The only fact might not be true is "big defense contractor working on a cutting-edge project". OTOH it also may be true as well. I cannot recall where I looked at a survey which pointed that over 50% of small & medium enterprises in Germany perform backups rarely than monthly or do not make any backups. In my practice I've seen enough companies making occasionaly copies of the application data. No plan how to recover, no even knowledge what have they to install to become able to restore this data. "We are making copies!" and that's all. I have seen this even in banks and governmental institutions.
Zlatko Krastev IT Consultant Please respond to "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent by: "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] cc: Subject: It wouldn't have happened if they'd used TSM, would it? Thought you all might enjoy this *true* story. ************************************************************ Shark Tank: It's about time This big defense contractor working on a cutting-edge project hires a consultant who adds a little something special to the project. "He brought with him a neural network package and integrated it into our product," says an engineering manager pilot fish on the team. After another year of development, fish is the one who's tapped to deliver the finished work to another division. But when it gets there, one of the hard drives fails. "I replaced the drive and installed the software from the tape backups -- full and incrementals -- I had carried with me," says fish, "only to find that the backups contained material that was over six months old." And -- no surprise -- the project's product doesn't work. In the ensuing brouhaha, the project's program manager is removed, and the fish gets a new task: finding out what went wrong. And he does. Turns out the consultant's oh-so-useful neural networking package was actually a demo copy of the product with a 90-day evaluation period. "We never bought it, and the former manager allowed it to be used without investigating the legality of it," fish says. "The neural network had been installed more than a year previous to the delivery," says fish. "The way the consultant kept it running was to frequently reset the system clock on the particular Sun workstation hosting our tool." Meanwhile, the configuration management specialist on the project knows the consultant is regularly turning back the clock on the workstation. But the configuration guy isn't exactly sweating the details -- he's doing a complete backup only once every six months, with lots of incremental backups in between. "The last full backup happened to be done at the very end of the 90- day eval period for the neural net software," fish says. So to keep it running, the day after the backup, the consultant turns the workstation's clock back three months. As a result, all changes on the project after that last full backup get a time-stamp that's earlier than the time-stamp on the full backup. So when the configuration management specialist runs his incremental backups, nothing gets backed up. "The backup routine scanned through all the directories, listing all the files -- but not backing any up to tape, since all the changed files were stamped with a date that was 'older' than the last full backup," says fish. And because the consultant keeps turning the clock back, the workstation's clock never again gets to the date of the last full backup. "The CM specialist never checked the incremental tapes or the backup log," says fish. "Otherwise he would have discovered the incremental tapes were all blank." _____________________________________________________________ Can't get enough Tank? Check out other bite-sized bits of humor, rumors, gossip and fun at The Sharkives: http://www.computerworld.com/sharky _____________________________________________________________ CLUELESS CONSULTANTS? --------------------- Bungling bosses? Useless users? Tell me your tale: [EMAIL PROTECTED] If it gets printed, you get a sharp Shark shirt. SUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBE --------------------- To subscribe or unsubscribe to Computerworld's e-mail newsletters, go to the following URL: http://www.cwrld.com/nl/sub.asp?[EMAIL PROTECTED] If the above URL is not enabled as a link, please copy it in to your browser window to access our Subscription Page. Copyright 2002 Computerworld Inc.