Tech Magazine Loses June Issue, No Backup

Gareth writes "Business 2.0, a magazine published by Time, has been warning their readers against the hazards of not taking backups of computer files. So much so that in an article published by them in 2003, they 'likened backups to flossing — everyone knows it's important, but few devote enough thought or energy to it.' Last week, Business 2.0 got caught forgetting to floss as the magazine's editorial system crashed, wiping out all the work that had been done for its June issue. The backup server failed to back up."

Comments

They probably still have most of it

[ZachPruckowski]

I imagine that they still can resemble a lot of it from other files - they should still have all the layout pieces for one, and all the authors ought to have at least rough drafts of their stories on their personal computers. The deadline's screwed, but they can probably get it out a few weeks late (or in July, depending on how often they normally publish).

High profile SNAFUs

[Rob T Firefly]

This reminds me of the recent uproar over a car crash involving the New Jersey governor. He was critically injured because he wasn't wearing his seatbelt, and people freaked, asking what sort of role model he could possibly be. I argued that he was an awesome role model, because sometimes people need to see a mistake end badly for someone else before they'll do what's necessary to protect themselves from making the same mistake. Seeing a high-profile magazine get hit like this can do the same for backup slackers the world over.

I don't know about you people, but after reading this (and giving it the "haha" tag) I'm going home and catching up on a couple of backups I've been slacking off on for a while.

Re:High profile SNAFUs

[Hoi Polloi]

I wouldn't use the term "role model" for things like that. I'd say "examples" is the better word. The governor was an example of what NOT to do.

Re:After the swearing stopped.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually that is what you get for having Geek Squad as your outsourced IT staff.

honestly, they CANT have competent IT. The FIRST thing you do in the morning is check the backups.

I have a HP sdat jukebox here and I STILL check the backup logs to make sure the backup and verify succeeded last night. if they dont I mirror the important files right away and then run a manual backup to not lose the last 24 hours of backup.

I hope that Business 2.0 learned that paying top $$$ for competent IT is a good idea and they should run a article about it.

Wrong problem

[mseeger]

Hi,

the problem was, as always, not the backup. I've rarely seen problems resulting from the backup process. The troublesome process is the restore. Or as a friend put it once:

Nobody wants backups, what everybody wants is a restore.

In my twenty years of IT i've seen several companies making backups like a well oiled machine. The backup process was well documented and everyone was trained to a degree, they could do it with their eyes closed. But everything fell apart in the critical moment, because all they had planned was making the backup. Nobody ever imagined or tried a restore on the grand scale. So they ended up with a big stack of tapes with unuseable data.

Backup is the mean, not the goal.

Regards, Martin

Re:After the swearing stopped.

[IdleTime]

I am not surprised.

There is not a week going by without me getting an issue from one of out regular analysts with question about how the customer can salvage their data because they don't have a backup. My standard answer is that we may be able to save some data, but it's going to cost a lot of $$$. And I also say: "When you don't have a backup, you have either deemed that you can easily recreate the data or that they are not important for the company"

And these are not mom&pop companies but big multi million/billion dollar companies.

Re:After the swearing stopped.

[Auntie Virus]

I have a HP sdat jukebox here and I STILL check the backup logs
HP DAT? You'd better do more than check the logs. A test restore (if your users don't already test for you by deleting files) at least a few times a week might save your butt one day. Actually DAT or not, test restores are a must. Logs lie.

Re:Rag

[UbuntuDupe]

nobody reads Business 2.0 anyway.

I wish. I wish people didn't read Time, either (the publisher), but they do. Time's writing style is the dumbed down, try-to-be-hip crap I wouldn't have gotten away with in sixth grade. Seriously. Like I said before, to understand why its writing is like fingernails on a blackboard for me, consider how the same information would be conveyed by two sources:

8-year-old: "6 divided by 3 is 2."

Time magazine: "Okay, imagine you've got a half-dozen widgets, churned out of the ol' Widget Factory on Fifth and Main. Now, say you've gotta divvy 'em up into little chunklets -- a doable three, let's say -- and each chunklet has the same number that math professor Gregory Beckens at Overinflated Ego University calls a 'quotient'. The so-called 'quotient' in this case? Dos."

Based on how that post got modded, I'm not alone in this.

We can't backup, its too expensive.

[Stu101]

This is my story and I bullshit you not! I work for a manufacturing company, the second largest in its field in the world. Great. However the boss really does not like spending money. We eventually got a backup system using offsite backups (with a special client) and it seems to work ok. However, when it got to 100 GBs I was told to start pruning stuff. So I did. Long and short of it, even with the most important files backed up, we still have most things not backed up. Basically I have almost half a TB of data that I am not allowed to back up because its expensive. I can only backup 5 days worth of data as they are unwilling to pay anymore money for it. The fun will come when someone wants a restore from last year. This people, is the reality sometimes. Me, well, I really dont care anymore. Im sick of having servers, important, mission critical machines sitting on single IDE disks. We sell online, great, problem is our firewall is non redundant single IDE disk. If it goes (like it has in the past) we were down for days, loosing emails, web traffic, web orders, remote ordering systems, EDI data, remote sessions, ftp, everything. DR? the solution proposed by upper management is, oh we will buy some dells and restore. Yeah thats a good idea. After waiting a week for them to arrive, what exactly are you going to restore ? This is more typical than you think, unfortunatly. Im just the guy that has to make do with what i can. No doubt when it fucks up I will be blamed.