Ask HN: When was the last time you lost data?

Re:Ask HN: When was the last time you lost data? by vbezhenar on Monday June 19, 2023 @09:13PM (#36398534)

Not me, but the company I worked before, recently lost their primary data. They used ancient hardware, ancient software and some proprietary backup solution nobody understands. Their hardware failed, their backups turned out useless so they lost their primary database.

This database is a collection of other data sources, so they spent few months rebuilding it and doing nothing in the meantime. Kind of worked for them.

Basically they did every imaginable mistake: they didn't keep things up to date, they used contractors who were hardly professionals, they never tested recovery.

This worked for them for around 20 years, AFAIK. They had old, but solid hardware and software (HP Itanium servers, HPUX, Oracle 9i, raids), so this thing worked well. That's a lesson as well: good hardware might make you too relaxed.

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Re:Ask HN: When was the last time you lost data? by dave-at-koor on Tuesday June 20, 2023 @08:31PM (#36412761)

Interesting. Out of sight, out of mind.

In the early 2000s, I worked for a company whose IT department was excellent at doing backups on a regular basis. Except they never tried to restore any of them. Turned out they were only backing up the directory structure. I forget whether there was a major crisis over it.

Thanks for sharing.

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