Too close for comfort!

The first hint that something was wrong was around 6AM this morning: my sister-in-law sent me a tweet asking, “Were your offices touched?”

I replied to her tweet with, “?? What are you talking about?”

My brother then called me and told me that it was in the news – the office building where Adaris is located had been burned. Apparently reporters were calling it a “total loss”.

Great. This was gonna put a dent in the Christmas festivities, for sure – cancel all the guys’ time off, call the insurance, find a new office, order some new servers and equipment, rebuild all of our servers and restore the data.

Eeeeehh! “Restore the data!”

This is where you really see if your backup strategy is worth a dime! Luckily for us, Sebastien, one of my engineers, did have the last good backup tape with him! Phew!

Despite all the initial excitement, I told my brother that it couldn’t be that bad; after all, I had received the email from our network monitoring service at 6AM, I had over 15 new emails on my iPad from our GroupWise server, my web sites were up, Vibe was working…how could it be a total loss?

As it turns out, the media had exaggerated the story a little. A couple of teens had set fire to the garbage cans outside the building. The flames climbed up the wall and damaged a small restaurant downstairs and an office next door to Adaris, but as you can see from the picture, it’s far from a total loss.

Still, this was wayyyy too close for comfort, and I was glad to see that our backup strategy ensured that all of our data was safe. I give thanks to my team for taking care of that!

I share this story with you so that you can see how vitally important it is to take your backups off-site! I still come across customers who backup their data every night but leave the tapes in the office. This is USELESS, folks! Think about it!

Oh, and by the way, they caught the two teens who did this. Yay!

Gotta be some proud parents, there, eh?