Item Subject: cc:Mail Text
c|net's NEWS.COM has a link to a story in the San Jose Mercury News, which
is reporting a computing "disaster" at what is arguably the country's
finest school for computer science.

        < http://www.sjmercury.com/business/center/stanford09.htm >

Actually, it's not at the "main" school, but rather at the
Stanford Graduate School for Business.  The article reports

        "The data was lost when the school attempted to move two
         powerful computers that serve a network of computer users...."

Later paragraphs are more telling:

        "And many of the faculty and students were shielded from
         disaster because they used Apple computers or Unix mainframes--
         rather than the Windows-based PC's served by the business
         school network."
        ...
        "The dean said the technicians turned off the two servers,
         in one case to add capacity.  But when the computers were
         brought back up, they could not read its original files."

So, you say, why didn't they have backups?  They did.

        "In fact, the business school's policy is to 'back up,'
         or save all of its files in its PC network once a week,
         with incremental backups made of each day's work.

        "In this case, Spence said, at least two serious mistakes
         were made:  The technicians did not back up the contents
         of the servers before shutting them down.  And once they
         realized they had a problem, they did not verify whether
         the back-up copies they had were complete."

The school had hired outside contractors to do the work.
(The actual incident occurred a month ago.)

--Glenn Cole
  Software al dente, Inc.
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