As I watched the news coverage of Hurricane Katrina unfold erratically across CNN tonight, one particular piece of footage stood out to my IT-attuned eyes. The film clip, attributed to WFOR, shows what looks like the corner of someone's mundane office desk, complete with the usual tower computer case and a couple of monitors. The camera pulls back to reveal that this was a corner office --- and then continues to pull back to show that the corner of the building in question has been neatly flayed open, demolished to the point where all external walls are missing and the entire room is open to the elements.
I hope that those people have backups, I thought immediately.
Of course, it's always possible that the data on that computer doesn't matter to them. Maybe they'll never regret that they didn't burn a couple of CDs of their important information every month, and file those safely away elsewhere. Maybe the archival email they kept on that machine will be the very least of their worries for a very long time. In the face of what many people are now going through, the fate of the office mailing list or some other such trivial corporate data may pale into utter insignificance.
However, it's also increasingly likely that the computer in question contained someone's personal tax records or their private correspondence, their first novel or the only pictures of their child's first birthday party. It's easy and increasingly plausible to imagine that this same waterlogged computer is also the modern equivalent of the mutilated and mud-covered box of family memorabilia that someone pulls out of the wreckage of their destroyed home.
The moral to all of this is almost stupidly simple. Now more than ever, for reasons both work and home related, we need to back up our data, and we need to teach those around us to do the same. We need to seize the wonderful opportunity that technology now gives us, to be able to duplicate and file away complete copies of that information which is the most precious to us, and to keep it safe from the harm that the universe sometimes seems to deal out so randomly. Keeping a lasting record of our past depends on this one act.
As for those in Louisiana, Mississippi, and other areas struck by this storm, I can only offer my empathy and hope. I visited New Orleans for the first time last month, and simultaneously experienced the low-level concerns caused by Hurricane Dennis and its movement toward the city, so I have just enough information to vaguely imagine what is now unfolding there. My thoughts are with all those involved.
