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?

How's this for a horrifying scenario: Disgruntled employee found to be stealing from the company is fired. On the way out the door, he reformats everything. Or, perhaps even worse, said employee actually didn't do his job properly, and left the company's site (it's only asset)without meaningful backups. Such is the case of the previously unknown blogging software company Journal Space. The blog entry says it all: Backing up to RAID is not a good idea. Especially when it's your only contingency plan. 

Of course, all of you cautious readers have off-site storage for tape backups, and you darn-sure don't leave the whole company database exposed to a single IT person with the power to spin the tumblers and leave everyone in the lurch. 

Truly a cautionary tale with many lessons. Firstly, don't believe anyone who you're interviewing for a job. Make them prove everything they claim. Second, don't give the keys to the kingdom to any one person. Third, always always always have ridiculously redundant backups. It may cost money and take time, but when everything goes south, and the offsite location is invaded by Sandinistas, you'll be ever so glad you kept a whole image of the site in a locked box buried in your back yard.