When Is A Backup Not A Backup?

Even though his data was in the cloud and on multiple machines, Matt Honan lost a year’s worth of photos, emails, documents, and who knows what else. The lesson? Back up to disk, tape, or something else and lock it away.

Don’t Lose Your Data To Someone Else’s Disaster

In our last blog I said to watch for our guest blogger Randall Becker. As much as I would like to take credit for his writing, this is Randall’s entry. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. What is “The Cloud?” Put simply, a computing cloud is a set of resources that […]

Dereliction of Data Protection – By a Law Enforcement Union

If you are not from the San Francisco Bay Area, you may not know that hackers gained access to the website operated by The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Police Officers’ Association, then stole and posted personal information on more than 100 officers. The officers’ home and email addresses were leaked along with passwords. This […]

I Got Burned And So Can You!

On Saturday, February 20th at approximately 2:20 p.m. Mountain Time, the shared server that my Internet domain is on experienced a hardware failure as a result of an annual fire system inspection at WestHost’s Data Center (DC). An inadvertent release of Inergen (a fire suppression product) was triggered by an actuator that was not removed […]

Who Owns Your Information?

What happens if there is a digital rights management (DRM) failure, your application is discontinued, or your service provider goes bust? How do you get access to your data?

An Untested Plan Is Worse Than No Plan At All

TATA’s London Data Center lost power, a customer had to tell them, and the UPS batteries were depleted because the 3 generators failed to start. Oh, and once the batteries died, so did their phones.

A Sidekick In The Pants – The Final Countdown?

Microsoft said Thursday that it believes it has recovered most of the Sidekick data that it initially feared might have been permanently lost. I am guessing that they located an older offline backup and are working on restoring it and applying any changes made to user data after the backup was made. This means that […]

A Sidekick In The Pants – Part 2

Thousands to tens of thousands of T-Mobile Sidekick customers may have lost all of their data. Here are some more thoughts on data protection.

A Sidekick In The Pants

T-Mobile and the Sidekick data services provider, Danger, a subsidiary of Microsoft, have announced that they lost subscribers’ contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists and photos – and there is no backup.