In a previous role, each night the backup at one of our branch offices was initiated by the receptionist. She did not enjoy the job and one night she displayed her true disdain for the task.

Instead of putting the tape in correctly, she inserted the tape in reverse. The engineer that answered the support call worked out that based on the pock marks on the tape cartridge she had used her high heel in order to hammer the tape into place. As you can appreciate the tape drive could not be repaired under warranty.

We have a small IT environment supporting our building construction business. The owners understood buildings but not IT. Over time, our storage needs had outgrown our servers - but the owners didn't want to invest in proper storage infrastructure like a SAN.

When we ran out of disk space, I had to buy an external USB hard drive and gaffer tape it to each of our servers to handle the extra capacity.

One day one of the owners walked into the server room and saw the gaffer tape. When I explained why we were doing it - he went a bit pale and we were then allowed to go and purchase a proper SAN with proper backup software.

As an Application Engineer I get to visit multi-national corporations down to backyard-shed operations. Several years ago I visited a local signage company to install a floating license and version upgrade for their 3D CAD software, and was directed to their 'backup server' located in a dingy office in a shed at the rear of the property. The 'backup server' was a retired 386 PC running Windows 95 and with a grimy Colorado tape drive installed, and was connected via a half-duplex 10Mbit link using a protocol I had never even heard of. I did the best I could with what was there, and left at the end of the day without being able to do a full test due to the main office being closed. I flew to the USA the following day for a week's Beta testing in Huntsville, then called the company when I returned to ensure that everything was OK.

I have never been subjected to so many expletives in the first minute of a 'phone conversation! Apparently the network link failed after my visit, the daily backup failed (and wasn't checked for almost a week), several job files and a week's accounts had been lost and the business was facing bankruptcy because of my interference ... etc. etc.

The following day it transpired that by coincidence, the adjacent factory had been carrying a large steel beam under their overhead crane on the afternoon of my visit, and it had swung out of control and punched through the common wall - severing the solitary network cable strung on the other side, which nobody had noticed!

I never did get an apology.

Rick Mason
Director,
MASCO Design Services Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia

In a previous role, the office was in the 18th floor of the World Trade Centre in Moscow. There weren't many skyscapers in Moscow back in '93 - and ours provided the best vantage point for snipers shooting down at the Russian White House during the coup. Shooting back up was the militia with big guns and RPGs. The top 2 floors were completely blown out. Our floor was peppered with 20c coin sized holes in the windows.

All the staff evacuated safely however the IT manager was looking ghostly pale - he'd realised that all the tapes were sitting in a neat pile in the server room. He decided that he had retrieve them - walking up all 18 floors, emerging into live fire, crawling on his stomach grabbing the tapes and fleeing for his life.

The next week we instituted an offsite backup rotation. Good thing too, because we had a massive failure later that year when the dry ice failed to keep the server room cool enough - but that's another story ...

Some years ago we had an Indian doctor in Darwin running our medical accounting software. He spoke with an Oxford British accent.

He had a poor relationship with his staff and thus did not trust them so insisted on running month end processes himself.

He would ring every month for 2 years asking "How do you run Month End?" and every month we would patiently tell him what to do.

We had not missed him calling one month but when he did not call two months in a row, my aprtner and I exchanged looks and wondered whether he had retired, sold the practice etc. Third month came and we got a phone call, from his 16 year old daughter.

She had left school early, knew a little about computers and he made her his Practice Manager. She had a problem we could not fix over the phone so we asked her to send a copy of her backup disk (those days a 5.25" floppy) to us.

We got a letter in the mail from her and inside was a photocopy of the Disk!

My partner said... "I will fix her!". He rang and told her that we could not read what she sent us... could she photocopy the other side? She believed him!!

We rolled in laughter on this one!!

I had my whole life on my laptop; work; photos from the last year, and I was always going to get around to backing it up...

But before I did, the computer died a slow agonising death in which every moment spent in resuscitation was every moment waiting in vain.

Blue screen - black screen with stripes, safe mode, no safe mode, dos command, zippity-doo-dah-zippity-day. Nothing worked.

And becuase you have to purchase the 3 year warranty seperate, not when you buy the machine, I forgot to do it, thus, it broke down 2 weeks after the 1 year warranty ran out.

The company wouldn't look at it initially, so I had a family friend 'have a look'. Call him MacGyver, call him amazing, he managed to get intructions and plans for the machine and pull it apart, to find that a faulty graphics chip had fried itself and pretty much, just the screen wasn't working.

So we put it back together, properly, and sent it back to the manufacturerer who fixed it by replacing it with what looked like a banged up old version from the shop floor.

Since I got it back, the DVD drive wont burn to disc and I know "now the difference between people who have lost data and people who haven't"

I forget exactly how long ago it was now but it was back in about 95 I was working for a IT Solutions.

IT was the latest thing companies were making all kinds on things that would work on your computer.

Being in IT was truly leading/cutting edge.

So although it was a little surprising to receive a call from a user complaining that their foot pedal wasn't working, it wasn't all that strange as we had just finished hearing about a brand new serial port steering wheel with pedals that would work with the original Need For Speed.

So myself and a work colleague at the time wanting to see this new foot pedal technology first hand never mind fix the problem, went out to see the client.

After arriving we were shown to the office of the user in having the problem.

He was green screen data capturer that was given a brand new Win95 PC and thought the cursor was controlled by placing the mouse on floor and moving it around with your foot.

His excuse was why on earth would you put something called a MOUSE on your desk and hold it in your hand.

1) Critical Line of Business System crashes
- Files system (FS) unavailable as the storage it is located on has failed and Prod FS is not recoverable.

2) Recover system
Option 1; Remap copy of Filesystem at DR to Prod system
Option 2: Create a new filesystem and map to Prod system (create storage volume and connect to app server). Copy data from DR
Option 3: Create new Volume and restore from Tape. Will take a long time (~ 400GB of small files)


3) Problem with Recovery
Option 1: Robocopy (host based copy procedure) has not worked for months?
Option 2: Same problem as Option 1
Option 3: Ok, but will take overnight and next business day to resolve - massive outage

I was only 15 at the time (1997) and the place i was working at was a local supermaket store which was a job then back when i was in school. i was heavily into computers and just learning c+ and other ms linux opps, the store check out system was a clear hit before any coles or Woolworth stores had ever imagined but.. the story goes on.. the operating system was the dinosaur at the time running a dos 3.30 with a interface that was ahead of time then but as the server, that was a mistake!!! the check out systems used to run 386 2mb ram and a 20mb hard drive (wha!?!?!?!) it was reliable but the software running was overwhelmed on overload, with a barcode system running over a 1400bps .014kb of a twisted wire which ran up in the celing to the back office. the boss got to know me as a teck guy and know all... so he asked me to figure why at the end of a day or when purchasing an item the computers were slowing down and freezing the checkout systems (mind you he would do the purchasing when it was peak time in the afternoon) i did not know at yet of the system until he asked me... so i went to investigate... mind you i was a kinda nerd then and the girls were a total distraction :D but i found out that the network was based on a 1983 modem switch network and three check out systems were using the single .014kb system. when the staff were serving customers with scanning the items the data was being sent to the back office every hit, the boss the other hand was doing purchases via a dail up modem (the ones where you place a speaker (sender) to the reciever and a mic (reciever) and that was chugging on the same network but a little faster (1.2kb) i told him to wait either before or afterday so it would not collide with overloading the system. it worked the next day... the next thing was even funnier but that might be another storey..... :) thanks for reading!!!!@@@@

Our servers got covered in coffee one evening whilst our IT manager was doing the daily back up - he tripped and tipped his whole mug onto the servers which then caused a fire and we lost crucial financial and customer information. The damage cost us $1.2 million. Drinks of any sort have now been banned from the IT room and our IT Manager was made to wear a hat shaped like a coffee cup for a week..