I ran into a video on CNN today that is one of the clearest arguments for a good backup scheme anyone could make. As described in the report at http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/crime/2008/01/24/pkg.disgruntled.employee.wtlv, an administrative assistant at a storefront architecture firm in Jacksonville, Fla., saw a want ad for an administrative assistant with her bosses phone number listed. Thinking she was being fired, she went to the office at midnight and spent the next three hours deleting all the data from the office server. Her boss told the police the seven years of architectural drawings and other files she deleted were worth $2.5 million dollars. Even the police officer in the report realized they should have had a backup.

While the reports I was able to find online stated that the data was recovered, they don't say whether a local consultant was able to recover them from the recycle bin, which would have cost the firm 2-3 hours of everyone’s work and a few hundred dollars, or if they sent the drives to OnTrack, DriveSavers, or a similar data recovery service, which would add a day or two and a few thousand dollars to the cost.

Any backup system, even a Maxtor OneTouch USB hard drive, would have gotten these people back up faster and cheaper, but the line between breaking into your place of work and deleting all the data and breaking into your bosses office and stealing the backup drive, tapes, etc., is pretty fine. In fact, the architects are lucky she didn't go off the deep end altogether and firebomb the joint.

You would think in a state with a football team called the Hurricanes that any thinking person would want to backup their data somewhere safe.

A $50/year Carbonite account looks really cheap by comparison with a full-blown data recovery effort. Even a more business oriented $300/month LiveVault account looks like a bargain.

People being the idiots they are, I'm sure I'll be writing "D'oh, I should have made a backup #27" soon enough.