In preparing for this series of stories on endpoint data backup and recovery, we asked a few friends in the industry about their experiences losing data to stuff like server crashes, laptop theft, accidental deletion and other things. I got quite a response. I’ve included some of it below and I’m sure IT guys among you know these all too familiar situations:
lol these things happens so many times. People lose laptops; phones; burglary at home, in the car, theft and sometimes in offices and when visiting. Telecoms & Media company tech executive
I have recently lost a laptop and quite a few in the past through theft. I lost a lot of personal projects and prototypes the resale value of it is roughly close to 40-50,000 Rands. Zimbabwean Tech Consultant, South Africa.
I was new to the computer world, computer crushed, we restored some of the drawings…but we had to redraw the rest from hard copies. Been working off the server since then leaving the IT guys to do the backups. Keep important personal files in the cloud. Draftsman, Zimbabwean Mining Company
One thing every IT person will tell you is that in an organisation, IT can be the most painfully unpredictable of places to work. It’s not because IT is a constantly changing industry, no; you sign up for consistent change when you join the career so that doesn’t faze you much. It’s unpredictable in that one minute things are dandy and fine, and the next, someone has had their laptop stolen, or a critical leader in the organisation calls you to say all their important files are gone, apparently mysteriously. And you have to somehow magically restore this data!
Of the responses I got, one friend shared a story that’s not of the unpredictable type. While just as commonplace, this is much harder to deal with. It’s the malicious data manipulation by employees of an organisation. It’s actually something that happened at a very huge company locally, and it was covered in the press. Essentially, at this company, employees could manipulate electronic data, and the lack of a proper backup system meant once manipulated, the old versions of the files could not be recovered, effectively hiding any potential fraud committed. An 2012 audit report of the company had the following:
Some information was still being carried on diskettes from district offices to Head Office and creating room for manipulation. Passwords were open to any users of the BIQ system amongst a host of problems indicative of an IT platform that is itself work in progress. The Internal Audit Department had no forensic tools to detect fraudulent manipulations of cash transactions since the environment is susceptible to fraud and misappropriation of cash….
This may result in incomplete records in the event of loss of flash drives and discs. Manipulation of financial information may occur. Fraudulent activities may occur. Threat to destruction of information through viruses….
You can read the audit report here.
We could go into these typical scenarios more and why this would spell disaster, but the guys at Crashplan Africa have made this amazing video that paints the picture clearer than we ever could: