create them from scratch?
c++;
Most ENTERPRISES still have tape at some level as part of a comprehensive disaster recovery plan. Tape is easy to offsite, fairly reliable overall and still have comprehensive support available in all platforms. Most INDIVIDUALS don't do backups at all.
Because no one ever restores them regularly to test them.
I was at a company years ago and argued for both a ton more backups than they were making and for a test restore. They were not in the mood to do either. After about nine months, for some unknown reason they had to restore a file.
And the backup tape was unreadable. The next good backup was 17 days older.
After that we got $30 bucks of backup tapes every week and we had a 7 day rotation with the 7th day going in the vault. And we did regular test restores once a quarter.
You should REGULARLY test your backups.
You should have LOTS of backups.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Hm. Tapes with a proven shelf life of many, many years, or DVDs where a single scratch can render 4GB of data worthless. I wonder which enterprises (or governments) should chose?
That, or you'd think they'd at least have that kind of stuff stored on more than one server if it were that valuable?
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Well, the summary states that the files were rescanned at a cost of $200,000 -- so it sure sounds like the hard copies were preserved.
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Easy to offsite???
I work for an IT organization and we pay a company called Iron Mountain $100's monthly to schlep our boxes and boxes of backup tapes to their offsite storage facility.
And remember there is a difference between making 'backups' (store my important files somewhere else so I can get them in case of a system failure) and preparing for 'disaster recovery' (store everyones files somewhere else so we can rebuild the entire infrastructure in case the building burns to the ground).
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Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I'm just assuming the harddisks were secure erased, considering that is what pretty much every govenment in the world does when formatting harddisks.
Simply put, secure erasing is a process whereby (semi-)random data is written to the harddisk, overwriting previous data, and doing it enough times to ensure no residual traces of data exists.
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Primary disk: Accidently deleted.
Backup disk: Accidently formatted.
Tape: Unreadable.
What about the other tapes in the cycle? Did you not test it before? What about data recovery on the hard disks?
Thats a lot of unfortunate co-incidents and a lot of questions. It sounds more like the reality is that none of these ever existed and someone got caught-out.
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An LTO Ultrium 3 tape holds 400GB uncompressed, and you can buy libraries that hold hundreds or thousands of these tapes (and dozens of drives).
Disc to disc backup is gaining acceptance for some applications, but there are other places where the massive storage capacity of tape just can't be beat.
The idea of DVD as a business-class backup medium is almost perfectly slashdottastic.
It was actually only worth $200k, since that's the amount of money it took to recover from the problem.
The fact that it was related to an account worth $38B is scary, but not the actual cost.
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