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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."
Then the swearing started again.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
who needs a magazine?
Some stories should just come with Nelson Muntz sound files embedded.
Ha-ha!
erroneous: look me up in a dictionary
*coughs
TFA: Business 2.0 never had to rely on their backup software until that day, which is why they probably did not realize that it was either obsolete or dysfunctional.
sorry, their MAIN problem is not in any way a dysfunctional backup system. ever heard of verifying backuped data?
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).
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.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Hum!!! Unless you are there looking at the data being backed up there is no way unless you get notification from your system that it has completed.
usually that is the case but it has happened when one of my backup failed one night and someone needed a file restores from the previous day, if that company never checked it's backup or never configure some kind of noticaition upon failiure or success then they are very lame
There aren't a lot of ways for a machine to "crash" that loses all its data. Even a lightning-fried hard drive can have its platters removed by a data recovery lab and many files can be pulled off. A mechanical failure doesn't grind the platters into sand. As a network server it really should have a RAID too. So how exactly can "the server crash" so spectacularly that the RAID, backups, and widely available data recovery services all fail? Did the building blow up?
Tens of IT managers are getting Hundreds of IT minions to check Thousands of backup tapes and befor a senior manager walks in.
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
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
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.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Wait for OS X 10.5 and "Time Machine".
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
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.
http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.
And if the data is that important then a suitable RAIDed disk array will sort things out.
The topic here is backups, not RAID.
Say it again with me everyone "RAID IS NOT A BACKUP"
RAID increases-uptime by decreasing/eliminating the downtimes needed to do restores when an individual drive bites it. It is *NOT* a backup.
RAID does not save you if someone accidentally deletes a needed file.
RAID does not save you if your machine gets nailed by a virus/upatched-exploit.
RAID does not save you if the drive power supply fries taking out attached hardware.
RAID does not save you if a bugler steals your machine.
RAID IS NOT A BACKUP.
Jerry: I don't understand. Do you have my data?
IT: We have your backup, we just can't restore it.
Jerry: But the backup keeps the data here, that's why you have the backup!
IT: I think I know why we have backups.
Jerry: I don't think you do. You see, you know how to MAKE the backup, you just don't know how to RESTORE the backup. And that's really the most important part of the backup: the restoring. Anybody can just make them.
Promote proofreading. Don't mod up sloppy posts.