Years ago in a previous Job, I looked after a customer who created GBs of new data every day. They insisted on backing up the data themselves even though they had a maintenance contract with the company I worked for who also offered an online backup service. Anyway, one of their staff religiously put a DAT tape into the drive every night and removed it every morning, labelled it, and stored it in a fire proof safe. One day the servers hard drive failed. They called us in because they couldn’t restore the data from tape for some unknown reason. It turned out that although they put a tape in every night, removed it every morning, labelled, and stored it in a fire proof safe, what they forgot to do was check the backup reports. If they had check the backup reports, they would have realised that the backups had never run. They had a year’s supply of backup tapes, neatly dated, and all of them empty.
In the end, they had to send the faulty hard drive off to get their data retrieved and were very lucky to get back 90% of their data back. It cost them thousands of pounds and two weeks without their data.Online backup companies like ourselves offer services where you don’t need to worry about checking your reports, you can just sit back and relax. Is it not worth thinking about letting someone else take responsibility for your data?
