So, recently, here in Indiana there was a story about a school system permanently losing some school records due to a computer glitch.

My first reaction was: Really?  That can still happen?  No way!  But apparently it can and still does happen.  Read the story and you’ll find this quote:  The school district's announcement said IBM engineers determined the loss of data was caused by "an unfortunate and very rare combination of hardware problems and backup configuration settings."

I don’t know about you, but if I read between the lines I am pretty sure that means someone wasn’t backing up what they should have been and when the hardware crashed and burned they discovered the omission too late to do anything about it.

In my opinion if you’re the conservator of someone’s data you need to be sure it’s being taken care of.  Here at Achievant we have a very robust back-up plan that backs up the data and then backs-up the entire disk image on which that data lies.  We keep the back-ups for at least 14 days, some for a month and some for a year.

We also routinely restore from back-up to ensure that we can.  Sometimes we restore just a single file, or a single database table or even an entire database.  And now and then we restore an entire server.

When you back-up you need to test and audit those back-ups.  You need to know that they work the way you expect them to and that in a true emergency they are there, whole and ready to go. 

Losing grades is bad.  What if it had been your banking records or your time and attendance data or your benefits information?  Our world runs on data these days.  Being sure our data will survive everything from an oops to a typhoon is s fundamental.