ISP Survives Twister

Companies who think they can get by without offsite backup should consider the tale of Aeneas Internet and Telephone, a small Tennessee ISP whose data center was flattened by a tornado on May 4. ComputerWorld reviews how Aeneas managed to be back in operation within 72 hours, but not without a near-death experience when it realized that all its tape backups were inside the data center and had been ruined by the storm. Aeneas dodged a bullet when a data recovery firm managed to save the data.

It's hard not to admire the effort and determination the ISP showed in recovering from a disaster (which it has chronicled on its web site). At the same time, it should serve as a wake-up call to any company that still keeps all its critical data in a single location. Two years after Sept. 11, the basics of data preservation are still ignored by many businesses. Whether you have enough terabytes to fill a data center or can fit your customer database on a Zip disk, the principle is the same: if your backups are lost, you may well be out of business.