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World Backup Day 2020: Breaking Out of Backup Traps and Being a Recovery Hero

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Less than one minute read time

That special day of the year is almost here—the one when we remind you (and the world) how important it is to keep up with your backup strategy and make sure it’s up to speed and effective (yay!). 

 

We all know the heartbreaking feeling of losing valuable data and information (and sometimes it hurts more than a breakup). Backing up your data is critical to your business, but a backup can also quickly get complicated. Hardware failures, cyberattacks, natural disasters, and human error are just a couple of things that can get in your way when trying to keep up. 

 

In honor of World Backup Day (March 31), we want to hear about your backup headaches and success stories—tell us about those moments of slow data transfers and hardware breaks, and times when a successful backup was a hero in a recovery situation. 

 

We know you’re as excited as we are to celebrate and emphasize the importance of a backup strategy, so share your thoughts by March 11 and we’ll put 250 THWACK points in your account!

Parents

  • Perhaps the best backup support experience I've ever had was back in the 1990's when I was first exposed to a small HP DAT cartridge array.  I purchased it to back up a firewall on a daily basis, and it would automatically rotate through a small number (6?  8?) of DAT tapes, and it worked well.

    Until the day it didn't.

    Fortunately I wasn't relying on it for a restore, but I could see it had errors, and I had no technology documentation or training for it--one of those public school environments where there was need to do the job right, but no budget for the equipment or training or additional support contract.

    I called HP's support number that was printed on a label on the DAT library and was immediately in touch with an engineer who knew this technology intimately.  I don't mean a Help Desk person who had experience with it; I'm talking to the actual engineer who designed it and who'd written its operating code.  Talk about competence on a land line!  I was in heaven.

    This fellow was not only an uber-geek, but he had social communication skills that would make a hostage negotiator humble.  

    It's a tech support experience I don't think I'll ever forget, and he was able to remotely use my eyes and hands to diagnose the issues and correct them quickly and efficiently.  I was grateful!

    It's a lesson I remember each time I pick up the phone to answer a call from someone with a challenge.  I wish there were more magic phone numbers that put me in touch with the root wizard for any system I'm working on.  This guy was the best!

Comment

  • Perhaps the best backup support experience I've ever had was back in the 1990's when I was first exposed to a small HP DAT cartridge array.  I purchased it to back up a firewall on a daily basis, and it would automatically rotate through a small number (6?  8?) of DAT tapes, and it worked well.

    Until the day it didn't.

    Fortunately I wasn't relying on it for a restore, but I could see it had errors, and I had no technology documentation or training for it--one of those public school environments where there was need to do the job right, but no budget for the equipment or training or additional support contract.

    I called HP's support number that was printed on a label on the DAT library and was immediately in touch with an engineer who knew this technology intimately.  I don't mean a Help Desk person who had experience with it; I'm talking to the actual engineer who designed it and who'd written its operating code.  Talk about competence on a land line!  I was in heaven.

    This fellow was not only an uber-geek, but he had social communication skills that would make a hostage negotiator humble.  

    It's a tech support experience I don't think I'll ever forget, and he was able to remotely use my eyes and hands to diagnose the issues and correct them quickly and efficiently.  I was grateful!

    It's a lesson I remember each time I pick up the phone to answer a call from someone with a challenge.  I wish there were more magic phone numbers that put me in touch with the root wizard for any system I'm working on.  This guy was the best!

Children
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