Backup your data - 4 April 2022

Backups are your friend.

I was working for a large company in the 1980s that was delivering a large project to replace thousands of "dumb" terminals (think "IBM 3270", but not as smart) and dumb displays with "smart" PC-based systems connected on a large LAN.  The Great PC Invasion and Distributed Computing Revolution were underway, so the company had hired a a collection of experienced PC and minicomputer programmers who were led by a management team of Mainframe Gods (as they viewed themselves).  As a bunch of hot-shot PC and UN*X types, we demanded a version control system and a tool for backing up the source tree.  In their wisdom, the Mainframe Gods chose not to invest in spurious tech like backups and version control, therefore each programmer had a personal responsibility to back up their source code.  As you might imagine, this was only loosely honored by most of the staff.  For all intents and purposes, there was no backup.  There was, however, one developer who was nominally the build engineer and therefore kept all the current, official source in one place:  on his PC.  Let us call him Bob because that is not his name.  

Bob was a big guy.  He was at least six feet tall and sturdily built - think "footballer" but soft, pudgy, and pale.  Bob was soft-spoken and kept his opinions to himself.  Mostly.  He had his eccentricities, such as a fondness for rifles that he kept in the trunk (boot) of his car.  He was a hard worker and wrote a lot of code.  Lacking any sort of code-review process, I cannot say how good the code was, but he wrote a lot of it and he delivered the official software builds for the terminal-emulation software that ran on the PCs.  To do the build, he had the sole copy of all the official source code residing on his PC.

After a long-running series of, uh, issues, Bob had a Big MeToo moment of such significance that he quit simultaneously with being fired.  Rather than make a fuss, management allowed Bob to finish the work day.  During the afternoon of that day, Bob's manager looked out the window to see Bob loading boxes and boxes of floppy disks into his car.  This was a curious action to take on one's final day of work.  On a hunch, Bob's manager went to Bob's desk and found Bob's PC in the midst of a FORMAT operation that had wiped most of the disk.  And thereby wiped the only known copy of the official sources from the face of the earth.  Bob's manager intercepted him at the elevator and they walked together to Bob's manager's office for a conversation.  It seems that the floppies in Bob's car were the backups, the ONLY backups now that his PC disk was blank.  To his credit, Bob's manager talked Bob off the cliff and got the backups returned to the office.  Then he escorted Bob to a nearby coffee shop to finish the day off-premises.  Someone was tasked to extract the backups from the floppies to the now-blank PC so that we could continue the project.  The project did eventually succeed, but we did have further harrowing moments with more conventional causes.  We did establish regular backups and duplication of key source code.

The moral of the story:  back up your data.  Trust but verify.