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Horror stories come in all shapes and sizes. While masked murderers and spooky ghouls may dominate the big screen and almost every campfire tale, some of the scariest things you will face come from a much more real place—the world of business.
Every day companies just like yours experience losses that they could prevent with a little planning. In many cases, the price tag for these missteps is high and can take thousands of dollars (or more) to correct. Even then, you may never recover the goodwill you lose from making a single mistake, especially if that mistake involves a failure to back up your data. We've compiled some business horror stories that illustrate the importance of protecting your data.
The Toy Story That Almost Wasn’t
Pixar is a large company and well-respected company, a household name. The animation studio has given us some of the most popular and memorable films of our time, but they almost lost everything. When Pixar was finalizing Toy Story 2, someone entered the wrong command and a large portion of the film disappeared. The company had a backup solution in place, but they had not checked on it in a while. When they did, they found out the backup system had not been working properly for over a month. Luckily, Toy Story 2’s technical director had made personal backup copies of the film so she could work from home. Without those, a good portion of the film (and all the money it took to make) would have been lost.
When a Virus Strikes
Sometimes, the problem doesn’t come from inside your company. Disaster can strike when a bad actor tries to get in. Orange Sky Adventures experienced this first hand. In 2016, the company lost 40% of its website after a virus struck. Photos, articles... everything was affected. At that time, the company had not been doing backups. Orange Sky had to spend hundreds of hours to correct the problem—and they missed out on an untold number of potential clients.
Backing Up Backups
Sometimes, even when you have an on-site backup system in place, it doesn’t work. The unthinkable happened to GitLab, a site where programmers can work together on a single platform. Over 1,400 people use GitLab, including developers at IBM and Sony. Years ago, a system admin accidentally deleted the primary database and GitLab lost 300GB of data. If they had had a robust cloud-based backup system running behind the scenes, this would not have happened.
Fires Happen
Samsung has had some of its own data issues—data issues that a cloud-based backup would have solved. In 2014, a fire broke out in one of its data centers. As a result, services to many Samsung devices got interrupted for a few hours. Phones went out, tablets didn’t work, and smart televisions went black. Online payment systems were also affected. Normally, this would have been a blip, but Samsung did not have remote backups on all of its servers. The fire knocked out several servers, and the information they held got lost forever.
Floods Do Too
Something similar happened in Pensacola, Florida to the Independent News. A terrible storm caused flooding. Newspaper staff and neighboring businesses tried to help unplug all the computers, but they acted too slowly. Everything stored on a computer or in a hard drive was lost that day.
Power Outages Can Lead to Corruption
Have you ever heard of a program called Ma.gnolia? It was a popular bookmarking service that existed from 2005 to 2009. It let people bookmark pages and save a snapshot of the bookmarked site. Users could also share collections of bookmarks with other people. Ma.gnolia was an innovative market leader. Few competitors could do what Ma.gnolia could. Everything was going well for the company until a power outage struck its servers in January 2009. When the systems came back up, it became apparent that the data had become corrupted. Nothing could be restored. The founders tried to start again, renaming the company as “Gnolia,” but all the goodwill they'd built up had been dashed. If the company had invested in a cloud-based backup solution, it might still be around today.
Being Smart About Backups
If you don’t back up your hard drives regularly, that decision could cost you. When you fail to put a disaster recovery plan in place, you could lose big. Around 58% of businesses do not have a backup in place, and roughly 60% of the companies that lose their data will close within six months of the event. Don’t let that happen to your company.
Backing up customer data and other critical business info is one of the smartest, easiest things you can do for your company. Smart Service users can enroll in the cloud-based backup service Smart Backup to protect their data without having to lift a finger.
Backups seem confusing. How do I know if I've done enough to keep my company safe? We've created a simple quiz to help you evaluate the safety of your company data. Take the quiz here!
