Backups are vital to sustainable behavior, yet a scary majority fail to maintain proper backups.

Perhaps you know that sinking feeling when a single keystroke accidentally destroys hours of work. Now imagine wiping out a disk drive containing an account worth $38 billion.

There have been similar situations before, and I've mentioned it here at e.g. www.kfwebs.net

Hopefully they haven't done the same as in August 2001 there was full chaos for nearly two weeks after the storage solution messed up, or rather, a human working on it did while they were installing new Hard Disk drives and got ready to format the new drives. The only problem was that they ran it on the operational drives instead of the new ones.

The difference, however, starts at "and mistakenly reformatted the backup drive, as well.". Ok, so this still shouldn't be an issue, right? because there are obviously offline backups for this kind of information: "There was still hope, until the department discovered its third line of defense, backup tapes, were unreadable."

If you haven't slapped your forehead already, this is the time to do so. The full story can be read at www.msnbc.msn.com , and folks: remember to back up your data.