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For companies that rely on computers as the backbone of their administrative, bookkeeping, inventory, ordering, invoicing, receivables and all-encompassing database storage and backup systems, here's a cautionary tale about making sure that your equipment, storage media and even your backups are protected from theft, natural and man-made disaster, human error and equipment or media failure.

We now relate to you a true story about what can happen when something as integral to a company's operation as a storage server happens to go AWOL.

The scenario:

Loss of data can occur through mechanical failure, natural disaster or human error. In this sample case, massive data loss was the result of the theft of a computer server.

The impact of loss would have been minimal, almost non-existent, if a recent usable copy of the data was available from back-ups made either to removable media or another computer on the network.

Company management thought that daily back-ups of the accounting database were being made at the end of each business day and stored off-site. This was a bad assumption that created a false sense of security.

Immediately following the computer theft in early August 2007, the accounting applications software was loaded into a partition of the back-up server, and all updates to the software were applied. So far so good.

The magnitude of the problem was realized when the data recovery disk failed to read into the restored system. The removable disk had failed and the most recent copy of available data was April 6, 2007. The only reason this data was available was that the owner had copied the accounting database to his computer for the purpose of preparing 2006 taxes.

Ironically, the company in the cited case had invested in robust servers with the latest fail-safe technology and had a spare server available. All of this was for naught in the absence of reliable and timely data recovery capability.

The impact:

All inventory, sales, and accounting data from April 2006 to the first week in August 2007 was lost. The company did not have up to date information on A/R, A/P, or any aspect of inventory control include quantities on hand, on order, or on current sales orders. All price changes and information relating to items added to the system, between the first week in April 2006 and the first week in August, 2007 were gone.

Hundreds of man-hours were required over a period of several weeks to conduct a physical inventory and reconstruct essential aspects of the database from paper files.

The lesson:

Do not assume that your back-up procedures are working. Test your recovery media frequently to make certain it will work correctly when needed. If you are networked, program your system perform an automatic back-up to an alternate computer nightly.

In the cited case this would have been a no-cost procedure that would have mitigated the impact from severe to negligible.