Backups

it's easy to tell if a lawyer is lying,,,,, if his lips are moving------- he is lying

jimh

Being in the computer field, with considerable experience in backups, I can tell you that properly done backups are a rare thing, especially among people who think that they are far too clever to need anyone technically able, or that the information is too sensitive for anyone who actually knows what they heck they are doing to handle the backups. But mostly they are just too darn cheap to pay someone to do it, and pay for the media to do it on, etc, etc.

There's a big difference betweeen what a lot of places should do, and what they actually do. Something like 4 out of 5 small businesses never recover from a fire, at least in part due to data loss. If there were backups, they were on site (or "offsite" was in the basement or attic.) If there were offsite backups, they were 6 months out of date. If they were up to date they were unreadable...etc. This bit might just barely be on topic if you have CNC files, business records, etc to backup that have to do with metalworking.

And many people who think they know what they are doing, don't. A college I worked at suffered a huge data loss when they discovered that their backups were not readable, after they made another mistake which caused them to need their backups. Tapes do not live forever. If you do not regularly check that you can actually restore files (and those files are identical to the files you backed up) you don't know if your butt is covered, or you're wearing the emperor's new backups.

I once had a department chairperson show up in a major tizzy about a file that was lost, and had not been noticed to be lost for several days. He evidently assumed that if it was not in the past few days, it was gone - I was able to offer him daily copies for a week or two, and copies at longer intervals going back years. This takes work, media, storage and organization - in short, money.

i find it hard to accept that any law firm would say::::::: michael jackson scott peterson oj clinton ARE IN ANY WAY innocent

lawyers,,,,,, the diff between a lawyer and a carp is??

one is a bottom sucking scavenger and the other is just a fish............ jimh

The possibility that the work is in question was not backed up is zero. I've worked on two occassions at jobs that required legal documentation by lawyers (company lawyers, in this case). The procedures for backups were explicit, were documented, and required multiple sign-offs. If the procedure wasn't followed, work stopped until it was. And that was just for

Lawyers working on big cases do not let their notes, email, references, or other documentation sit on hard drives with no backup.

Ed Huntress

This doesn't surprise me at all. While I was employed as a computing support tech at a large aerospace company in Seattle who I won't name. It was very common for engineers not to back up their work. More than once we had to send in a dead hard drive to a special company to have the data recovered at a very high expense.

Lane

I agree Ted - however this turkey is likely out of the pen. His home office IT is going to get him later, but for now he is making money hand over fist for the boss.

Wonder if a CD-Rom was generated... Guy never had a drive go down ?

Children, what to do with them once grown ?

Martin

They've got backups. The concern is that the privileged content of their notes might now be leaked to the press or the prosecution, thus prejudicing their case.

Gary

It still surprises me how many businesses fail to back up their computer systems. Equally surprising is the number that do back up their systems and NEVER learn how to restore all or part. Or that never test their backup media to see if it really has their current data.

Paul

Patently absurd in this day and time.

The smallest engineering group can afford to have all engineering data kept on a network server with automated backups running every night and snapshots taken every 30 minutes. Not even a big deal to set up with Windows 2003 or Linux/Samba/rsync.

With 200 gigabytes of storage going for about $100, there's no reason why everyone can't have a redundant raid array for primary storage and a second server for backups. All pretty much automated. That only leaves the off-site backup issue.

for what it's worth, every aerospace company I know used to automatically back up computers, now they only back up servers, and each employee is on their own for any backup of their personal machine - In fact, they actively seem to discourage any systematic backup, including automatically deleting email after a number of days, etc. I think this comes about because the cost of a set of servers is visible and can be quantified, whereas the time lost when a disk crashes and somone has to re-create their work is not visible and gets charged to the project. Part of this may also come from outsourcing the IT infrastructure, the IT company isn't responsible for the data, so why should they bother?

I think it's some little slimy lawyer maneuver to get a mistrial or whatever.

My understanding was it was the lawyers apartment that was broken into. There was also another apartment broken into, with nothing within touched... like the 'thugs' had maybe broken into the wrong unit, realized their error and quickly moved on to the correct one.

Don't get me started on lawyers or the legal/justice industrys... politicians also don't do well on my list.

Erik

Even better, a company big-shot that backed up his entire computer to the company network server nightly, including his 5 year plan to send 90% of the union jobs to Mexico. Imagine what happened when a union member accidently discovered this document and released it to the local news media!!

All the IT weenies swore up and down that some had to be doing some major hacking to get to this information, it simply could not have come from a shop floor computer.

A few days later I happened to be sitting within a few feet away when one of our computer savvy union stewards brought several bigwigs,the head of security, several IT managers and the union business managers out. Walked up to a shop floor computer and within seconds and less than a dozen mouse clicks showed them the very same document, STILL being backed up to the network.

The sight of the jaws dropping and teeth rattling off the floor was absolutely PRICELESS!!!!

Needless to say, there were a few changes in the IT department that day............

Tom

Every computer of mine has two hard drives... I have over 30,000 pictures from my camera stored in my computer... I also burn Cd's

Any place I worked the guy would not have a chance of it happening twice.

Particularly today with 4.6GB of either RW or RAM available on a single simple 5 inch disk (DVD) there is NO excuse for not having a backup. DVD RAM or CDR are the ONLY backup that is acceptable as evidence in a court of law, as it can NOT be monkeyed with.

At the insurance office where I work every morning, ALL important data is saved on the server, which is backed up nightly to DAT tape, as well as on the hard drive of a specified workstation - which weekly zips the backup files and copies then (currently) to CDR. Just installed a DVD burner as 2 CDs don't handle the weekly zip too well any more.

No client data may be stored on the workstations hard drives. Both the server and the backup workstation are in a locked room.

The tapes are rotated on a weekly basis and kept off-site. The CDs/DVDs are stored offsite. Any loss of a single file, or damage to a file discovered before the end of the day is corrected by retrieving from the backup workstation disk.

And the hard drive on the main server is mirrored.

They had never heard of permissions, or even password protection or encription??? What IT department???

Perhaps he doth protest too much. Backing up is not difficult. It does not require proffesional help except for those proud of their illiteracy. A little reading,, a CD or DVD drive and something as simple as PKzip can do the job. And yes, I have had a few crashes in the last 50 years but never lost more than an hours work.

Presumably by that you mean you. How did I guess?

Ted

Depending on the firm, perhaps small but definitely non-zero.

Ted

Guess they never heard of encryption. Almost any encryption can be broken but it is surprising how easy it is to encrypt sufficiently well that it would take serious compute power, expertise and the knowledge that something worth the effort was there.

Ted

I don't doubt it for a moment. Just between you and I, the prime purpose of my post was to encourage people to do backups. I keep seeing post in this and other NGs of people bemoning the loss of six months stuff when a hard drive crashed.

Amen!

Ted