On Automated Backups
I present to you the canonical backup story, in my own words (except for the part about it being canonical.. Those are TJIC’s words).
At my last company, they spent 30 grand on a fancy-ass automated tape backup system. We had 3 full time IT people and 12 engineers (that is generally considered overkill on the IT side). After the backup system had been in operation for 6 months, which required a co-worker to stay late and swap tapes twice a week, I tested the system by asking for a file I had “accidentally” deleted. The response?
“Oops. It looks like all the backup tapes are blank. We have no backups.”