http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070320/...e_us/lost_data

This was just hit me even though it didn't happened here where I worked , but this is pretty BIG...with just an accidental click on the wrong key... and poof!.. its all gone...

__________________
Jean
-----
"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing." - Albert Einsteiin

A lot of things went wrong before that magic "keystroke". The "keystroke" wasn't the causal event. Stuff happens. The only two real mistakes (the serious ones) is that the tech had been given access to the backup drive with instructions to format it, and that the backup tapes hadn't been adequately tested. Both, it seems to me from the peanut gallery, are the admin's responsibility. (Fault's a little strong for this situation.)

And that, my friends, is why you keep the paper files while the data is still valid.

__________________
In Fallout 3, 'happiness' is a warm junkyard dog and a loaded gun. It's mostly the loaded gun.
- Moose's one-line review.

"your going to regret that one. You are now a colonoscope...
- Chrissy, corrupting PraedSt's wish.

You hit the nail on the head. I see it all the time at work. People not putting "test" in their plan, find problems when it's too late.

If this were planned correctly, the plan should have been to work on one drive, test it to make sure it was done correctly, then move on.

If the drive was in the same machine or array, then a final backup before operation should have been performed and tested.

Also; most backup plans have multiple tapes. The last backup doesn't work? you move to the previous, and so on. You may lose some iterations of data, but it's not a total loss.
My guess is that they were re-using tapes, and never testing. Tapes wear out.

We have an operations department here that has the attitude of "we got to do it anyway, so if it's wrong, it will have to be fixed anyway, so no need to plan." It's always the computer's fault, never the lack of planning.

__________________
Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

Reminds me of one of my bosses lines from auto repair days:

If it doesn't fit, force it. If it breaks, it probably needed replacing anyway.

__________________
Don of Borg - Cool, Calm, Collective.

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

I'm sorry to say this, but those guys are NOT the ones I'd have asked to mess to the drives after a disaster like this, I'd have gone for real data recovery specialists immediately.

__________________
And the "driving on the freeway on a scooter" analogy still holds true because the pilots are sitting in 7 to 30 ton aircraft o' doom and you are running around them in your very own Meatbody, Mark I. Beep, beep.
Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

DriveSavers for the win!

__________________
"4th Law of Modern Thermodynamics: Where Mihoshi is, Chaos Reigns." ~W. Hakubi
"Gun control is hitting your target; Recycling is reloading your brass." ~ Lex of Dirty Work.

I've often wondered if we could have a "Library of Alexandria" problem--where a tremendous percentage of our knowledge just goes away following some major disaster because we don't have reliable archives for much of our knowledge. Tapes---lots of things go wrong there. burn a CD/DVD ? Unlike the mass-produced CDs, the gold CDs has an optical layer that breaks down in, an estimate I heard was 5 to 10 years. Even paper often has acid in it, but at least even with acid it lasts 500 years or so.

I'm not sure what the solution is--print out the entire internet on acid free paper and store it in a deep cave somewhere? Not gonna happen--and there might not be a cave big enough. Or--a reliable long-term digital storage system stored in a cave somewhere--with instructions on acid free paper (or etched in stone--or at least metal!) concerning data formats, etc, so future archeologists have a prayer in reading it.

My Verizon FIOS has been out for 36 hours (just came back on an hour ago)--so no TV, no telephone, no internet--so I've been thinking of lack of access to data lately. Note--it took 1 hour to fix the problem (most likely it was in the green box with "Broadband" printed on it a block from my house that had been hit by a car who must have thought the sidewalk was a nice place to drive). It took 36 hours to send the truck out to find and fix the problem!

__________________
-----
Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

In the old days, a work wasn't really protected by copyright until a copy was in the Library of Congress.
As a result, early filmmakers has their movies copied out to paper to keep in the library.
As a result, there early works are still available, since paper photos have a fairly long shelf life.
Later this was changed, which has resulted in a middle period were essentially all movies that where not constantly shown and therefore constantly copied, is gone, since filmstock from that period basically turns to dust in only 10-20 years.

We're already in a "Library of Alexandria" situation, if you remember that the library didn't really disappear by fire, but instead through decades if not centuries of neglect.

I remember a (Swedish?) scifi dystopia which had civilization destroyed because everything was scanned to tapes(shows how old that was) and the originals destroyed to save space.
Then a bug evolved which lived off the glue that binds the magnetic particles to the tape.

__________________
And the "driving on the freeway on a scooter" analogy still holds true because the pilots are sitting in 7 to 30 ton aircraft o' doom and you are running around them in your very own Meatbody, Mark I. Beep, beep.
Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

I've just had a vision of anthropology grad students, thousands of years from now, doing their thesis defenses on the late 20th century's view of who was greater: Kirk or Picard? And the latest religion formed around references to the commandments of a lost deity: G*dwin's Law.

Hoo boy. Is it 4pm yet?

__________________
In Fallout 3, 'happiness' is a warm junkyard dog and a loaded gun. It's mostly the loaded gun.
- Moose's one-line review.

"your going to regret that one. You are now a colonoscope...
- Chrissy, corrupting PraedSt's wish.

I'm willing to bet that at least part of the problem was the substitution of procedure for talent. Why have a trained, experienced person who knows the systems, with the experience to watch out for problems ahead of time, when you can write an SOP and hire a 'tech' to just follow the checklist? You don't need a human, just get a robot and run the program.

Reminds me of the Isaac Asimov robot story 'Risk', where Susan Calvin had to send in a human to determine that a robot strictly following orders had bollixed the experiment. As I recall, she said " 'Go find out what's wrong' isn't an order you can give a robot."

Unless you first give the robot SOP#203-98876-098A: Procedures to find out what's worng.

__________________
The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

See also

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ms_Fnd_in_a_Lbry

The story 'Ms Fnd in a Lbry'

__________________
The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

And there we have an example of the last line in my signature.

I had a boss that saw anything even slightly pessimistic as being negative. He had a bunch of slogans like, "A winner sees a solution for every problem. A loser sees a problem for every solution." Many was the time that I tried to point out that when the raft springs a leak, having a guy along that thought to pack a patch kit would be a lot better than a guy that swore up and down that it wouldn't be needed. We never seemed to reach a middle ground on that one.

__________________
I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.