When I was in school, I had visited the offices of Texas Instruments on a field trip. One of the most awesome things I saw there was a hard wood basket ball court, 3 stories within the ground. Well, in school you do pay attention to the basket ball court, more than the other equipment buried deep underground. While playing a game of ball does sound great, they had dug hundreds of feet to save something that was most precious to them, their data.
- We are only human – I have ever so often absent-mindedly deleted a file to only regret doing so a moment later. Even the awesome people at Flickr recently almost lost all the files of one of their users.
- Too Hard (Disk) to handle – Your server can go kaput and take all your data with it. This is a fairly common occurrence too. In fact the crash of one of my favorite blogs inspired me to start blogVault. You can read more about that here https://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/12/international-backup-awareness-day.html
- Hackers – With their understanding of the nooks and crevices of the system they can wreck havoc. Peace of mind or pieces of mind. Choose!!!
- Fire/Flood – While less likely to occur, one should not risk any data which they value to such a calamity. One can only imagine the damage done by something like the Brisbane floods.
- Loss/ Theft – While blogVault deals with WordPress backups which reside on servers, the possibilities of theft (https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2007/12/19/verizon-colo-theft-in-denmark/) at a data center seems most unlikely. On the other hand we carry data important to us on phones, laptops, disk drives and USB sticks. In all such situations loss or theft can be one of the ways to lose your precious data.