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Data

Entry 21, on 2004-08-17 at 10:10:48 (Rating 1, Computers)

I have been involved with trying to recover two lots of data after major computer problems today. On one occasion a drive failed and on the other a user accidentally deleted thousands of documents.

In both instances it wasn't possible to recover all the files due to problems with the way the backup was set up. I'm glad to say it wasn't me who set up these particular servers, although I do administer several others.

It did emphasise the fragility of the data we store on computers though. Modern hard drives are small, fast, have high capacity, and are cheap; but they aren't necessarily as reliable as we would like. I'm going to make sure the backups of my own machines run more frequently, especially my main laptop which is the most susceptible to data loss.

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