Today marks World Backup Day, which provides a crucial reminder of the importance of reliable data protection. Without an effective backup and recovery strategy, businesses and institutions risk financial devastation, operational chaos, and reputational damage.
What better way to celebrate the occasion than by recalling some of the most infamous horror stories in data backup history?
1998: Pixar
Imagine a world in which Toy Story was a standalone film with no sequels – all those cherished childhood memories or cinema trips with your kids gone without a trace. That would’ve been the reality if it wasn’t for a woman on maternity leave named Gayln Susman.
Pixar was deep into production on Toy Story 2 when a mistakenly executed command deleted 90% of the film’s files. To make matters worse, the studio’s backup system had been failing for over a month. If it wasn’t for Susman, who had a copy of the data on her personal computer while working from home, the cinematic history may have looked very different for Woody and company.
What went wrong:
- No real-time monitoring of backup integrity.
- Lack of redundancy in backup storage.
- Absence of automated alerts for failed backups.
2009: Ma.Gnolia
Ma.Gnolia was a leading bookmarking site in 2009 when a catastrophic failure corrupted its entire database beyond recovery. The good news was that the company had backups. The bad news was that they were stored on the same system, leaving no way to restore user data.
Ma.Gnolia’s founder, Larry Halff, tried to resurrect the service under the name Gnolia. Within a year, the service ceased to exist.
What went wrong:
- Backups stored on the same system as primary data.
- No cloud-based redundancy.
- Insufficient disaster recovery planning.
2009: T-Mobile Sidekick
T-Mobile’s Sidekick smartphones were the go-to devices for mobile users who loved cloud-based storage back in the noughties. The computer servers holding the data were run by Microsoft through its subsidiary, Danger Inc., which suffered a catastrophic server failure that erased all user data.
Customers woke up to find their calendars cleared, contacts erased, and photos vanished. The incident was described as the biggest disaster in cloud computing history, though Microsoft was eventually able to restore users’ data.
What went wrong:
- Lack of redundant backup copies.
- Poor disaster recovery planning.
- No customer-accessible local backups.
2014: Code Spaces
Cloud-based hosting service Code Spaces suffered a devastating cyberattack when hackers gained access to its Amazon Web Services (AWS) account. A Hotmail account was used to initiate the attack, which was followed by an extortion attempt.
When Code Spaces attempted to regain control of its systems, the attacker deleted most of the company’s data, backups, machine configurations, and offsite backups via its control panel. Code Spaces went out of business the following day.
What went wrong:
- No secure, air-gapped backups.
- Weak access controls on cloud accounts.
- No effective disaster recovery plan.
2017: GitLab
When spam attacks began to impact GitLab’s performance in 2017, the company’s engineering team attempted to rectify the situation by optimising its production database, which housed everything form from project metadata to user credentials.
When an engineer accidentally deleted the database after targeting the wrong directory, five different backup methods all failed due to various oversights, including incomplete snapshots and inaccessible backups. The incident cost customers six hours of production data, leading to significant reputational damage and a drop in revenue.
What went wrong:
- Multiple backup failures due to misconfigurations.
- No easy-to-restore cloud-based backups.
- Insufficient testing of recovery processes.
How Redstor could have prevented these disasters
Each of the horror stories above highlights the consequences of inadequate backup strategies. Redstor’s backup and recovery solutions could have mitigated or even completely prevented these disasters:
Intelligent data protection with automated monitoring
Redstor provides continuous backup monitoring and anomaly detection to prevent failures like those seen at Pixar and GitLab. Automated alerts ensure that backup errors don’t go unnoticed.
Immutable and air-gapped backups
With Redstor, businesses can store backups in immutable cloud environments, protecting data from corruption and accidental deletion, as seen in the Ma.Gnolia case.
Instant recovery and failover capabilities
Redstor’s InstantData™ technology ensures that even in the event of total system failure, data can be accessed immediately, preventing downtime that could have cost GitLab millions.
Cloud-first, multi-layered redundancy
Unlike Ma.Gnolia’s reliance on a single backup system, Redstor provides geographically distributed backups to ensure data is always recoverable, no matter what happens to primary storage systems.
Protect your data today
World Backup Day is a reminder that no organisation is immune to data loss. No matter the cause, the consequences of poor backup strategies can be not just catastrophic but potentially fatal.
Don’t let your business become the next cautionary tale. Protect your data with Redstor and ensure that your backups are always there when you need them. Get in touch today to learn more.