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How important are backups in your disaster recovery strategy?

October 12, 2020

We understand that it can be hard to see exactly why data backups are so important if you have never experienced data loss. Perhaps it is better to show you how important backups are, rather than just telling you.

One famous example is at the animation studio, Pixar. During the creation of Toy Story 2, way back in the late 90s, the studio were running on a Linux-based machines. There is a command on Linux machines that removes all files below the current directory once it is run. The command was issued at the root level for the entire project.

The CTO instructed that machines were to be unplugged, but it was already too late. Once machines were plugged back in they realised that about 90% of the film had been deleted. A whole year’s worth of work destroyed in 20 seconds from one user-error.

Luckily, Pixar have always kept backups of their work, just for situations such as these. Unluckily, they hadn’t been paying attention to their backups. Although they still would have recovered most of the work, the backups had been failing for the whole of the previous month due to hitting capacity on the storage. 150 people’s work for a month. How many hours of paid work would this have been? From my estimation around 24,000 hours. You can see this still would have been a pretty expensive hit on the company, just because backups weren’t checked or tested regularly enough.

Fortunately for the Technical Director at the time, she had been working from home due to recently giving birth to her son. This meant that she had another copy of the data on her local machine. They hooked up her machine to the network and managed to recover all of the files. An unplanned offsite copy of the data saved thousands of hours of work time! You can only imagine what would have happened if they had lost a whole year’s worth of work. It would have cost millions.

Human error is one of the leading causes for a disaster. Opening the wrong attachment, pressing the wrong button, using a command in the wrong place… all such simple things to do and nearly impossible to prevent. Take a leaf from Pixar’s book. Don’t just hope you get lucky! Backup is a vital part of a disaster recovery plan, so ensure it is strategised to reflect this.

If you need help with this process contact Vitanium. We can help keep your data safe and secure in the cloud.

Filed Under: blog

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