Oh, the stories we could all tell about lost data. Everyone's experienced it at some point or other: the arbitrary loss of an entire area of information. No warning. Just loss. Profound, soul-crushing, "I gotta redo all of that work?" loss.

Such was the fate of Ma.Gnolia. This social bookmarking site lost itself in January. Even Google's cache couldn't save it from the catastrophic loss of data. A lack of backups is the fault of everyone involved. It's IT operations' fault. It's management's fault for not budgeting it. It's the CEO's fault for not understanding the need and cost requirements.

And all too often, the reason you need to backup is your own fault. I remember, with dread, the day I typed "rm -rf /*" on an OpenBSD machine. It was our Web server, until I managed to scrag the entire file system and the Web directory. A lot of coffee went into recreating the site over the next few days. From scratch. I decided to start doing my site designs with a Mac, instead of vi on the server, from then on. 

Or the time with my Mac LC III, where I sold my soul to the Two Times devil to turn my 80 Megabyte hard drive into a 160 Megabyte hard drive, as if by magic! It was slower, but it worked. It lasted a year, but when things went south, I had to run the poor bugger off of a 270 Megabyte removable Syquest drive. If I had thought the compressed drive was slow, I'd never imagined the interminable pauses possible with a removable drive. I lost four years worth of high school-angst data.

Or there's the time my buddy was organizing MySQL databases in the server farm, and accidentally deleted the Bugzilla database. D'oh! With so many online backup offerings these days, there's no excuse not to have your stuff saved online. But what happens when one of those online sites lost its data? I know I'd be extremely distraught if my Flickr account was ever scragged.

Fortunately, we're all professionals and have long ago learned our lessons about proper backups, right?