Law Technology

Another Story Emphasizing the Need for Off Site Backups

By Bryan

I saw this interesting story about a Florida woman (Marie Lupe Cooley) who thought that she was about to lose her job. She had concluded this because she “saw a help-wanted ad in the newspaper for a position that looked suspiciously like her current job ? and with her boss’s phone number listed”

So, police say, she went to the architectural office where she works late Sunday night and erased 7 years’ worth of drawings and blueprints, estimated to be worth $2.5 million.

“She decided to mess up everything for everybody,” Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office spokesman Ken Jefferson told reporters. “She just sabotaged the entire business, thinking she was going to get axed.”

The twist to the news story, of course, was:

As for the job, Cooley originally wasn’t in danger of losing it. The ad was for Hutchins’ wife’s company.

However,

 The firm told FOXNews.com that Cooley no longer is employed there.

I guess that is one way to ensure that you do lose your job.

Anyway, the moral to the story does not involve the allegedly felonious acts of the employee, instead, they apply to the employer. Your employees have access to all of your data. How able would you be to function if one of you disgruntled employees destroyed all of your data?

Given that almost everything is store electronically today,  I would guess that it would take quite some time to get your office back to normal. Also, it is likely that, in some ways you would never recover from the damage.

The quote in the story I found most interesting was:

Hutchins told one TV station he’d managed to recover all the files using an expensive data-recovery service.

Here the employer had to employ a data recovery service to try to salvage his information. If, however, he had employed a proper off site backup strategy, he likely would not have had to incur the cost of “an expensive data-recovery service.” Instead, he simply could have restored his information from his off site back up.

Obviously, there are only so many things we can do to ensure that our offices do not get hit by some sort of disaster, be it fire, flood, or disgruntled employee. However, there are simple steps we can take to make sure that, in the event of such a calamity, we can easily restore our data and get back to work.

If you are not sure what a good backup plan looks like, or how to implement one, you cannot find better suggestions and directions than this post from Ross Kodner

Full post as published by The Connected Lawyer on January 25, 2008 (boomark / email).