US Airways Emergency Landing Brings New Meaning To The Term "Computer Crash"

Posted by admin on August 11, 2009 | No Comments

It was a cold Thursday morning on January 15, 2009, when Bill Wiley boarded US Airways flight 1549 bound for Charlotte. Wiley was on his way to an important meeting for his employer, Computer Associates.

As you might expect he was diligent about backing up his information. In fact, he used two computers for safety; one for daily use and the other simply as a backup for redundancy. He also kept all his data on thumb drives and rarely carried both laptops at once.

As Bill planned for the meeting the night before his flight, the thought never crossed his mind that carrying both of his laptops could be a problem. After all, what are the odds of both machines failing at once?

Eighteen hours and an emergency landing later, Bill would quickly find the answer to that question when he was quoted as saying “I had no idea how screwed I was about to be.”

Even though the machines did not have classic hard drive failures, they were ultimately plunged into the ice cold water in the Hudson River, rendering them useless to their owner. When they were finally dredged up from the bottom of the lake, they were held as “crash evidence” by the federal government. More than three months later, Bill still hasn’t recovered his machines or any of the critical 250 megabytes of information stored on them.

Compare Bill’s story to that of passenger Paul Jorgensen who also carried his laptop on flight 1549. Immediately after the crash landing, Jorgensen panicked and thought, “I was going to be in pretty deep trouble…my life is in that laptop.” Pretty incredible that he’s thinking about his laptop when he was just spared his life!

Fortunately for Paul, he backed up his laptop to a “cloud” based service. The crash landing happened on a Thursday, and the following Monday Jorgensen was back up and running again with all of his data, files and favorites intact.

As I read about the passenger experiences on flight 1549, two points jumped right off the page…

1. Hope is not a strategy! Bill Wiley was hoping both laptops wouldn’t fail; and for a long time he was right. But the most unbelievable thing happened on January 15th and hope didn’t save his data; but smart planning did save Paul’s.

2. Physical redundancy is not enough! Even though Bill had his data on a thumb drive and a second laptop, everything was destroyed at once; and if you have an onsite backup of your data as the only backup, you have the same risk of losing everything to a flood, fire, theft, or natural disaster.

Are You “Hoping” Your Backup Won’t Fail You Either?

You are relying on hope if you’re using a tape back-up system.
Tape drives have an average failure rate of 100%. When was the last time you conducted a trial restore using your current backup? That’s the only way to know for certain your backups are working.

You are relying on hope if you don’t have your data stored off site.
Since your server locations are prone to fire, flooding, and storm damage, it’s imperative to have an offsite copy of your data.

You are relying on luck if you don’t have a completely automated backup routine that operates without failure.
Human error is the #1 cause of data loss; that’s why you want to take the human element out of the equation. What if someone forgets to back-up one day? Are your tapes being rotated properly? Automating your backups are the only surefire way to make sure no one forgets.

You are relying on luck if you don’t have a way to quickly RESTORE data.
Just having the data isn’t enough; if you want to really be back up and running fast, you need an “image” of your drive. Let me give you an example: having your data backed up is akin to having an exact replica of all the furniture and personal belongings in your home kept somewhere offsite. If your house burns down, all your stuff is safe. HOWEVER, you would still have to rebuild the house and move everything back in; a task that could take days to complete. Data on your network is no different. If your server is destroyed, you would need to rebuild the server, reinstall all the software and THEN import all the data back. That’s a couple of days work! Having an image of your hard drive is like taking a complete snapshot of your entire “house” and replicating it as is.

Vist BSSI’s Computer Support website.