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What Was Your Worst Data Loss Disaster?
Ben Stegner
1 day ago
<< EDITOR ADDED DATE 2025-04-24>>
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MY REPSONSE
Back in the Wild West days of corporate computing, II used to have my own back up solution. Brought and paid for myself. It was a zip drive. Remeber good old Iomega devices. It was 10 megs that I controlled. Had my own program that I wrote in COBOL (shows you how long ago that was). Worked fine thru several IBM Thinkpad hard disk failures. Sigh!
Anyway some genious decided that there should be no foreign devices on the corporate network, All USB ports would be locked, All computers in the Window NT domain would be backed up by the domain admin team. Even floppy disks were prohibited and locked.
Having no choice, I did a lot of printing of stuff fo take home and emailing copies of working documents to a coworker and visa verse.
For about six months everything was fine. Then predictably my “workstation” that Thinkpad disk drive failed. Support dutifully replaced it and reinstalled the Operating System and started a restore from “Headquarters”.
Guess they never met Murphy.
Of course, I was idled for the better part of two days with about 50 meg of data “sped” down the undersized corporate network. Due dates be dammed. My status reports were on sentence. “Computer failed; Restore in progress; ETTR unknown.”
So it finally finished up after three DAYS, And NIGHTS! I sit down an logon. Guess what happens next? “File not found”, “File corrupt”. Another two days of “techincal magic” and everything now appears to work.
Go to open my latest — now behind schedule — “urgent” report. “File not found”.
I do a quick look and the back up data is SIX MONTHS old.
Apparent after great “STURM UND DRANG” we find out that the corporate backup system had never worked.
I do a not so quick inventory of my paper files that I had at home. And there is SOME stuff but not everything. (I was a very inefficient clerk. Especially when I am very annoyed.)
Leadership told me to “Stop Bitching” and “deal with it”.
Apparently, the various executives were going thru
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Webform has — I guess — a size limit
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Apparently, the various executives were going thru a similar “experience”.
I presume that they were not diligent about the corporate diktat that there was to be no “personal” data kept on “corporate computers”.
Never found out the full impact of the disaster.
But soon after IT leadership left for “other opportunities” and who bunch of “IT diktats” changed.
Laugh!
I too left soon after for a better opportunity and more money. Laugh!
About a year later the company was acquired and their IT was “absorbed” with a huge layoff.
I don’t know if the two are related.
Never looked back.
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Thought this was a interesting memory.
Argh! Argh! Sigh!
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Posted by reinkefj 
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