Found this hanging in my office today, posted on a wall by a coworker. Original appears to be from here, posted on the internet all the way back in 1999, feel free to sing along to the famous tune:
Yesterday,
All those backups seemed a waste of pay.
Now my database has gone away.
Oh I believe in yesterday.Suddenly,
There’s not half the files there used to be,
And there’s a deadline
hanging over me.
The system crashed so suddenly.I pushed something wrong
What it was I could not say.
Now my data’s gone
and I long for yesterday-ay-ay-ay.Yesterday,
The need for back-ups seemed so far away.
Thought all my data was here to stay,
Now I believe in yesterday.
I would like to share a little personal story that shows why this song rings a bell for me. Roughly two years ago, I was enjoying my summer vacation with friends and family. Back then, I was storing all of my files on an external hard drive (mistake 1) on an encrypted partition. I was also storing my photos on that very same hard drive (mistake 2). One evening while on vacation, my sister calls me on my mobile phone, asking if she could reformat the external hard drive I had given her to view the photos for some reason. Why would I do that? Because I was in a hurry and wanted to make sure she could view the pictures even though I was away (mistake 3). And she needed the full capacity of the disk to share some photos of her own. Not thinking clear, I agreed (mistake 4 – start to see a pattern here? ;-) ). After all, what could happen in a couple of days? I could always put the backups back on there when I was back, right?
Yeah, right! The next day while we were enjoying a sunny breakfast in the yard of our lovely holiday apartment, my parents called me. Somebody had broken into our house during the night. One of my neighbours saw the thief breaking our window and called the police. They arrived fast and almost caught him – but he escaped. Turns out he took the jewellery of my wife with him after searching the whole house.
Yet, I still felt lucky after racing back home to see the damage. For some reason, they had not taken my personal laptop. If they had taken that, all of my personal files and photos would have been lost – as the only backup was happily reformatted the night before. As you can guess, since then I have made sure to backup my data and photos at all time into the cloud to make sure this never happens again. Oh how stupid I was back then, and how lucky :-) .
