http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/03/20/lost.data.ap/index.html
Murphy’s Law at its most vicious - just leaves me shaking my head.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/03/20/lost.data.ap/index.html
Murphy’s Law at its most vicious - just leaves me shaking my head.
But what a good response! The article didn’t say anything about the technician being fired or even disciplined, for an honest (if careless) mistake. People just got to work and set about fixing the problem.
It sounds like a poorly planned backup system, ifone backup can be deleted so easily, and the other backup proves to be unusable. If the data is so valuable, at least one backup should be offsite and hard to delete.
I suspect any reasonably competent IT pro could design a better system than they had in place*, I wonder if they ever had the resources to implement one. My friends in state jobs constantly complain about the lack of funds for even the most basic purchase, and I wouldn’t be too surprised to hear that they’d have to justify each and every tape requested, then run it through the budget committee, and try to explain why one piece of data should be on multiple tapes, then explain offsite storage, etc.
Being a little cynical, them not taking it out on the person that wiped everything makes me suspect that someone had put in a request that was denied, and there’s a paper trail to prove it.
*based only on the short article, I have no knowledge of the systems used by the state of Alaska
Yeah, if that much damage can be done accidentally, imagine what a malicious person could do. Then make sure your data is backed up enough to handle that.
Rather than re-key or re-scan 300 boxes of documents, why the blue boogers didn’t they ship the drive off to Drivesavers? A simple reformat is usually quite easy to undo.
I’m in IT, and resources are the key. We have all kinds of disaster and loss recovery plans. We just can’t get anybody in management to give us the money to implement them.
It took (no joke) a fucking fire in our data center to get them to see the wisdom of putting alert monitors in the air circulation system.
I bet the recovery budget for this function looks really different next year.
Another newspaper article on this situation had this sentence: “Over the next few days, as the department, the division and consultants from Microsoft Corp. and Dell Inc. labored to retrieve the data, it became obvious the worst-case scenario was at hand.” I assume that one of the Microsoft or Dell consultants attempted to recover the data on the drive.
Well, that’s part of your problem, right there.
It was probably running Linux and they called Microsoft and Dell. You know how some higher ups are. They always know best.
Employee “But sir it’s Linux box.”
Smarter than you boss - I don’t care! I want you to call Microsoft and fix this now! Call Dell next! We bought these damn things from them, it’s their fault. :mad:
If they are taking sensible precautions against theft of confidential information (note I said if), then the disk may have been overwritten and not just reformatted. That would make it a lot harder to fix than just a visit to Drivesavers.
Yeah. Our data center is located upstairs from and directly above a breakroom, which features a microwave oven and dorks burning popcorn therein. We have disaster recovery plans up the wazoo too and I’m betting we’re going to have to use them one day.