Professor Loses Data – Backup Failure

This article in The Age today is classic example of what most people do. Now it’s really surprising that a professor with important information would trust it all to a laptop but apparently he did and has made international headlines for it. Now the article is actually about the thief returning the data via a usb stick which is nice but the real lesson here is that a person who keeps his life’s work on a PC and doesn’t bother to keep a second copy of it, has some serious thinking to do about the security of the information s/he has been working on. What could you seriously be thinking?

The issue isn’t that the laptop would one day be stolen, yes this does happen, but it’s more that the laptop might one day suddenly die. Then what? Each time I run a MS update to my home Vista laptop I cringe at the thought of what will happen if it doesn’t actually wake up from the operation.

Some of the comments that were left behind by readers were great. Particularly this one

He should thank the thief for backing up his 10 years of work. If the hard disk had failed, he would have lost everything. It’s good to have IT literate thiefs these days!

This is the story below.

‘Hope for humanity’: thief returns stolen laptop data on USB
A laptop thief with a conscience has posted a USB containing precious data to a Swedish professor, a week after stealing his device.

The unnamed professor from Umeå University told local Swedish newspaper Västerbottens-Kuriren that he was devastated by the theft, believing that all of his work was gone forever.

But to his surprise, a week later, the entire contents of his laptop were posted to him on a USB stick.

“I’m very happy. This story makes me feel hope for humanity,” he said.

The professor, who admitted to being a little lax when it came to backing up data on his laptop, had left the bag hidden behind the stairwell of his apartment block when he made a short detour to the laundry room. Soon after, he realised his bag had vanished along with ten years of precious data.

Although the bag was returned shortly after – minus the laptop – his biggest concern was for the contents of the laptop.

“The calendar is extremely important. It is my life. Here I have documented the last ten years and beyond,” he said.

When the professor received the USB stick he said it appeared the thief copied all documents and personal files from the laptop to the USB, which he estimated would have taken several hours to download.

Swedish police, who he contacted shortly after the theft, told him they had never experienced anything like it.

smh.com.au

The reality is that backing up is a lot of work, and for most people not what they do on a day to day basis. At Carbonite it is what we do every day. Given our experience, what we have learned is that if you don’t make it easy for people to backup they won’t and then they will experience a disaster like this one.

The following article was prepared by Backupify an online tool for backing up all sorts of things such as your social media accounts. It covers the 15 biggest backup failures of all time. Another great read of why the world needs more services like Carbonite. I have taken a couple of the examples for you. Some might be familiar as they also made international headlines.

15 Most Outrageous Data Loss Incidents

British Home Office loses data on all English & Wales prisoners
Data on 84,000 prisoners was lost
British Home Officer ‘misplaced’ a thumb drive
Employee thought it was a good idea to download all England & Wales prisoners’ data from secure servers to a thumb drive!
This was ‘okayed’ as long as this person didn’t lose it…

Ma.gnolia went down in January 2009
Data was lost forever in the cloud
Database failed
No backup
No effective recovery solution
Users turned to Delicious
Data corruption and loss can be redeemed but faith in cloud services is irreparable

Daily Mail loses employee data
Daily Mail was a company that pointed out fallacies of government when it lost data, slipped up, or jeopardized security.
Daily Mail met some karma in 2008 when one of their laptops was stolen
It contained personal information on thousands of the organization’s staff – including bank account numbers

And finally for this week, I have been checking out the Facebook page for one of our popular Carbonite resellers: Jims Computer Services Baulkham Hills which you can find here http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jims-Computer-Services-Baulkham-Hills/287828584110

He has written about the 10 top reasons computers fail and here they are. How about supporting him and his business by liking his facebook page.

My TOP 10 Reasons why computers fail
10) Incorrect memory is installed whilst the computer is running. (BANG!).
09) Main boards get old and their 1000s of solder points start cracking up.
08) Hijack malware blocks all your applications from running.
07) Laptops are moved when the Hard drive is still writing data.
06) Power supply fans get old and die causing the power supply to overheat and pop!
05) Computers die from power surges.
04) Liquid spills on laptops.
03) The Hard Drive is at the end of its life and makes clicking sounds.
02) Viruses infect the operating system and software drivers.
01) No maintenance.