Tech Support Tales: Backup copy

Working in data recovery as I did, you get plenty of amusing disaster stories.

One day a businessman brought in some dead floppy disks. (This was in the days when people actually worked on floppy disks, as well as using them for removable storage.)

He told us that the floppies contained all his business data, but that they had somehow become unreadable. Fortunately, he had been careful—he had asked his secretary to make a copy of the disks every evening at close of business, and store the copies safely in the filing cabinet.

He showed us the copies. A thick stack of photocopies of floppy disks, each carefully annotated with the date it was made.

I’ve seen other stories like this, but I can vouch for the fact that this really happened at least once.