Over the past few weeks, things might have seemed a little bit quiet on the blog/new products/website updates front, and for not so good reason - a preventable reason at that. On May 14, we suffered the corruption of data on one of the hard drives here. Suffice it to say, we've been limping a little and waiting for the data recovery people to do their magic.
I finally received the call today to say that they were able to recover 102,000 files which would be classified by type, but not necessarily in any order, and none with names. A File Type Recovery, I've learned, is the last chance, the end of the line, etc. What we'll be left with is hundreds of folders with thousands of files and there is no way to tell one .jpg file for an advertisement from one .jpg from the iPhoto library, a .xls from any other, etc. Boy, that'll be fun.
My point is not to elicit any sort of response from you, but to warn that you must back up and subsequently test your backups. Most of our data was backed up, but the data had not been tested for integrity, so even though we have some pieces, not all work, and only a few work perfectly. We restored from what we thought were valid backups of some files only to find that they didn't work.
Will we get much usable information back from the data recovery company? Other than a Microsoft email database, it appears unlikely.
Make sure that you set up a backup routine both on-site and off-site and test the backup files from time to time to make sure that you can restore your operations from the backups. Had we done that, we would have found some holes to fix, and until you've lived through putting the pieces back together, you can never appreciate what a pain in the tail it is.
Backup! On-site, off-site and test!!