Flutterby™! :

If someone you know goes to the Stanford Graduate School of Business, do something nice for them because they've just gone through a horrible disaster. In fact I vote we all offer them honorary sympathy PhDs, just refer to anyone who lost data in this crash as "Doctor". And for those of you who don't, take this as a warning to back things up, and even if you think you've got a DP department, back things up yourself anyway. From: http://www.sjmercury.com/business/center/stanford09.htm

The Stanford Graduate School of Business, justly known as an incubator of high-tech growth, has been struggling for the last month to recover from what its dean calls a ''disaster'' -- a computer snafu that in some cases erased years of academic work.

Among the files lost, Stanford officials said, were databases that took months to build, notes of crucial research, and parts of dissertations and books that had been developed over years.

[snip]

And many of the faculty and students were shielded from disaster because they used Apple computers or Unix mainframes -- rather than the Windows-based PC's served by the business school network.

[snip]

``I want to say that they did not crash in the sense of just stop working,'' Spence explained. ``They were taken down for capacity additions to the drives, and for reasons we still have to get to the bottom of, they did not recognize the contents of the original drives.''

[snip]