No, I am not kidding. Apparently two researchers that had been working on a cure for prostate cancer had all their data on a laptop. While they stopped quickly on the way to their lab, a thief stole the laptop out of their parked car.

And, yes, I hate to say it: they had no backup.

Being in the online backup business, I hear about stories of data loss all the time. But some are just more painful to hear than others.

If you happen to live near Oklahoma City, and have any suggestions on finding the laptop, the researchers are offering a no-questions-asked reward of $1000.

Deloitte published the results of it’s fifth “State of the Media Democracy“, which shares the results of a poll of about 2,000 American consumers. While there are a number of interesting results from the survey that demonstrate the increase in smartphones and continued viewing of TV and reading of magazines, here is a stat that might be shocking to those who backup their data:

51 percent of Americans have experienced a computer or hard drive failure that caused them to lose photos, movies, or other digital content.

That is over 100 million people that have lost data they have created! Considering the availability of easy and inexpensive unlimited backup solutions such as Backblaze, no one should ever lose data as a result of a hard drive failure.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend I noticed the following tweet from @DigitalRoyalty:

My friend’s laptop was stolen. He tracked the thief via @Backblaze for weeks & finally identified him on Facebook & Twitter. Digital 007.

I know our online backup service saves user data every day, but physical theft recovery? That certainly caught my attention and I asked for the whole story. The friend who had their laptop stolen, Mat Miller, replied:

I received a DM from @DigitalRoyalty that you were interested in hearing the story of how I identified the thief of my computer using Backblaze, here goes:

I was in LA on a work trip and my laptop was stolen from the trunk of my car. Bummed out for sure but o’well at least my data was safe! I was insanely busy over the next week so I was logging in to the dashboard and grabbing files as I needed them. Then, about 4 days after the computer was stolen, I saw that a new user had been created on my computer.

The name was “jack”. I clicked on the folder and noticed that the thief had failed to remove the Backblaze program from applications and his files were being uploaded! On the first day I had a picture but nothing else (wait for it Miller).

A few weeks went by with no specific details to nail him on (I must admit everyday was quite exciting) until last Friday. He added a college paper on his desktop with his full name. I googled his name and came up with his Twitter and FaceBook pages!

I’ve filed a report with the LAPD as of today so we’ll see how this pans out. Backblaze is amazing!!!

Mat Miller

Wow. Nice sleuthing Mat, thanks for telling us about it, and hope you get your laptop!

Have you upgraded to Snow Leopard? Users on Apple’s forums are reporting a bug that deletes all user data if someone mistakenly logs into the “Guest” account. This issue was originally reported about a month ago on Cnet’s MacFixIt but today is being mentioned across the web as more people are being bitten by the bug.

While not completely reproducible, it is happening frequently enough to take a basic action: turn off the guest account.

eHow explains how to turn off the guest account – it’s quick and takes just a minute.

Of course, you should also make sure your data is backed up, but I assume you already use Backblaze to do this.

Dan Tynan’s article “The 7 dirtiest jobs in IT” hit a nerve with many an IT worker, and Dan followed it up with, “Even dirtier IT jobs.”

Number 6 on the list of the dirtiest jobs? Data crisis counselor.

This is a person on the other end of the phone from “sobbing adults who’ve lost images or videos of their recently deceased parents” and dentists, and IT managers, and tons of others who lost data and were frantic, upset, and panicked. Kelly Chessen, who has this job for DriveSavers, a firm that tries to recover data from dead hard drives, says her five years on a suicide prevention line is what prepared her best for this position.

Have you been an unwitting data crisis counselor for a friend or family member?
Make sure they backup so you don’t have to be…

Kodak Gallery, formerly known as “Ofoto”, claims to be the leading online digital photo developing service. Customers upload photos to the site, use it as a way to store and share photos online, and count on it as a photo backup.

However, today Kodak updated its storage policy to say that it will delete your photos if you do not purchase products from the company each year. Specifically, every 12 months customers storing:
* Less than 2 GB of photos need to purchase at least $4.99
* More than 2 GB of photos need to purchase at least $19.99
With a $100 digital camera shooting at 8 megapixels, just 500 compressed photos or 40 uncompressed photos would take you over the 2 GB limit.

Kodak Gallery provides a good photo developing service and should be able to charge for it. However, if you are counting on this as a backup of your photos – think again. Forget to purchase your minimum requirement one year? Bought your minimum, but then added some more photos and went over 2 GB? Your photos may be deleted.

Kodak Gallery’s terms of service say,

“You should keep a copy of each image you upload in a secure place. We are not responsible for deleted images.”

Ensure your photos are safe, in a secure place, forever. Back them up with Backblaze.

Online backup service provider Carbonite was all over the news this week for suing two of its suppliers, claiming the vendors setup the systems that were responsible for losing 7,500 customers’ data. First published in The Boston Globe, the story was picked up by TechCrunch, Computerworld, Cnet, and at least 20 other media outlets.

A large number of users losing their data certainly makes for good headlines and stories about the risks of cloud computing, but I think there is a different story here.

Carbonite’s CEO complained the media response was overblown. He claimed, correctly, that the majority of these reports were misleading. While 7,500 customers’ data was lost, only a small percentage of users (54 in total) actually lost data because this data was a backup and most people still had the the files on their computers.

Numerous articles also used this as an opportunity to raise doubts about using “the cloud” in general. Again, this seems to be a red herring. As a whole, cloud computing is generally more available and reliable than systems users put in place themselves. What’s more, backup is the ideal cloud computing application because it adds to the reliability by having data offsite that you already have locally.

What was missed in the news is that a company who’s core business is to provide online backup outsourced their online backup. Carbonite hired a system integrator, and now by suing this vendor, they are effectively denying responsibility for the backup systems.

This would be the equivalent of Google outsourcing search technology.

Building robust online backup technology is difficult. There are certainly lots of complexities involved to ensure data is backed up, redundant, and secure. It is the role of the online backup service provider to have the technical expertise and laser focus to work through these items. Pushing it off on an outside company just seems a bit …risky.

Update: After writing this post, David Friend, CEO of Carbonite, emailed me to state that while they purchased the Promise Technology boxes from system integrator, Interactive Digital Systems, they now write their own software.

Nearly 50,000 swimmers nationwide rely on the U.S. Masters Swimming organization for training, competitions, and various local programs. Started in 1970, the organization has grown to support 500 local clubs and its website, www.usms.org, is the hub that helps manage this large, distributed non-profit.

Yesterday, during a routine import, the database containing all the member records became corrupted. Access to the website was shutdown to prevent additional errors while the team tried to restore the systems, but to no avail.

Luckily, the USMS team understood that data gets lost and rigorously prepared for such an event. Data was backed up in three ways: incremental, transactional, and tape. Even so, it turned out their first two backups failed. Fortunately, the third backup worked, and the organization lost 3 days, not 30 years, of data.The USMS team says:

“For the next six hours, five experts attempted to recover the corrupted data and it turned out to be impossible.”

Continuing to show diligence and savviness, the USMS team has developed their plan to go forward:

What we are doing short term
We are going through all auxilliary sources of data including credit card transactions, automated emails and batch processes. We have hired extra help and we are manually copying the data from these sources as soon as we receive it.

What we are doing Long Term
We are purchasing additional hardware and leasing a separate facility to do real-time secure backups of transactional data thereby efectively adding a fourth set of backup data that is accurate up to the last transaction. In addition we have established a new set of protocals to further mitigate potential data loss.

If there is are some lessons to be learned from the USMS experience:
* Make sure your data is backed up.
* Backup to more than one place (e.g. local hard drive and online backup service.)
* Periodically check your backups.

You can never be too careful with your precious data.