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In early 2016, we found out my wife Heather was pregnant with our daughter. It was a crazy time, both daunting and exhilarating. I don’t think anyone is ever truly ready, or prepared…
When getting ready to tell our parents of the impending arrival, we decided to make use of a visual aid (aka: Slide Show). It wasn’t a drab
We have kept digital copies of all our records for a number of years now, and pictures for even longer. W
I started looking for pictures from the first summer my wife and I were dating, but each of the folders
No problem, I’ll just restore those files from my local backup.
<Spins up local backup, selects folders to restore, initiates restoration>
<Opens Folder followed by Blank Stare>
Me: “The backup folders are empty, too….???”
Heather: “What?”
Me: “Oh, nothing.”
WTF….
Me (thinking to myself): No problem. I’ll grab them from my cloud backup.
The folders are still empty. It was at this time I believe, my wife walked in rubbing her tummy, asking me what I was doing. I believe my response was something along the lines of “Oh, just working on the slideshow.”
<Repeat Steps Above>
After I was able to get my wife leave my office, I decided it was time to pull out the big guns. My cloud archive. There was no way it wouldn’t have them.
You see, it has taken me the last several paragraphs, to bring you to this point, where I will cover a few facts:
- My wife is blissfully walking around our home, in her early pregnancy glow, picking out colours and sheets for the nursery. She has no idea I’m about to spoil her day with this news.
- I have 3 different backups systems, two of which allow for versioning (I believe data is priceless). The chances that they are all bad, is exponentially minute.
- I’m not ready to tell my pregnant wife, that I lost all the photos from the first summer that we were dating, and am quietly contemplating how to escape the house without her knowing. Mexico is nice, right?
Me: Ok. This shouldn’t be that bad. I keep all my old hard drives. I’ll get the old one, and pull the data off it again, and figure out what happened.
Well, I did just that, with the same results I had experienced each time before. You see, I had replaced that hard drive because it was starting to fail, and it turns out the sectors that stored those photos had gone bad.
As you can see with this scenario, even what many would consider a robust and multi-level backup system can fail, if your initial dataset is bad.
Thankfully, it turns out I had (for some unknown reason) put the lost photos onto a CD Disc, which I found about a month later. So this particularly data loss story, does have a happy ending.
I would encourage everyone to give their data storage, backup, and/or archiving methods some good thought and discussion. Speak to experts you know, and PLEASE test your backups regularly. A backup that hasn’t been tested, is useless.
Not sure how you should or want to proceed, or if your methodology is sufficient for your risk tolerence? Reach out to me via Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn and I’d be happy to discuss.
