On taking backups

That great bastion of Democracy - the Sunshine State of Florida is giving us an object lesson in how not to manage - your PC backups.  The story has to be shared with this august body.

Firstly a computer crashed somewhere in the elections office and they lost the 2002 election data files. Constance Kaplan, the director of the office had to tell everyone that the data was lost and was not overly happy about it. 

However while Laplan was giving the bad news in a TV interview, a secretary found a backup!    It was sitting on a disk on a shelf in a conference room.

It could happen to any of us.  What should you do?

These days with broadband, I recommend off-site backup with a third party such as www.connected.com.  For a few dollars a month I get my disk backed up over the Internet each evening. 

The other thing you need to do with any backup arrangement is to test it.  I was once developing a system for a client in the Carribean.  We installed phase I of the software, which collected customer data and (reluctantly) took the BWIA plane home.

Three months later after three operators had been punching in names and addresses we returned with Phase II.  Phase II required that we re-organise the file system, which means basically you zap the database, re-set the table structures and restore from the last backup.  My programmer was just about to press return on the IBM 370 equivalent of delete *.* when he thought he should check the tapes. 

Turned out that the operators had backup up the name and address file OK, however the job instructions then rewound the tape and backed up another file over the top.  They had ben running for three months without a backup because the backup job had never been tested.  

  So always backup and always test the backup.  A lesson for us all.  You can't rely on a disk in the conference room.