An analyst gets his just desserts

This will be short and sweet, although not to me.

During the two-plus years that I have been author of this column I have written frequently on the necessity of properly implemented back-up and recovery procedures.  I have waxed often if not eloquently on the topic of institutionalizing best practices through policy-based management procedures, and have apparently helped at least a few of you move in the direction of automated, policy-based management.

My home office uses daily incremental and weekly full backups to protect the data.

Last Wednesday, the backup half of my disk-to-disk back-up and recovery solution failed.  I walked into the office Thursday morning to the sound of disk drive heads kissing the media they were supposed to be flying over.  Until I get the disk drive back from whichever data recovery outfit I wind up using, I am assuming that what data I had in there is pretty much lost.

Knowing the importance of protecting my data, I made sure that going out and buying more disk drives was my top priority for Saturday morning.

On Friday, a similar problem occurred with the main data drive on my desktop machine.  Whatever the cause, the disk drive suffered a major seizure.

What are the odds, eh?

Actually, the odds are fairly easy to compute, given the published mean time between failure (MTBF) of my EIDE and SCSI drives.  However, the astronomically large numbers that were in my favor didn’t do me much good. 

I guess this all goes to show that best policies are only “best” if they can be proven to be so.  Clearly mine weren’t.

The good news is that I treated myself to a snazzy new laptop.  The bad news is that it is costing me dearly.  And the really bad news is that, when all is said and done, sometimes even analysts get precisely what they deserve.