So, by now you are probably figuring that I had an “incident” to spark my flurry of writing on of all things — backup!  If you guessed that, you would be 100% correct!  By once again being what some have called “over cautious” about ensuring up-to-date backup I have been able to rescue a customer from disaster.  Their nightly backup was “old”, and rather than take any chance with “something” going wrong, I insisted in making a backup of their critical data before doing what “should” have been a “safe” maintenance function.

Well, the “safe” maintenance function failed — for reasons unknown!  (…aren’t they always?”).  However, the fact that the maintenance function failed was not apparent — in fact it looked like all was back to “normal”, mission accomplished — until the next day when a user went to run a report and the requested data was “missing”.  Further investigation revealed that the table was in fact missing some 60,000 records — a disaster for this client!

Fortunately, because I took the “safe” route, I was able to recover the missing records and combine them with the “new” records added during the 24 hours that it was thought all was back to normal.  End result — apparently no data lost.  Moral of this true story — backup, backup, backup!