Re: Ah Arcserve
"Always test backups"
I was distantly involved in an update in a business who went from a bespoke DOS system to using MS Office (Win95?), with their stock in the... what was it called, Access?
They were religious about backing up. Every day they inserted a floppy disc (colour coded for the day of the week) and ran the backup batch file that had been written to copy the important files to disc.
Fast forward a year or two, a harddisc failure took the machine out. No worries, they got a new harddisc, reinstalled Windows, installed the Office suite.
It was about then that they discovered that their backup was essentially useless. In order to keep the screen "tidy", echo was turned off and all output sent to null. The script failed to copy several megabytes of data to a single disc, instead only copying across some of the index and meta files.
Customer data? Gone. Stock inventory? Gone. Traceability of who was renting what? Gone. Details of payments made and owed? Gone. Scans of all sorts of things? Gone.
The company basically had to start from scratch using the small amount of paperwork they had (they believed in shredding, too). I think they hobbled along for a few months before throwing in the towel.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
