A realtor attempted a do-it-yourself computer upgrade from a 286 to a 486. His budget motherboard came with poor advice, and the result was, his hard drive crashed and all data was lost: accounting data, real estate closing information, and agent commission calculations for his three offices.

Luckily he was a client of an R.B.S.

After he installed a new hard drive and controller card, the R.B.S. provider was able to restore all the programs from the remote backup.

In about 2 hours everything was restored to the date of the last backup transmission.

The city government of a small town did not use a Remote Backup System. Instead they were carefully backing up their computer system onto tape cartridges that came with the system

When the system crashed and they needed the data, they found that the tapes were all blank...

...even though each day the software displayed the message "BACKUP COMPLETE"

They had never tried to restore the data before.

They had never thought to verify the tapes.

All data had to be re-entered from paper, which took several weeks.

Dutifully, this woman made sure her tape backup software was running every night before she left the office. As soon as it started, she locked the doors and didn't think about it again  until the next work day.   Sounds great.... except.... it was the same tape, over and over and over. When the terrible day came to retrieve a database that had hundreds of clients files on it,  the tape had broken - literally - from too much usage.

Don't expect your tapes to last a lifetime, rotate them and replace them on a regular basis.

The President of a mid-sized company found that relying on employees to change the daily backup wasn't working, and with the quote "If you want something done right, do it  yourself" in his mind, that's exactly what he intended to do!

Every day he made sure the correct tape was inserted into the tape backup, he had them very well organized and stored at the company's safety-deposit box. Every day during lunch, he put the previous day's tape and the day's bank deposit into his briefcase, made the deposit himself (another thing he wanted to do personally), and rotated the tapes in the deposit box.

When the inevitable happened, he very proudly went to his deposit box and removed the tapes he needed to restore - they were all blank. It took a few hours to figure out exactly what had happened - to his horror a magnetized business card that he had paper clipped to the top inside of his briefcase was erasing the tapes as soon as he closed the case - everyday. He still takes those daily trips to the bank - without the magnet!