Tech Magazine Loses June Issue, No Backup

Gareth writes "Business 2.0, a magazine published by Time, has been warning their readers against the hazards of not taking backups of computer files. So much so that in an article published by them in 2003, they 'likened backups to flossing — everyone knows it's important, but few devote enough thought or energy to it.' Last week, Business 2.0 got caught forgetting to floss as the magazine's editorial system crashed, wiping out all the work that had been done for its June issue. The backup server failed to back up."

After the swearing stopped.

The first words from management were "You're kidding me, right?"

Then the swearing started again.

Re:After the swearing stopped.

Actually that is what you get for having Geek Squad as your outsourced IT staff.

honestly, they CANT have competent IT. The FIRST thing you do in the morning is check the backups.

I have a HP sdat jukebox here and I STILL check the backup logs to make sure the backup and verify succeeded last night. if they dont I mirror the important files right away and then run a manual backup to not lose the last 24 hours of backup.

I hope that Business 2.0 learned that paying top $$$ for competent IT is a good idea and they should run a article about it.

Re:After the swearing stopped.

I am not surprised.

There is not a week going by without me getting an issue from one of out regular analysts with question about how the customer can salvage their data because they don't have a backup. My standard answer is that we may be able to save some data, but it's going to cost a lot of $$$. And I also say: "When you don't have a backup, you have either deemed that you can easily recreate the data or that they are not important for the company"

And these are not mom&pop companies but big multi million/billion dollar companies.

Re:After the swearing stopped.

I have a HP sdat jukebox here and I STILL check the backup logs
HP DAT? You'd better do more than check the logs. A test restore (if your users don't already test for you by deleting files) at least a few times a week might save your butt one day. Actually DAT or not, test restores are a must. Logs lie.

Re:After the swearing stopped.

The problem is that tech magazines are in the advertising business, not the tech business. I write content for the Web site of a tech radio show, and it's just a bunch of us in cubicles looking stuff up on Google. No tech people involved.

Paging Jerry Seinfeld

Jerry: I don't understand. Do you have my data?
IT: We have your backup, we just can't restore it.
Jerry: But the backup keeps the data here, that's why you have the backup!
IT: I think I know why we have backups.
Jerry: I don't think you do. You see, you know how to MAKE the backup, you just don't know how to RESTORE the backup. And that's really the most important part of the backup: the restoring. Anybody can just make them.

With this much free advertising

who needs a magazine?

Nelson Muntz

Some stories should just come with Nelson Muntz [wikipedia.org] sound files embedded.

Ha-ha!

They probably still have most of it

I imagine that they still can resemble a lot of it from other files - they should still have all the layout pieces for one, and all the authors ought to have at least rough drafts of their stories on their personal computers. The deadline's screwed, but they can probably get it out a few weeks late (or in July, depending on how often they normally publish).

Re:They probably still have most of it

Yeah, great, that's the content - now how about the advertising? That's where they make their money.

Editorial department server content was lost. Advertising content is normally handled by the production department.

I think we can all relax and rest assured that the June issue of Business 2.0 will have all its intended advertising.

High profile SNAFUs

This reminds me of the recent uproar over a car crash involving the New Jersey governor. He was critically injured because he wasn't wearing his seatbelt, and people freaked, asking what sort of role model he could possibly be. I argued that he was an awesome role model, because sometimes people need to see a mistake end badly for someone else before they'll do what's necessary to protect themselves from making the same mistake. Seeing a high-profile magazine get hit like this can do the same for backup slackers the world over.

I don't know about you people, but after reading this (and giving it the "haha" tag) I'm going home and catching up on a couple of backups I've been slacking off on for a while.

Re:High profile SNAFUs

I wouldn't use the term "role model" for things like that. I'd say "examples" is the better word. The governor was an example of what NOT to do.

How does this actually happen?

There aren't a lot of ways for a machine to "crash" that loses all its data. Even a lightning-fried hard drive can have its platters removed by a data recovery lab and many files can be pulled off. A mechanical failure doesn't grind the platters into sand. As a network server it really should have a RAID too. So how exactly can "the server crash" so spectacularly that the RAID, backups, and widely available data recovery services all fail? Did the building blow up?

Re:How does this actually happen?

A mechanical failure doesn't grind the platters into sand.

Doesn't it? [ufl.edu]

Re:How does this actually happen?

IANA publisher, but I would also imagine that in such a deadline-intensive business, data from a fried disk is about as good as lost. Sure, they can send their drives off to data recovery labs who could slowly recover an uncertain portion of the data for a pantload of money, but by the time that's done it'll be time for the next issue anyway. I'd guess it would be a lot quicker and cheaper to write off the disks and salvage what they can from everyone's local copies of the data.

Wrong problem

Hi,

the problem was, as always, not the backup. I've rarely seen problems resulting from the backup process. The troublesome process is the restore. Or as a friend put it once:

Nobody wants backups, what everybody wants is a restore.

In my twenty years of IT i've seen several companies making backups like a well oiled machine. The backup process was well documented and everyone was trained to a degree, they could do it with their eyes closed. But everything fell apart in the critical moment, because all they had planned was making the backup. Nobody ever imagined or tried a restore on the grand scale. So they ended up with a big stack of tapes with unuseable data.

Backup is the mean, not the goal.

Regards, Martin

Re:Wrong problem

The troublesome process is the restore.

I heard a story about a LAN admin who was doing backups every night. The tapes would go into a safe, then would go offsite, then be used again.

Everything worked well(?) until they needed to do a restore. The tape in the safe was corrupt. The tape at the offsite storage was corrupt. No tape was good.

It seems that the LAN admin made tea every morning. The electric kettle sat on top of the steel safe.

So the backup tape was placed into the safe, then the kettle was started, magnetizing the safe, and erasing the tape.

Not ONCE did anyone try to do a test restore to prove the system.

Re:Wrong problem

> Would mirrored drives be a more effective solution?

Yes and No:

• Mirrored drives are a good protection against drive failures and (usually) offer an easy restore process. If you mirror a drive and put the copy away (e.g. into a safe) this is a real and widely used backup method. As always you should at least try once to boot the system while removing the primary disk. Somtimes RAID controllers have some irks too.
• This method usually depends on the availability of a certain hardware, if you cannot get a new mainboard or raid controller of the same type, the mirrored disk contains data you may have trouble getting at. You may ignore this issue, if you have the same hardware at a safe location again.

Regards, Martin

We can't backup, its too expensive.

This is my story and I bullshit you not! I work for a manufacturing company, the second largest in its field in the world. Great. However the boss really does not like spending money. We eventually got a backup system using offsite backups (with a special client) and it seems to work ok. However, when it got to 100 GBs I was told to start pruning stuff. So I did. Long and short of it, even with the most important files backed up, we still have most things not backed up. Basically I have almost half a TB of data that I am not allowed to back up because its expensive. I can only backup 5 days worth of data as they are unwilling to pay anymore money for it. The fun will come when someone wants a restore from last year. This people, is the reality sometimes. Me, well, I really dont care anymore. Im sick of having servers, important, mission critical machines sitting on single IDE disks. We sell online, great, problem is our firewall is non redundant single IDE disk. If it goes (like it has in the past) we were down for days, loosing emails, web traffic, web orders, remote ordering systems, EDI data, remote sessions, ftp, everything. DR? the solution proposed by upper management is, oh we will buy some dells and restore. Yeah thats a good idea. After waiting a week for them to arrive, what exactly are you going to restore ? This is more typical than you think, unfortunatly. Im just the guy that has to make do with what i can. No doubt when it fucks up I will be blamed.

Re:err...

hell with that. ever heard of competent IT staff? why has their CTO not been fired yet?

honestly though, talking management into backup solutions is like pulling teeth, then they blame you for not having it in place when the failure does happen.

Last place I worked at we were using 4 year old DLT tapes because management was too stupid and cheap to buy new ones.

"we will buy new when those fail" is what we were told.

Re:err...

/grabs hammer...

*bang* *bang* *bang*

Oops, it looks like a couple of those DLT drives are running into problems. We need replacements. Did you see what happened to Business 2.0?

Re:err...

ever heard of verifying backuped data?

Errr...uhh....umm...'verifying'? Uh, I'll be right back!

Re:err...

sorry, their MAIN problem is not in any way a dysfunctional backup system. ever heard of verifying backuped data?

I'm sure they've heard of it, in a conversation that went something like this:

IT Guy: We need a system for verifying our backups.

Suit: How come? Don't the backups work?

IT Guy: We need to be sure that if there is a failure, the backups will be ok.

Suit: But they're just copies, aren't they? I copy files all the time and it never goes wrong.

IT Guy: This is a little more complicated than that.

Suit: How hard can it be?

IT Guy: Well, I was thinking we might need to hire a part-timer just to take care of backups and verification.

Suit: But we've never had a failure! Sounds like empire building to me. I know that's what I'd be doing in your position. Nice try. We'll keep the backup system the way it is, thanks.

IT Guy: But..!

Suit: Moving on to the next item on the agenda... ok, Executive Bonuses!

Re:Rag

nobody reads Business 2.0 anyway.

I wish. I wish people didn't read Time, either (the publisher), but they do. Time's writing style is the dumbed down, try-to-be-hip crap I wouldn't have gotten away with in sixth grade. Seriously. Like I said before [slashdot.org], to understand why its writing is like fingernails on a blackboard for me, consider how the same information would be conveyed by two sources:

8-year-old: "6 divided by 3 is 2."

Time magazine: "Okay, imagine you've got a half-dozen widgets, churned out of the ol' Widget Factory on Fifth and Main. Now, say you've gotta divvy 'em up into little chunklets -- a doable three, let's say -- and each chunklet has the same number that math professor Gregory Beckens at Overinflated Ego University calls a 'quotient'. The so-called 'quotient' in this case? Dos."

Based on how that post got modded, I'm not alone in this.

Re:We've all been there. Don't be too pious, here.

RAID does not save you if a bugler steals your machine.

But can he carry my server and his horn at the same time?