Hi Deborah and the rest of ISF,
I'm new to this group, but -- nevertheless -- thought I'd throw in my two cents, or maybe three.
First off, as Helen mentioned, these scenarios may very well be implausible. However, they are illustrative; they cause us to think about risk and recovery. That's a good thing. I am amazed at how often we are pretty Pollyannaish about risk. Moreover -- and perhaps more to the point - let us not forget that thieves and fools are often very ingenious. Let me explain by way of a couple of stories...
When the implausibility was mentioned, I was reminded immediately of two unrelated items. The first is one of thievery and the second is one of law.
First - Thievery:
Many years ago I had as a long term client a large, national environmental organization, with offices in NYC, DC, and on the west coast. This, by the way, was in the days when RAM was expensive. Megabytes, then, cost hundreds of dollars. One day, in conversation with their IT director, he mentioned a rash of printer related problems. Throughout one office (and not in the other various offices) their printers stopped working correctly.
We investigated and, after quite a few hours of furious head-scratching, we finally figured out that all the add-on RAM had been removed from the printers; a total of thousands of dollars worth of RAM given the then price of RAM. Who would of thought to steal RAM! Not only did the thieves have to know about RAM, and add-on RAM, but they would have had to wield screwdrivers to painstakingly unscrew the access ports, remove the RAM, and then put it all back together again. The did, and the RAM was gone.
I tell this story to emphasize that thieves can be ingenious. Witness the recent spate of news stories about lost laptops containing some form of identity data that could be used for identity theft. (I also find it slightly ironic that the news media was busy broadcasting that - if found by enterprising thieves - the laptops contained data that could be used for identity theft.)
Witness as well, the recent fiasco when AOL released what it thought was sanitized search information. (Again, the media told any would be identity thief just what could be done with it.)
Thieves are ingenious. Assuming that a thief might not know what a backup tape is, or that it might contain information of value, assumes they are not ingenious. That's a dangerous assumption.
Second - the Law:
The second story is of the law - specifically the recent HIPAA requirements for handling what is known as ePHI (electronic Protected Health Information). If your organization falls under the HIPAA requirements... well, the law requires you not only take specific steps to protect ePHI, but you also must take those same steps to protect your backup of that data.
Hence, taking home a tape is no longer an option. The tapes, too, must also be kept secure. If that backup tape truly has HIV information on it, it better not be in the sock drawer, else you're in serious trouble.
The answers here are simple and - even for a small non profit - very do-able. Have a workable backup strategy and off-site storage. My personal preference for small orgs is:
A) 21 tape rotation using FULL backup (as mentioned, incremental can be troublesome)
B) Get a safe deposit box from a nearby bank. It's not iron mountain, but it's better than nothing.
C) Weekly put the Friday tape in the bank and retrieve the previous weeks
D) Put the Monthly tapes in the bank on a rolling three month schedule (i.e., leave them in the box for three months, then put them back into the tape rotation.)
Finally, since you've got a safe deposit box, take a moment and record your system passwords, put them in a sealed envelope and put them in the box as well, and tell the E.D. about it. So, voila, if you get hit by the proverbial bus, at least your E.D. can login as administrator and accidentally crash the server.
It ain't rocket science - which is lucky since I ain't a rocket scientist!
Regards
Gavin
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
.