Are your backups good enough?

I caught this article at Ars Technica today.

http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/05/hackers-crack-flight-sim-community-site-ruin-it-for-everyone.ars

I'm not a flight sim guy by any stretch, but I think we can all agree: losing 13 years of work is one thing, losing 13 years of what you do in your spare time, your labor of love so to speak, is absolutely gut-wrenching.

I'm sympathetic to these guys, but unfortuntely there's just no excuse. Their backup strategy has been inappropriate and insufficent since the beginning, and noone caught it. Their entire disaster recovery scenario rested with a backup server that was online and (somehow) accessible? Wow, just wow.

So, they'll probably rebuild, and it will likely take a whole bunch of time. But if they take away one thing from this fiasco, its that they had better take their backup and disaster recovery strategy very, very seriously.