On a Hard Drive, No One Can Hear You Scream!

I'm a programmer. Two weeks ago at work we had a hard drive failure on our development database containing two full months of work. The files on that drive were backed up nightly, but unfortunately, they were backed up to the same server that they resided on, so the file backup was gone as well.

When I asked for tape backups we discovered that nightly the database was backed up to another server, then moved to a third location and deleted from the original backup location. Unfortunately we also learned that someone at some time in the past had deleted the folder it was being moved to and no one ever noticed the error messages being generated nightly. So, our data was safely backed up, then moved to a location that did not exist, then deleted. The nonexistent files were then backed up to tape. Things looked pretty bleak when a few days later one of the ex-data base administrators restored a database he called "prayer" and like an answered prayer it was the data we thought we had lost.

Until today I thought we had it bad; then I read about Alaska.