If you read my blog you may have remembered the post I did about Backing up to hard disk in response to my friend Owens blog about the risks of tape backup. And it appears as Owen mentioned it in his blog the worst case scenario happened to an IT staff member in the Alaska Revenue Department accidentally formatted the wrong hard disk, the backup hard disk and what was more the tape backups they discovered were unreadable! His little error wiped out an account worth $38 billion!

This has got to be one of the worst case scenarios I have ever heard of. However luckily enough they still had their vast paper archives they had scanned everything into the system from and would need to start again from scratch scanning in 800,000 records! Good old paper hey? It doesn't matter if its slightly wrong on the paper, the papers crumpled or torn you can still read it :)

I bet that IT department will be doing a serious review of their backup strategy.